Ethics of the British Museum

Should the British Museum give back the treasures it has that were stolen from foreign lands?

I say the Elgin, or Parthenon Marbles need to be given back to the Greeks. What I found really low was their possession of the Sphinx of Egypt's beard...

Define "stolen".

The British Museum did return "portions" of the Sphinx's beard; they are now being properly restored by the Cairo Museum.

The British Museum has been pressured to return the Parthenon marbles for decades. The link below will take you to a detailed history of that effort:

The British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles

I think part of the problem here is trying to judge the past by the standards of today. As the items in question are part of Greek culture I can see there is an argument for their return although (like lilithcat perhaps) I would query the word "stolen". How would you apply the argument more locally? For example the Lewis chess set is I think (this is from memory) in the British Museum in London when one could argue it ought to be in a local museum in the Hebrides. Does it matter that London possibly allows more people to see it than would be possible on the island in question?
Coming to a more modern era we have a system in UK where when important items (works of art, books, artefacts) come up for sale that are held to be important to our culture that UK museums etc get 'first option' if they can meet the price. If not an export licence would be granted. If a foreign collector acquires an item in such a way is that immoral (if clearly legal and not "stealing")?

Here's another recent battle over who owns what, and how they came to possess it:

Getty Museum Strikes Deal to Surrender Antiquities by Laura Sydell

The Getty Museum is making one of the largest givebacks of looted art in history. Over the next several months, under the terms of an agreement reached with the Italian government, the museum will begin returning 40 disputed objects currently in its collection.

snip

The Getty follows the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in reaching agreements with the Italian government to return looted antiquities.

The rest of the article is here:

NPR - All Things Considered

The Getty and other US museums mentioned in the article are behaving in a very commendable way here. Reading the article suggests that Italy, like many other states in today's world, has laws governing excavation sites and the antiquities that are unearthed in them. The gist seems to be that someone in the chain has contravened those rules though it is not clear to what extent the museums were aware of this. Perhaps they chose not to investigate too closely.
But going back to the original example (Elgin marbles) I doubt that any such rules existed at the time. Although we can see today that their removal was perhaps "wrong" I doubt that contemporaries would have seen it that way or cried theft.

>6 PossMan: But going back to the original example (Elgin marbles) I doubt that any such rules existed at the time. Although we can see today that their removal was perhaps "wrong" I doubt that contemporaries would have seen it that way or cried theft.

Actually, it appears that some, at least, did.

It's just silly to talk about "standards of the past" in contrast to "standards of today." Just as there is disagreement today on matters of ethics & morality, so there was in the past. Plenty of contemporaries to slavery objected to it. What we are taught of history is only a part of what actually was, and it comes to us attached to a chain of efforts to affect what & how the public thinks & {thinks it} knows: efforts exerted back then as well as now.