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Tomb raider
Despite claiming that his journals were notes for a novel in progress about a would-be smuggler, Tokeley-Parry was sentenced in absentia in Egypt to fifteen years' hard labour and was also put on trial in England. He tried to persuade the court that convicting him would be 'doing the dirty work for a corrupt third world regime' incapable of protecting its own treasures. It was morally permissible, he suggested, to steal antiquities from Egypt and bring them to collectors who had the wealth to restore and preserve them. It's an argument that many collectors would like to believe, but the court declined to see Tokeley-Parry as a saviour. from Fake it till you make it [LRB]
posted by chavenet on Dec 07, 2025 at 1:18 PM
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" where he got a degree in moral philosophy in 1974."
I feel like whoever was marking the exam papers must have had a hangover
posted by awfurby at 1:33 PM
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Surely there must come a point where there is a reckoning for all the looting. For all the pieces of cultures past and present ripped from where they came and put on display or hidden in storerooms.
There is far more value in seeing Inca artwork in its context in the place where it was made and being able to relate it to the people who live with it every day.
There are cultures in existence today who intimately know the stories and meanings of pieces in museums because their close ancestors made them.
posted by awfurby at 1:42 PM
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Worse - in the case of some indigenous Australians - the remains of their relatives are being held by museums thousands of kilometres away.
posted by awfurby at 1:44 PM
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"You've spent the last three school years getting beaten up, clearly your lunch money isn't safe in your hands."
posted by FatherDagon at 2:04 PM
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IMO after he showed up in court and used that defense they should've had to either acquit his ass or empty out the British Museum
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 2:39 PM
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Plundering artefacts from foreign lands so they can be restored by wealthy collectors is the same principle which justifies the global thievery of the British Museum; the repository of relics, history and culture which has often been forcefully, violently or coercively taken from different people around the world.
Sometimes, its curators and archivists claim that it's a global collection which allows people to see the world's history without travelling to the countries from where the artefacts originated. Essentially, Britain claws in the revenue from tourism, and then profits from the unethical vestiges of its colonial ransacking in bygone years. The irony of stealing the physical history of a nation, only to years later invite said nation's current residents to Britain so they can witness their country's history locked up in little glass boxes.
Stupendously immoral, and 'justified' by its defence as an important British institution, the disestablishment of which would apparently be a tragedy. We should return the plundered goods and apologise quite frankly.
posted by Eldritchstigmata at 2:47 PM
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Is you takin pictures a ya own criminal fucking smuggling operation??
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 5:59 PM
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Fascinating, though it left me wanting more.
I simply adore the fact that the farmer who sent papyrus scraps to a museum for authentication was obviously not working alone, on account of being so dumb.
Sometimes, its curators and archivists claim that it's a global collection which allows people to see the world's history without travelling to the countries from where the artefacts originated
In a fair world it would make sense to have a museum in Cairo showing paintings from Titian and Caravaggio, or coins from Sutton Hoo if you prefer, in return for having loaned out artifacts from Pharaonic Egypt for display at the British Museum or Met. There is definitely a surplus of, for example, mummified cats, far more than is needed for consumption by domestic museum-goers.
I don't know how you get there, because there is obviously not a surplus of the "Elgin" marbles or busts of Nefertiti, and that's exactly what big western institutions don't want to give up. For some of famous ones the defenses of keeping them in London or Berlin are feel so tortured they are going to have to crack at some point.
posted by mark k at 9:08 PM
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I know people have justifiably strong feelings about artefacts from living cultures being looted for Western museums (the British Museum being far from the only one, incidentally). But just to mildly point out that the article is (a) about ancient Egyptian stuff, the property of people who have been dead for two to five thousand years, and whose culture has since been displaced by Roman, Christian, and Islamic successors, and (b) about a person who was not sponsored or condoned by the authorities but put on trial and jailed?
posted by Phanx at 10:24 PM
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I like @mark k idea's better. Other arguments tend to become uncomfortably close to nativism.
Modern Egyptians have nothing to do with ancient Egyptians, same as modern Greeks have nothing to do with ancient Greeks, same has modern Parisians have nothing to do with baron Haussmann. Should we, say, expropriate a Saudi Prince who bought a magnificent French castle just so random French people can wander around in it and point at things? If you think about it, their emotional connection to the castle is just as arbitrary and capricious as the Prince's: they didn't build it, nobody they know lived in it, they just happen to like the way it looks, or read about it in school. The castle happens to sit in a country they belong to currently, but when it was built it was a literally the seat of power of a different sovereign entity. You don't really have a moral claim to something just because you're used to see it.
I know, I know: there's the whole decolonial aspect. But too much of a good thing can become a bad thing. I mean, should we celebrate Mobutu just because he was indigenous? You can say that the Greek are deprived from their culture when the Victory of Samothrace is displayed at the Louvre, but are they really? It's not connected to any living tradition anymore. Are the British deprived of their culture when Damien Hirst's shark is displayed in New York?
I think you could draw a line at human remains, for cultures who actually maintain a tradition of devotion to ancestors. Looting the ancestor shrine of an extant Chinese family is not OK. Exposing remains of an ancestor of a tribe who venerate ancestors actively harm them. Return the remains. But nobody is around there looking to visit the grave of Ramses II. If you can go against the will of Franco's family and move his body around, I think it's fair to move Ramses II remains around when there's nobody still living to be against it. Ötzi's corpse is on display in South Tyrol, an area both Italy and Austria claim. Are Austrians deprived of their culture by Italians?
Just start from the current state of affair and loan things to each others, so that anyone interested can gawk at the art, independently of any claimed special connection.
EDIT: or what Phanx said.
posted by dragondollar at 10:41 PM
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One interesting thing is the motivation for fakery. Profit, obviously, but it's not like committed liars and frauds are short of career opportunities. It's more as if this guy mainly wanted to reinvent himself. He adopts a parodically upper class Brit name, and weaves the antiquities into a false story of an inherited family collection. As it was, he used Egyptian antiquities, but if his life had gone slightly differently he might have been faking Vermeers and claiming he got them from his illustrious Van Velzen forebears.
posted by Phanx at 11:31 PM
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It was morally permissible, he suggested, to steal antiquities from Egypt and bring them to collectors who had the wealth to restore and preserve them. It's an argument that many collectors would like to believe,
No "would like to believe" about it, I've no doubt they do believe it.
Years ago I was watching a documentary featuring some restoration work being done in Egypt by Egyptians. Perhaps the person doing the work was nervous because being filmed (I know would be), or simply was not up to the job, but we could see the objet (Fayum mummy portrait, IIRC, or close enough, painted gesso cracked by lack of humidity) being further broken before our eyes, and failed attempts at makign it right, which only made it worse. Not quite so bad as the Monkey Christ or this tragedy, but still, sad making. Would the same have occurred had it been in the hands of a rich collector? Maybe. Maybe not.
(Not that Europeans over the centuries have had a stellar record of preserving world art treasures from destruction, try though the best of them might. The 1945 Friedrichshain flak tower fire makes for some distressing reading, easily overlooked when compared to recovery of artwork stolen by Nazis. Monte Cassino also comes to mind - it would have been worse but for monks and German removing much of the most important manuscripts and artwork. Oh, and the mass post-war book pulping of books deemed unsuitable by Allied authorities for anyone; the curators were not always up to distinguishing the awful from the innocuous. But I digress.)
Italy has more good (but not necessarily great) stuff in back rooms and warehouses than they know what to do with. I can see an argument for putting the excess up for auction to boost the national budget.
I can also see a strong argument against doing so.
Happily, not my call.
posted by BWA at 6:23 AM
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Modern Egyptians have nothing to do with ancient Egyptians
I mean... even granting this point (which is contentious), the conclusion still doesn't follow?
We don't need a cultural connection to these resources to agree that stolen things belong to the person from which they were stolen. My bike doesn't (legally) become the property of my bike thief just because he's held onto it for 70 or even 200 years.
Mineral and petroleum resources are the property of the country in which they are found. No-one is using cultural association to claim ownership of the oil under their country, but companies have to pay taxes (i.e. 'buy') if they want to extract it. But these antiquities were taken at the barrel of a musket; they were stolen.
The difference is that antiquities have retained their value and represent ongoing tourism dollars, unlike oil which just goes up in smoke. There is a fair argument to be made that colonized countries should also have reparations for resources that were plundered from them in the past. We just can't point at the physical resources any more because they're all consumed.
posted by Arandia at 10:15 AM
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@Arandia : True, but that's not what's going on with the narrative about museums having to "give back" looted artefacts.
If you want a bike analogy: you passed away without heirs and your bike had been sitting in a shed for decades when some thief discovered it and took it home. The thief fixes it up and uses it for decades, then decides to gift it to some public institution because his knees finally gave up. Decades later, some random guy buys your old house, finds out you were a famous cyclist, and that your bike somehow ended up in the care of that institution. The guy asks that the bike be given to him, since he's the new house owner. Should the institution comply with his request? He has no personal ties to you, the thief is long dead, and the whole claim rests on the idea that somehow the bike belongs with the house.
I think claims about resources taken are equally dubious. What deserves reparations is the environmental damage that still affects the living, right now. While it's complicated to decide who *could* have benefitted from mineral resources sometimes centuries ago and therefore who should get compensated *now* (and how much?), it's not complicated at all to identify who turned a lake into a pool of acid and who is the injured party that deserves redress. The amount is also easy to calculate: pay until the damage is fixed.
That's a real example by the way: the Cerro de Pasco silver mine. Centuries of exploitation, and the locals are still suffering from the incredible damage to the environment.
posted by dragondollar at 11:24 AM
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