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Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

One of the outcomes of the US-Iraq war was Iraq's national heritage of antiquities getting plundered and sold illegally.[1]

The burning of the Library of Alexandria is a potent symbol in Western culture, but the world has repeatedly suffered massive losses of cultural and historical artifacts in the last few decades. The public quickly develops historical amnesia for recent events. Compare, for example, the loss of Brazil's National Museum to a fire two years ago.[2]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/ir...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/fire-engulfs-b...

edited: clarity and link formatting

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The destruction of Baghdad itself, including the House of Wisdom (large library), by the Mongols in 1258 is probably a more apt comparison.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)

What a tragedy. Most westerners don't realize that when Europeans were living in mud huts and emptying their chamber pots into the streets, the Muslim world had plumbing, water filtration, surgery, advanced mathematics, and many more amazing scientific advances which quickly spread throughout Muslim countries due to the cultural exchange at Mecca. I wonder what the world could have been like if the Mongols had never destroyed so much civilization and progress.

Wait until you read about the Roman Republic thousands of years before this time - you’re gonna love it.

Yeah but besides the sanitation system,the aqueduct, the roads, the irrigation system, medicine,oratory, law, historians, dramatists,Vitruvius..what did those lousy Romans have?

great Monty Python bit! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo

They did invent chemical warfare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum

1. Are you sure you linked to the right page? That looks to be a condiment.

2. Chemical warfare was used before the Romans, for instance, like that condiment, the greeks had it before them. (Though I don't believe the greeks invented it first either). For example, see this wikipedia article (which is really in need of some improvement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_chemical_warfare

Garum is supposedly similar to south-east Asian fish sauce so as someone who can't stomach even regular seafood, let alone that horrible stuff, I'll stand by their humorous assessment :)

ROMANES EUNT DOMUS

And the indus river valley civilization! They had a pretty advanced irrigation system.

They used flood irrigation, more precisely - https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p077x0m7/why-did-an-entire-ci...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation#Clim...

One could say the same thing about a lot of conquerors including the Arab armies. For example, when the Arab armies conquered North Africa, it was one of the richest and most developed areas in the Mediterranean. After the Arab conquest, it became a backwater and never achieved the prominence it had before. Also, in Egypt, the Great Pyramid was once covered with gleaming white limestone, but this was removed and used to build mosques.

The pattern of civilization, destruction, new civilization is a repeating motif in history. Yes the Mongols caused a lot of destruction, but they also facilitated the East-West exchange of ideas and goods on a hithero unknown scale.

My understanding is quite different... north africa flourished for hundreds of years after the Arab conquest, particularly during the time of Andalusia which lasted almost 700 years. Even after, North Africa held quite some power from its pirating entities. It was very much a hub, controlling important sea routes. It wasn't until European colonialism that it really turned into a backwater and lost all prominence. At least that's my understanding from my historic readings.

> It was very much a hub, controlling important sea routes.

That’s an interesting way of saying they were pirates and slavers who raided Europe and abducted slaves for centuries.

To add an interesting part about history: after the US became an independent nation US merchant vessels were not under the protection of the Royal Navy. This made US ships a good target for pirates from the Barbary States who would not only steal the cargo but enslave the crew (the pirates also raided European settlements near coasts for slaves). Because the US didn't have a navy at the time they decided to pay tribute to stop the attacks. At one point the US paid a fifth of its annual budget in tribute to the pirates. This led to the creation of a permanent US Navy and to the Barbary Wars.

Now 200 years later the US Navy is a pretty powerful fighting force.

Ah, like the sentence right before that which stated they were pirates? You think I referred to north africa holding power from its pirating entities as some kind of Disney movie piracy? Anyone who has any sense of piracy in a historical context knows they thieve, pillage, kill, rape, enslave. Besides, you say it as if the north african states uniquely employed slavery, this was a time of a giant slave trade by European countries in Africa, Asia and South America, if I'd have said the colonial Netherlands controlled important trade routes and trade hubs, would you have added the snarky comment as well?

It’s extremely unlikely the limestone casing for the pyramids was still around at the time of the Caliphate. Do you have any sources for that? It wasn’t all that long ago, relatively speaking.

There's a kernel of truth there. The limestone casing was destroyed by an earthquake in 1308. The rubble was repurposed for other building projects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza#Casing_s...

>in Egypt, the Great Pyramid was once covered with gleaming white limestone, but this was removed and used to build mosques

This is a very misleading distortion of history. The limestone casing on the Great Pyramid was destroyed in an earthquake in 1308 CE. The limestone rubble was pulled from the base of the pyramid and repurposed for building though much of it was also burned in kilns for lime like the marble of many ancient buildings and temples from the ancient world all around the Mediterranean by people of many and various religions and nationalities.

>When the Arab armies conquered North Africa, it was one of the richest and most developed areas in the Mediterranean. After the Arab conquest, it became a backwater and never achieved the prominence it had before.

You really ought to read up on the Islamic Golden Age.

This comes across a little patronizing. The poster is making the point that North Africa had been part of a civilized empire for centuries, and full of wealthy cities, some famous for their learning. Some of history’s greatest minds lived in Roman North Africa.

These cities were conquered. Some were sacked and destroyed. There was major loss of life, economic destruction, and loss of property, including written works. The conquerors, at the time, did not much appreciate the value of what they were destroying.

The fact that the region later somewhat recovered does not take away from the fact that, if we’re talking about setbacks for human progress, the early Muslim conquests were one. Yes, there was a great reawakening where the conquerors began to appreciate the legacy that remained, and began translating and building on the works that escaped their destruction. That doesn’t make the intervening period better. And certainly the poster is correct that cities like Alexandria and Carthage never again achieved their old prominence.

Your understanding of the region is not an accurate account. Not at all. There have been various sophisticated civilizations in the region, among them various Islamic states. The rises and falls of various sophisticated civilizations came about for a variety of reasons, most of which were prior to the Islamic world existing. The Islamic Golden Age brought Alexandria back from being a declining backwater with its schools closed by late Rome's Christian emperors to returning to a center of learning, one that helped preserve important classical texts that were lost in the West, esp in mathematics and the sciences, and where they were significantly further developed.

Nobody is disputing the existence of the Islamic Golden Age. We are talking about the intermediate, bloody and chaotic period caused by the Muslim conquests that rapidly spread from the Arabian peninsula and overcame the Persian Empire and most of the Roman Empire. These empires didn’t go away for a “variety of reasons”, they went away because they were violently conquered by invading force in the name of religion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_conquests

As for your claims about Alexandria:

> Following the Arab conquest of Egypt in AD 641, the city was plundered and lost its significance before re-emerging in the modern era

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria

Once can also hardly read accounts of the conquest of Alexandria and think “my, what an improvement.” A lot of people died. Parts of the city burned. You are also wrong that the schools were closed prior. That was certainly not the case. Alexandria was a major center of learning up until the conquest.

Carthage was sacked and deliberately destroyed to prevent it from being retaken.

Look, yes, there’s a group of people out there that understates they Islamic Golden Age. But that doesn’t take away from the reality that the early Muslim conquests were absolutely ruinous. People were still writing those “important classical texts” you mention when they were killed and their texts burned. I doubt they would have much appreciated that the conquerors much later translated what survived the flames.

About the "schools being closed" thing, I had a chance to compare notes (so to speak) with a few friends that grew up in north african muslim countries. I remember they had a few interesting takes that showed a VERY distorted perspective on a few aspects of medieval history (we all do, history books are written by whoever runs the schools), a little beyond the self congratulatory takes I experienced in European schools. I still remember vividly an Egyptian friend of mine that was dead sure Egypt won the Six Days War against Israel to mention one of the most obviously wrong things he believed.

Similar as with Russians.

It might be a good idea to state your definition of North Africa. Though the Wikipedia page says that the most accepted definition is one where Egypt is part of it; I've been of the idea that it's not (but that might be because of the french influence ;) )

you studied classics in grad school but you should have also studied debate. As it is abundantly clear to the posters before me and those who replied above, no one except you contended that the islamic golden age did not exiat.

What your classics academia instruction seems to have short changed you is in the entire period of history where arab conquest reduced most mesopotamian and north african development to rubble, mostly in the name of religion.

>As it is abundantly clear to the posters before me and those who replied above, no one except you contended that the islamic golden age did not exiat.

Happily since I was a philosophy undergrad, I am easily able to spot a straw man. The claim was that the Arab Conquest transformed N Africa from a wealthy region to a backwater. This is was really what I was more responding to. During the Arab Golden Age N. Africa was far more prosperous than during the collapse of late Western Rome. If you learned about the history of the region you could discover how inaccurate the premise is as well as the conclusion. Anyway, this conversation ended yesterday so research if you'd like to learn, but I'm out.

The region never recovered post-Carthage. I live here, so if you are talking about a powerful civilization, then there is only Carthage. After that it was mostly trading cities going through boom-bust which are setup by other civilizations (Rome/Byzantium/Caliphates/Ottoman...)

> These cities were conquered. Some were sacked and destroyed. There was major loss of life, economic destruction, and loss of property, including written works. The conquerors, at the time, did not much appreciate the value of what they were destroying.

It's just life. North Africa was just a bunch of tribes/cities. It is easier for an invader to tackle them one city at a time than taking a full united civilization.

Much of Roman Africa was in a state of deterioration due to Christan invaders like Visigoths(I think) who overrun the Roman African provinces towards the decline of the Western Roman Empire.

At the time of the expansion of Islam, there was no longer even a Western Roman Empire.

I should have said Vandals instead of Visigoths. The Vandals ruled over Africa during and after the end of the Western Roman Empire.

Later in one of the most dashing military campaigns, the Eastern Roman Empire(Byzantines) forces under Belisarius captured most of the territory of the former Western Roman Empire, including the African provinces after defeating Vandals. The African provinces were then organized into the Exarchate, which is what Muslim armies eventually overcame in the 690s AD.

If that "Golden Age" includes the destruction of Nalanda[1], then forgive me if I agree with the person you're replying to, it was an incredibly destructive empire that aggressively expanded and destroyed anything that deemed heretic. As such, it's not exceptional in either sense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda#Decline_and_destructio...

Edit - As I can't reply to stuff like this (it deserved to die) but in case I get anything more like it:

> Find me an "empire" that wasn't destructive. You're disingenuous, and likely racist as all hell. Fuck off.

I'm making that exact point, all empires are destructive, hence the it's not exceptional in either sense. Thanks to all those who can read and all those who don't go around calling others racists for no good reason.

This thread was at one point about Arabs and the scope of the Islamic Golden Age usually does not include the Turkic people who sacked Nalanda.

The Arab world, and Arabic history, is not homogenous. Some Muslim nations were very progressive, others were very backwards. Just like non-Muslim nations, really.

There was definitely a period when western Europe was very backwards whereas a lot of meaningful and important progress was made in Muslim countries. There have been Islamic empires that were relatively tolerant about differences, and certainly didn't destroy everything they deemed heretic.

We have a strong tendency to generalise: everything that's a bit distant from us has to be either one thing of the other thing. We're terrible at nuance, yet it's vital in order to understand history.

Any recommendations for fun-to-read books about this period?

I read these on holiday in Morroco a couple years ago and thoroughly enjoyed them. Not necessarily the correct period so I'm open to see other people's suggestions too.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/878061.Moorish_Spain

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/336859.The_Golden_Trade_...

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4398835-the-berbers-and-...

> amazing scientific advances which quickly spread throughout Muslim countries due to the cultural exchange at Mecca

A more important factor in their quick spread was the violent conquest of a huge swathe of the Middle East, North Africa, and part of Western Europe.

All those things existed in the Roman Empire, which extended into the Middle East, until the early Muslim conquests destroyed most of the Roman Empire and all of the Persian Empire, sending the Middle East into a minor dark age.

Because the region had been extremely wealthy and advanced for centuries, with plenty of intra-Empire cultural exchange, itdid eventually recover. Most (not all) of the “advances” were translations of and commentaries on Greek/Roman and Persian works, and notably, most of them were from the pre-existing conquered strata population in pre-existing centers of learning. Of course, as time went on, people did build up higher, but the conquests were a major setback.

So let’s not hype it up too much - where would the world be, if, as Gibbon wrote, Mohammed had died in the cradle, and all those people hadn’t been killed, books burned, and cities sacked?

There’s no way to know - it might have been worse off in both cases.

Based on some quick back of the napkin calculations, we'd probably be facing severe overcrowding and famine; same as if Genghis Khan had been a stillborn.

I’m pretty sure I learned all that in high school (in Virginia, 20 years ago when it was still a red state).

As someone who moved between red and blue states in high school I like to say that the blue states refuse to teach history and the red states refuse to teach science though history of the middle east isn't usually what I'm referring to.

The Eastern Romans had it too, as it never ceased to exist in the East. However, I don't think the original Muslim Arabs had any of those technologies, the states they conquered did. (Roman and Persian)

Conquering something doesn't mean you automatically get to keep it. Systems need to be maintained.

>> the Muslim world had plumbing, water filtration, surgery, advanced mathematics, and many more amazing scientific advance

I wonder, why did they get stuck into the past still being ruled either by a monarch or some religious leader?

resource curse, and all of its knock-on effects: ripe targets for resource extraction by foreign governments or multinationals (e.g. the offshoots of Standard Oil), said foreign entities will then support governments that abet their wealth extraction, which are typically governments whose mandate is not based on the will of the people even idealistically. said governments will return a portion of resource revenue to the people in the form of bread and circuses, to distract from how poorly their leaders serve them. saudi arabia had no taxes until only recently – if people are taxed, they’re likelier to be more critical of their government, and to demand representation https://www.ictd.ac/blog/tax-accountability-strengthen-links...

What about Iran?

Rome had most of that long ago. Some of their field surgery technology in particular was extremely advanced.

Same thing happened in India. In fact, there was a lot of Indian influence on Islamic sciences. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_influence_on_Islamic_sc...)

But unfortunately, more than just knowledge was exchanged.

Imagine universities existing for hundreds of years, but promptly destroyed by invaders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda

This pattern repeated throughout India for hundreds of years.

The Europeans were emptying their chamber pots nearly 1000 years after the Greeks invented most major math theory and were sending water hundreds of miles on aqueducts.

Ehm, plumbing is a bad example since the Romans did that WAY ahead of the Muslim world. For that AND sidewalks, you're welcome. Thanks for the numbers, that was handy.

> you're welcome

I am confused... are you an ancient Roman?

close, I'm Italian.

Not that close

actually not close at all, if dude is really trying to be Mr. Ancient Rome, well, he’s likelier descended from the “savages” that sacked her than the ancient patricians who led her in glory

why "likelier"? We had invasions and racial mixing like everywhere else in the mediterranean, but that was happening during roman times too.

I'm actually more of a cisalpine gaul than a roman myself, but the beauty of the empire was that it was multi cultural and multi racial.

Said that, Italians absolutely look like romans, this is a small example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdUPYm06gVc

Our language is also the closest to the type of Latin romans spoke during the empire (which itself evolved).

I do not understand why it's even controversial, you're making a dumb point.

>Our language is also the closest to the type of Latin romans spoke during the empire (which itself evolved).

Wrong. Modern Galician is the closest extant language to Latin, the next closest being Spanish.

Romans fought wars against Italians for centuries, who after being conquered were regarded as allies, then as citizens, but never as Romans. The French and Germans have just as much Roman in their blood as the Italians.

That's just not true. The most similar is definitely Italian, your opinion doesn't count as fact.

https://languagevolcano.wordpress.com/2016/07/08/which-langu...

I don't speak Galego well but Spanish FOR SURE is not as close as Italian because it contains so many Arabic influences.

Also, you're referring to "cives romani" and obviously a person that didn't live in the city of Rome wasn't a roman.

Regarding the having "roman blood" for French and Germans, you're just wrong. I'm not even going to bother finding you resources because it's not my job to educate you, but I suggest you inform yourself before you start spewing incorrect notions like they are somehow facts.

>The most similar is definitely Italian

Funny how even though I'm fluent in Latin and can understand a third of spoken Spanish (having never studied Spanish), I can barely understand 10% of Italian regardless of the accent I'm listening to or which city the speaker is from. It's also funny that several other fluent Latin speakers (and some professors) I've talked to agree about this.

>Also, you're referring to "cives romani" and obviously a person that didn't live in the city of Rome wasn't a roman.

No, not obviously. Romans thought of themselves as a separate ethnicity with a distinct language, culture, and religion from Italians. They are descended from a distinct tribe that settled the city. A Roman family who had lived in Gaul for generations would still be called Roman. An Italian family who had lived in Roma would still be called Italians and cives Romani. Romans settled throughout their conquered territory, which included Italy, Hispania, Britannia, and Gaul. Like it or not, those regions have as much demonstrable Roman blood as modern day Italians whom are mostly descended from Italic tribes, not from Romans.

>it's not my job to educate you

Thank heavens my education of the Latin language and Roman history doesn't depend on you.

Romans would have felt insulted at your insinuation.

>you're welcome

I hope that was a joke. It's very sad to see people take credit for achievements of others just on the grounds that they happen to share the same nationality/race/religion/birth place.

Sure, someone of your tribe achieved X in the past, very well done, but how did YOU contribute to that? Winning the lottery of birth is not an achievement.

It’s very clearly said as an attempt at humour, rather than them actually taking credit for something they didn’t do.

He doesn't sound like he's joking to me (see his other reply), at least the "clearly" in your reply was unwarranted.

Edit: Anyway I'm starting to believe that this whole submission/thread should be flagged. It certainly discusses many things besides the theft of the tablet.

> you're welcome

Found Augustus Caesar's hn account.

(Though, obviously the Romans were far from the first to do this; evidence of some sort of sewerage apparatus goes back at least 6000 years, and the Minoans had an urban system long before Rome existed)

>the Muslim world had plumbing, water filtration, surgery, advanced mathematics, and many more amazing scientific advances

A lot of which came through Indian traders, first evidences of human surgeries are found in Indian subcontinent, Indus valley civilization had pretty advance irrigation system for the time and mathematics: quadratic equations, notion of zero, notion of limits and inifinty were here in philosophical sense even if no one every applied it in mathematics.

In the field of war strategy and material, like steel for sword - India was wayy ahead at its time. They knew about the steel temperament long before Europeans even started using steel for swords.

"During the 6th Century BCE, an Indian physician named Sushruta – widely regarded in India as the 'father of surgery' – wrote one of the world's earliest works on medicine and surgery"

Hell Arabic numerals are actually the Indian nos which trader Arabs exported to Europe. I find the characterisation that Arabs invented no system used in so many places so misleading. It is almost as if western historians do not want to give adequate acknowledgment to South Asia.

Medieval French village https://www.solosophie.com/medieval-town-of-dinan/

Modern Bagdad https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y2BD66C-W58

I dont find any descriptions of specific surgeries here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_in_the_medieval_Isl...

The Muslim world was on the decline from ~1100, before the Mongols were anything of note to them. Yes, the Mongols delivered the coup de grace though.

> Most westerners don't realize that when Europeans were living in mud huts

Mud huts? Rome was composed of mud hut? The tallest building in the world for almost the entire 2nd millenia was in england. Not exactly "mud huts".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_St_Paul%27s_Cathedral

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Cathedral

https://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-the-tallest-buildin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_world%27s_talle...

I think you are overselling the muslim world and underselling europe a bit.

> the Muslim world had plumbing, water filtration, surgery, advanced mathematics, and many more amazing scientific advances which quickly spread throughout Muslim countries due to the cultural exchange at Mecca.

Much of it brought to the muslim world by the roman empire and the greeks. Or from the indians/chinese/etc in the east. Of course there were muslim contributions but lets not get too carried away here.

> I wonder what the world could have been like if the Mongols had never destroyed so much civilization and progress.

The world would be exactly the way it was in the 1200s without the mongols. The muslim world had stagnated by the time the mongols came around. After all the arabic islamic golden age started in the 700s. The mongols destroy arabic islamic civilization but they helped create the turkic islamic civilization of the ottoman empire not to mention the persian centered khanates which went on to create mughal india. Without the mongols, we don't have the italian renaissance and modern europe and without modern europe we don't have modern civilization. The empire created by the mongols is why marco polo went east. It's also why christopher columbus set sail. Without the mongols, we don't have the new world.

No doubt, the arab world suffered and lost out, but the world advanced immensely due to the mongols. The mongol empire was the first truly "global" empire. It helped europe bypass the muslim world and trade directly with india, china, etc.

>Without the mongols, we don't have the italian renaissance and modern europe and without modern europe we don't have modern civilization. The empire created by the mongols is why marco polo went east. It's also why christopher columbus set sail. Without the mongols, we don't have the new world.

I'll take whig historiography for $500, Alex.

No. Just geopolitical, economic, historical facts. Meaning, what actually happened. Sorry if it doesn't mesh with your "mud huts" worldview and agenda.

Without the Mongols no one would have discovered the new world to this day?

Was this incendiary comment really necessary?

"Muslim world" is somewhat misleading glamorizing generalization in all such statements. Pretty much all examples which are used as a proof of the MW comparatively advanced stage at early medieval times come from Iran/Persia, and Middle East. Both were very much advanced well-before Arab conquests, and simply continued to be so. There were many other parts of MW which were much below that level, or which to tge contrary experienced devastation, and decline as a result of the conquest. The Christendom was very uneven too, of course. And lots if people lived in mud huts in both realms.

Also, blaming Mongols as if they were the sole destroyers is absolutely incorrect.

The arab conquests were like ~700, we're talking about hundreds of years later. I think 'the muslim world' can take some credit for developments on that timeframe.

Not sure if Mongols are -entirely- responsible for the decline. We should also consider the shift of international trade from land to sea, and subsequent loss of contact with external world, as the possible culprit. (Consider the Ottomans, for example).

That said, here's a famous quote:

O would that my mother had never borne me, that I had died before and that I were forgotten [so] tremendous disaster such as had never happened before, and which struck all the world, though the Muslims above all . . . Dadjdjal [Muslim Anti-Christ] will at least spare those who adhere to him, and will only destroy his adversaries. These [Mongols], however, spared none. They killed women, men, children, ripped open the bodies of the pregnant and slaughtered the unborn. - Ibn al-Athir (1233–1160)

A modern equivalent (sorta) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire

Another example is shutting down What.cd, which was a digital library that had an unbelievably large collection of music. Many titles couldn't be found anywhere except on What.cd.

Granted, a lot of that music probably wasn't amazing. But as an archive and community what.cd was unmatched, and I'm still upset that it's gone. RIP

License holders honestly can't be trusted with archiving or distributing their own works.

So much music and movies is available in inferior or compromised formats if you go through the versions available on the market today from the license owners.

The effectively-infinite copyright length that was introduced in the 1970s (yes, that recent!) definitely belongs in the same discussion as the burning of Alexandria. We haven't even begun to realize how much culture we've sacrificed at the foot of Disney and other copyright maximalists.

Annecdote: My dad collects plastic model kits. A major model kit company asked him if he could scan the lid of one of their products they made decades ago, so that they could have the artwork to re-release the same model.

I think LEGO Group is good about this; they have a vault containing a copy of every product they ever made.

Ironically, purely from an amoral preservation point of view, having the antiquities in a museum in the United States or Western Europe has a higher chance of preserving the artifact for future generations.

That's the argument that the British Museum uses to justify its collection (much of which was obtained through colonialism). Many countries (even Western ones like Greece) would like their stuff back.

Granted. Though there’s an argument on what preserving the antiquities is for in the first place.

If we think there is a value provided to visitors seeing them in person, then preserving them far away deprives the Iraqi from these benefits making the preservation neutral at best in the short/middle term (long term? will it ever come back ?). It might feel like having your pet living abroad in a shelter, on one side it gets to live, on the other it doesn’t help you much to cope with your life.

Aside from a couple brief but extremely violent periods this past century, sure. The city I live by had its old town reduced to rubble in 1944-45 and is still rebuilding, despite being in one of the most prosperous regions of a rich, powerful country. The Germanisches National Museum wasn't spared, and they still lost stuff, despite preparing for bombardment. Countless works of art were destroyed throughout the city, despite the citizenry's pride in their cultural heritage.

Or maybe because of an excess of pride in that cultural heritage, if you look at the big picture...

I'm talking about Nuremberg/Nürnberg, of course. I love living here now, but oh boy was the evil of an evil time concentrated here. It's hard to reconcile the lovely place I live now with what I grew up learning about it, to the extent that I think of it as Nürnberg today, but Nuremberg when considering the horrors of the 30s and 40s.

Big Western countries don't have constant, low-level instability like our former colonies - we have rare but all-encompassing blowouts. We've just been lucky in the US and Canada that geography protected us for so long (aside from the evil various European powers visited upon people we encountered or forcibly brought there).

More historically, think about spasmodic but intense episodes in the West, like the iconoclastism during the Protestant Reformation. Good luck to any ancient religious art that happened to be in Switzerland at the time... and think about the various flavors of religious nuttery in the US, now being concentrated and inflamed with social media. The Hobby Lobby founders fortunately wanted these artifacts as evidence for their flavor of religious nuttery, but what would have stopped them from acquiring artifacts that they felt needed to be destroyed?

This is basically the plot to Three Kings, which was set during our first time in Iraq.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kings_(1999_film)

Given the region's susceptibility to Islamic State uprisings, I'm not convinced Iraq and Syria are going to be good stewards of antiquities in the long-run. [1][2] These areas haven't been stable for decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_cultural_herita...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Mosul_Museum_ar...

Well, one of these artifacts looks to have been in that region of the world for over 5000 years. That's a pretty good track record.

I'm sure the citizens of Philly wouldn't be susceptible to any arguments that Baghdad would be a better place to store the Liberty Bell.

That’s not a very good argument. ISIS has destroyed a lot of artefacts and antique ruins. The track record, even recent, is actually pretty bad.

Your first point makes sense but your second just isn't comparable in any way at all seeing as Baghdad is literally one of the most inhospitable places to live at the moment

it was sitting underground and unknown to men for almost all of time

It's worth thinking through the question of whether Iraq or Syria would not be entitled to see stolen property returned due to destabilization. Right now the possessor of the stolen property is an American who also has trafficked in a number of items which were looted in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq (this particular tablet was stolen earlier).

Art theft is a real issue in the US and Europe. If an art thief stole then sold a painting owned by an American to someone in China, would you support seeing the stolen property returned to the original owner? Would you take seriously the idea that the owner wasn't entitled to have their stolen property returned since there was a non-trivial chance the art could be stolen again?

For sake of argument, I think that the difference may be that if an artifact is stolen can be recovered. It may even continue to be available to researchers and the general public if it is stollen to be placed in a museum.

It is a much different scenario if an artifact is destroyed either intentionally or unintentionally.

The question of whether a returned article would be destroyed is something to consider, though the notion that this would happen in Iraq and Syria assumes something like another US invasion which caused the destruction and looting in Iraq and Syria the first place. Americans (or others in the Coalition of the Willing) arguing we should keep stolen antiquities because in the future we might destabilize the places we're returning stolen goods to so badly they could be destroyed sounds a little like a threat.

I'm not at all comfortable with the idea that Americans shouldn't return stolen antiquities because America might destabilize the region of the original owner again so badly it could be destroyed.

>It is a much different scenario if an artifact is destroyed either intentionally or unintentionally.

I'd forgotten to respond to this earlier but it's been bugging me, so I'd like to note that a significant amount stolen art is never recovered. In some cases prominent and expensive artworks have been destroyed by the thieves when they couldn't move the art in an attempt to destroy the evidence. Stolen art is sometimes destroyed either intentionally or unintentionally.

A good example would be the destruction of Bamiya Budha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban

but its still theirs. USA or any other nation has no right to take it. Its like China would take the declaration of independence for "safekeeping"

Something 1000s of years old hardly belongs to any particular modern country. Perhaps if whoever is looking after it can't protect it from theft, they don't deserve to be looking after it and it's better that it got stolen. If an entire country is too weak to protect artifacts, then they should be given to somewhere that has that capability.

Who would want to return artifacts to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan just because the Taliban happened to control that piece of land at the time? Nobody cares about some little political group on the scale of 1000s of years.

so you feel the same about the elgin marbles, presumably? because i absolutely adored seeing them at the British Museum, but it sorta feels to me like they ought to be returned to Athens

I don't know what they are but if they were stolen, then obviously it was unable to protect them at that time. No, I don't think ancient Greek artifacts belong to modern Greek people or the modern Greece country. Perhaps they could just as well belong to the EU and be kept in any EU country. Who decides what political entities are the true heirs?

The Burning of the Library of Alexandria was neither intentional nor absolute. A better example is the burning of the House of Wisdom by the Ilkhanate Mongols

My point was that people often point to the burning of the Library of Alexandria as some kind of pivotal tragedy in Western history. But in reality, the world loses huge chunks of unique stuff in our time, irretrievably. Stuff like animal species and human communities and one-of-a-kind historic artifacts. We then soon forget that anything was lost and tell each other just-so stories with zero historical perspective.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5t6op5/facts...

> > I am curious about what knowledge was lost in the fire,

> Probably next to nothing, and certainly nothing of importance was lost. Alexandria was hardly the only library in the world, and the libraries at Pergamum and later Rome herself rivaled Alexandria in scale. Antony replaced the losses of the fire during the Alexandrine War with copies made from the library at Pergamum, and libraries in gymnasia or simply founded for citizens abound during that period in the Greek world, they're in like literally every city of any size.

> We do not lose texts because of catastrophic events that wipe out all copies of them. We lose texts because they stop being copied.

Also check https://www.ancient.eu/article/207/what-happened-to-the-grea...

The documentary No End in Sight talks a lot about the looting of national museums. It was tragic and entirely preventable, but the US did not commit enough troops and did not have a plan for reconstruction or securing anything other than oil fields.

It depends on the definition of lost. I would argue that an artefact is better protected in a museum in Washington DC rather than in a country in a state of civil war.

Then the debate isn't so much about being lost, but whether the artefact should be located in the country where it was originally created, thousands of years ago.

And I think you can see it both ways. I don't understand people who identify themselves to the population that lived on the same territory centuries ago. It is a different people, a different culture, and there might be some trace of that culture left (like there are traces of the roman empire culture left all over europe), there might be some artefacts, some monuments left. But they are really a foreign people to the current inabitants. So should St Mark's Basilica in venice be destroyed to return the looted parts to Turkey? Or should the Lyxor obelisk on the place de la Concorde in Paris be returned to Egypt? I don't think so.

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