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Comment by stolen_biscuit | Hacker News Reader

Museums shouldn't be full of looted treasures, museums should be full of treasures of the culture who built the museum. It is an injustice that any significant artifact is not in the custodianship of the culture it belongs to and when the infrastructure is in place to preserve the items, they should be returned to the community they came from.

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To what modern-day culture do Roman artifacts belong?

Even if we assume it rightfully belongs to people with Roman ancestry, that describes many modern Germans as well as it does modern Italians. People from these two regions were moving around and in near constant contact with each other for thousands of years. Somebody who is German today may have ancestors who were Italian two hundred years ago, and Greek 2000 years before that.

Which part of Rome? It depends. It doesn't make sense to send the Roman baths in England back to Italy for example.

I dunno, maybe some historians would know the best place to return it?

Most countries are full of land stolen from the ancestors of the people who lived there, which was then exploited by the thieves, to make them and their descendents, incredibly wealthy and powerful.

Indeed, across the entire globe, only a tiny fraction of the population own the vast majority of land and other resources.

Let's all sort out this much bigger and globally impactful inequality first, before worrying about some museum pieces.

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