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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

Every now and then I get to run around the main loop in NYC's Central Park. Near the MET Museum there is an Egyptian obelisk, Cleopatra's Needle: https://www.centralparknyc.org/locations/obelisk. Ostensibly an Ottoman Empire gift to the US in the late 19th century... I wonder how many treasures have been plundered from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, etc... and spread across the world. Things like Cleopatra's Needle are generally OK because they serve the public good and have clear provenance, but many treasures in private homes and elsewhere may not, and should return to their rightful countries of origin.

edit: my ethics

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Just FYI it's not the only Cleopatra's needle. The one on the Embankment, London has damage from zepplin raids.

There is a Tommy Handley radio sketch about the phonetic alphabet from the 1940s show "ITMA" which features "Klimpompidra's niddle" as the phonetic K, which begs the question "how do you spell that" which then recurses...

The people who control Egypt now conquered it 1400 years ago and deliberately destroyed all the cultures that existed before them.

Ancient treasures created by those predecessor cultures are not owned by the people who destroyed the culture they come from. They literally have no connection. Not culturally, and to a large degree not even genetically.

It would be like saying that ancient Native American art is rightfully owned by the Kennedy family.

So that's the moral side.

On the practical side - what a terrible idea, to send irreplaceable ancient human cultural artifacts to be kept in such an unstable, low-trust society. They will not be good stewards. If we care at all about people in future centuries and millennia being able to see these objects, they need to be kept in the most stable countries.

There's significant population continuity between ancient and modern Egyptians.

What's your purpose with even trying to make this argument?

You are correct, and there are genetic studies to back you up. Modern day Egyptians have substantial continuity from ancient Egypt. Even in Ancient Egypt, there was trade and mixture with people from the Levant, but that didn’t massively change Egyptian genetics.

As for your question, you probably suspect the answer - many people will discredit Middle Easterners (including North Africans if you consider them distinct), past and present, inadvertently or not, intentionally or unintentionally. They are the modern day scapegoats, and nothing good can come from scapegoats right?

The biggest boogeyman in particular is the Arab. Muslim Egyptians, which are the vast majority of Egyptians, have a minority % of Arab ancestry. Oh God forbid, people of a shared faith but different ethnicity occasionally intermix. /s

“Arab” is a cultural identity that is not entirely equivalent to genetics. During the mid-20th century, Egypt was a center of pan-Arab nationalism, and even briefly formed a “United Arab Republic” with Syria. That fell through pretty quickly, but even today Egypt calls itself an “Arab Republic”. This isn’t to claim that Egyptian people today universally consider themselves to be Arabs, but many of them apparently do.

Regardless, I would still question the basic premise that contemporary Egyptians have some sort of exclusive claim to the archeological heritage of ancient Egypt. Almost every aspect of ancient Egyptian culture—its law, religion, written and spoken languages—have been long destroyed, forgotten, or replaced, in many cases deliberately. (Yes, I know Coptic is still used as a liturgical language by the Christian minority, but even they natively speak Arabic.) What exactly gives Egyptians an exclusive claim to an ancient culture that’s as foreign to them as anyone else—blood and soil? Maybe I’m being naive but I would prefer to treat the ancient world as the common heritage of all of humanity, with its preservation and study as a common good than to treat it as some sort of private ethno-nationalistic domain.

> What exactly gives Egyptians an exclusive claim to an ancient culture that’s as foreign to them as anyone else—blood and soil?

Extend this logic and then any country who want to consider inclusive claim on this matter to abolish inheritance law. Why do you have exclusive claim to your dead relative wealth? Is that because you maybe lived together or only blood?

Or why only ancient world, let's treat the Modern world like that as well. And then let's distribute the wealth.

> Maybe I’m being naive

I do agree with you.

The fact that you’re looking at this in terms of wealth and not even in terms of cultural heritage is revealing. Would you rather an Egyptian use the Rosetta Stone for building materials than a French scholar use it to decipher the hieroglyphs?

> Or why only ancient world, let's treat the Modern world like that as well. And then let's distribute the wealth.

This might be shocking to you, but not only am I opposed to blood-and-soil ethnonationalism, but also communism!

> The fact that you’re looking at this in terms of wealth and not even in terms of cultural heritage is revealing

I am not comparing both cases. I am just giving an example to show how your logic and argument is ridiculous.

Ironically the world common heritage that you are describing is core idea for communism. I know that you oppose them but for your racist views, there is no problem into having similar ideas.

And you calling it ethonationlism doesn't change that facts. By the way I can extend this and call each inheritance, culture and everything a group of people did/doing as such. I hope you would support eliminating passports and abolish borders to be consistent (as just another example)

There's a difference between inheriting property from your immediate parents and trying to lay claim to cultures that ceased to exist centuries before you were even born, and there's a difference between allowing a society that exists in the year 2024 to conduct its own affairs and allowing that society some proprietary claim to ancient artifacts that it had no part in uncovering or studying. Your arguments are glib and your resort to incoherent accusations of racism is laughable.

I find your ethics to be a bit misplaced - I think good intentioned but not really thoroughly thought through.

To be fair its probably a quick throw away comment you made.

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