"It belongs in a museum!" Yes, but whose? The BBC News reports that a coalition of 18 of the world's most prominent museums - including the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston - has issued a declaration of noncompliance with countries demanding the repatriation of antiquities removed from sites within their borders. By redefining themselves as "universal museums" and sidestepping the shady details of how their institutions acquired their collections, these museums are hoping that strength in numbers can somehow stem the tide that is returning archaeological artifacts to their countries of origin in ever-increasing numbers. But their arguments are specious at best, and downright insulting to the rest of the world at worst.

"The objects and monumental works that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones," the statement reads, which even if tue does not vacate the museums' moral obligation now to return what was admittedly ransacked in ages past.

There may be some truth as well when the coalition declares: "The universal admiration for ancient civilisations would not be so deeply established today were it not for the influence exercised by the artefacts of these cultures, widely available to an international public in major museums." But that time has past. Whereas until very recently the museum and the idea of cultural preservation was a Western phenomenon, even the remotest corners of the earth have museums now. To argue that antiquities belonged in an environment conducive to their survival and appreciation was one of the greatest rationales of the colonial powers, when they carted off art and artifacts by the boatload to such institutions as the British Museum and the Louvre. The argument had a certain seductive logic to it, though even during the time of Lord Elgin (whose "Elgin Marbles", stolen from the Parthenon in Athens, remain a bone of contention between the United Kingdom and Greece to this day) it was starting to ring hollow to some.

Today such reasoning is intellectually bankrupt, and smacks of more than a little paternalism on the West's part. There is a museum revolution going on in the world today, from small Native American museums in New England to visitor centers at lowland Mexican jungle ruins, and it's silly to say that big museums should keep their booty because only they can do these items justice. Antiquities don't need to be permanent features of Western museums in order to go on fostering a love for all things ancient. Smaller museums have made a cottage industry of lending out their collections to the larger institutions, as the Egyptians did recently with their wildly-successful tour of mummies; and with the advent of digital archives and the world wide web, admiration is only a click away.