By CNES
A large number of cultural heritage objects from the Middle East and North Africa are located in museums outside of the region, with prominent and extensive collections held in European institutions like the British Museum and the Louvre or American ones such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The numbers are alarmingly higher for sub-Saharan Africa, with an estimated 90% of its material cultural legacy being preserved and housed outside of the African continent.
Today, many European and North American museums acknowledge their complicity in the legacy of colonialism, conquest, and war through which cultural artifacts now housed at these museums were looted and forcibly removed from their original communities. Many institutions are pursuing initiatives to enhance transparency about the history of these objects and their acquisition, emphasizing provenance research.
A limited number of museums have engaged in repatriating objects that were taken unlawfully from their countries of origin, with the most notable example the repatriation of the Benin bronzes to Nigeria from museum collections across Europe and the United States. Closer to home, the Fowler Museum at UCLA returned seven looted items from its collection to Ghana in 2024, while the UCLA Library sent back six Judaica books to the Czech Republic in 2022, removed from the Prague Religious Jewish Community Library during World War II, and sold to American buyers. Nevertheless, significant debates over repatriation persist regarding the actual return of stolen items (for instance, the disputed return of the Rosetta Stone to Egypt or the Elgin Marbles to Greece), which are connected to the discussions about "appropriate" stewardship and the issues surrounding the control over the repatriation narrative.
In fall 2025, a group of undergraduate and graduate students in Professor Susan Slyomovics' course “Repatriation: The Heritage of the Middle East and North Africa” grappled with these and other issues surrounding repatriation and the legacy of looted objects in Western museums. In addition to working with scholarly literature on the subject, the students had an opportunity to learn from several invited speakers. The class also visited the UCLA Fowler Museum to learn first-hand about its return of Ghanaian objects, as well as the Getty Museum to learn about Armenian manuscripts housed there.
“The goal of the course is to study the ways in which dispossessed communities may have legitimate moral and cultural stakes or even forms of ownership in museum collections. These communities continue to call for special claims, needs, or rights of access to their material heritage held elsewhere by museums. In most cases, it is important to emphasize that most often these claims and obligations are not legally binding. What are some of the strategies pursued by all stakeholders?,” said Slyomovics.
The course culminated in a one-day conference co-organized by Slyomovics and the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. The conference, entitled “How to Repatriate the Material Heritage of the Middle East (and Beyond)?,” featured nine student presentations that engaged with case studies of artifacts looted and forcibly removed mainly to Euro-American museums or collections through anthropological missions, colonialism, conquest, and war, primarily from the Middle East and North Africa but including comparative cases from other regions. The presenters included Jessie Blattner (Anthropology), Greta Degner (Library & Information Science), Jake Hubbert (Anthropology), Elisabeth Jahn-Morrissey (Anthropology), Sally Jebory (Anthropology), Shoshana Karp (Anthropology), Nihal Khan (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures), Leilani Ortega (Library & Information Science), and Summer Syed (Anthropology). The conference was moderated by Professor Heghnar Watenpaugh (Art History, UC Davis and UCLA Ph.D.), who offered reflections on the student presentations following each one of the three panels at the event.
The presentations featured an array of case studies on the topic, including discussions on the ethics of displaying looted human remains from ancient Egypt in UK museums and the restitution claims surrounding the Koh-i-Noor diamond from India, which is part of the British Crown Jewels. The students addressed several key issues, such as the impact of object removal and the lack of subsequent access to such objects for the affected communities; the importance of transparency and provenance research; the moral and ethical responsibilities of museums; and legal and political challenges and repercussions related to restitution, reflecting on the existing legal framework that limits the understanding of cultural artifacts as property. The students also expanded the debate by focusing on case studies that challenge the very notion of repatriation and its meaning by examining the possibility of “musical” repatriation and the “repatriation” of destroyed, repurposed, or unmovable cultural heritage.
Many students who presented at the conference will continue to pursue these topics as they focus their future studies on manuscripts, archives, museum curatorship, and archaeology.
“The conference explored strategies deployed by museums from outright rejection of claims to temporary loans, or a single exemplary object gifted from among thousands looted, or digitized versions, virtual relocations and models of artifacts. In fact, we asked what does it take to return what has been taken away?,” Slyomovics concluded.