Loot Quotes

“I used to wonder: Do only ignorant laypeople gaze on the colossal bust of Ramses II at the British Museum and ask themselves how it ended up there? Is it only the unschooled visitor who looks at the soaring column from the Temple of Artemis at the Met and questions why it exists in this place?”
― Sharon Waxman, Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World

“He discovered a cartouche from Abu Simbel in which he could identify the name of Ramses. Upon making this breakthrough, he rushed from his apartment, found his brother, cried, “Je tiens l’affaire!”—“I’ve got it!”—and dropped into a dead faint. In a letter dated September 27, 1822, Champollion wrote of his discovery to the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Letters. And within two years he completed a Précis du Systeme Hieroglyphique, showing that the script was a mixture of ideographic and phonetic signs.”
― Sharon Waxman, Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World

“As cultural politics change, museums change with them.”
― Sharon Waxman, Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World

“As once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking.”
― Sharon Waxman, Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World