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Elgin Marbles: The Elgin Marbles are a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures, inscriptions, and architectural limbs that were created mostly by Phidias and her assistants.
The 7th Earl of Elgin, Thomas Bruce, removed the Parthenon marble pieces from the Acropolis in Athens while serving as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803.
In 1801, the count claimed to have obtained a permit from the Ottoman authorities to remove parts of the Parthenon.
As the Acropolis was still an Ottoman military fort, Elgin needed permission to enter the site.
Subsequently, his agents removed half of the surviving sculptures, as well as architectural members and sculptures of the Propylaea and the Erechtheum.
The excavation and removal was completed in 1812 at a personal cost of around £ 70,000.
The sculptures were sent to Great Britain, but in Greece, the Scottish aristocrat was accused of looting and vandalism.
They were bought by the British government in 1816 and placed in the British Museum. They are still on view in the specially designed Duveen Gallery.
Greece has sought its return from the British Museum over the years, without success.
The authenticity of Elgin’s permission to remove the sculptures from the Parthenon has been widely questioned, especially since the original document was lost. Many claim that it was not legal.
However, others argue that since the Ottomans had controlled Athens since 1460, their claims on the artifacts were legal and recognizable.
Benin bronzes: In 1897, a British naval expedition was organized to avenge the deaths of nine officers killed during a commercial dispute between the King of Benin and Great Britain. Britain sent a force of 500 men to destroy Benin.
After ten days of fierce fighting, the British set the palace on fire and looted the royal treasures: delicate ivory carvings and magnificent copper alloy sculptures and plates, now known as the Benin bronzes.
After the sack of Benin, the British took the bronzes to pay for the expedition.
One of them, a bronze rooster, ended up being a fixture in the dining room at Jesus College, Cambridge.
Many people have campaigned for the rooster to be returned over the years and in November last year, the University of Cambridge agreed to return it to Nigeria.
One of the activists was BBC historian David Olusoga, who said that the British Museum should have a “Supermarket Sweep” in which countries have two minutes to retrieve their artifacts.
Rosetta Stone: One of the most famous objects in the British Museum, the Rosetta Stone is a broken part of a larger stone slab. There is a written decree on the king, which is inscribed three times. In hieroglyphs, demotic and ancient Greek.
It is believed to have been found by accident in Egypt in 1799 by Napoleon’s army while digging the foundations for an addition to a fort near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta.
When Napoleon was defeated, the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801 meant the stone for British property, along with other things the French had found. He was sent to England and arrived in Portsmouth in February 1802.
Friends: The four-ton, 7-foot-10-inch statue of Easter Island is considered one of the most spiritually important of the 900 famous Chilean island stone monoliths, or moai.
Each of the figures is said to embody tribal leaders or deified ancestors.
It was taken from the island, which is in the Pacific more than 2,100 miles off the coast of Chile, in 1868 by Commodore Richard Powell, captain of HMS Topaze, who gave it to Queen Victoria.
He donated it in 1869 to the British Museum, where it now stands at the entrance to the Wellcome Trust Gallery.
But the indigenous community of Easter Island, the Rapa Nui, wants Britain to return the spiritually ‘unique’ effigy.
Governor Tarita Alarcón Rapu found the sight of the artifact so emotional that she burst into tears as she begged the museum to return it.
