Greece and Mesopotamia in Britain: Changing Places

This chapter examines how Britain’s appetite for primacy extended to the appropriation of overseas’ heritage when the Parthenon sculptures were removed from the Acropolis in Athens and installed in the British Museum in London where they have been on display since 1817. The following decade artefacts from Assyria were acquisitioned from a private collection, with greater numbers arriving directly from site excavations in the 1840s and 1850s. The Greek and Mesopotamian collections represented two different worlds. The former was revered as the cradle of Western European civilisation, while the latter from Mesopotamia, which today equates to modern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and southwestern Iran, was seen as something foreign and other. What the British Museum contributed to were ideas of paternalism and entitlement, as well as issues of ownership and site displacement which has created a complex situation for a modern nation. The extent of this was demonstrated when the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was scheduled to meet the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in November 2023, to discuss the Parthenon sculptures but cancelled, at the last minute, to avoid a confrontation. More often it is left to the British Museum to field these questions, which continues to assert it is a universal museum and that the sculptures will remain in its ownership, and therefore, in London. This chapter examines how this overseas heritage has become part of Britain’s contested history and considers how these issues arising from its world collections might be resolved.