60 Minutes - Who Owns History? | 60 Minutes: A Second Look

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

In 2023, Anderson Cooper reported that a large number of antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection had come to the world-class museum by way of theft. Ancient art had been looted from Cambodian temples fifty years ago and the Cambodian Government wanted them back. But as Cooper discovered, returning the stolen goods was no simple matter – a lesson that another 60 Minutes correspondent had learned two decades prior. In 2002, Ed Bradley traveled to Greece and England to cover a dispute that is hundreds of years old – whether the British Museum should return a collection of marble statues removed from the Parthenon back to Athens. This episode of 60 Minutes: A Second Look will examine why, more than 20 years later, that dispute remains deadlocked, and whether efforts like those by the Cambodian activists that Cooper profiled are changing the way we think about museums and the ownership of ancient art. If you enjoyed this episode of "60 Minutes: A Second Look", find and follow the show on your favorite podcast app. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Wow, there's a plus to coming here early. I feel like almost you have to whisper. Yeah, it almost feels like a kind of a spiritual space, doesn't it? This past summer, we were fortunate enough to get a tour of the British Museum first thing in the morning. It was a chance to beat the crowds to see some of the most significant artifacts of the ancient world. It's quite a feat of sculpting, and it's unequaled in any of the ancient sculpture that we still have with us today. And those ancient sculptures happen to be at the center of a very modern debate. Alexander Herman took us around.

He's the author of a book about the Parthenon marbles, perhaps better known as the Elgin marbles. So these are the roughly 90 large pieces of sculpted marble that were taken from the Acropolis in Athens by men working for the British ambassador Lord Elgin in the first decade of the 19th century. But what once was a common practice of finders keepers has become one of the longest custody disputes in cultural history. Trouble is, those marbles are now in the British Museum in London,

and the Greeks want them back. That was 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley in 2002. Greece was preparing to host the Olympics and was trying to reclaim its national treasures ahead of them. I think it is really such an injustice and wrong to perpetuate such an injustice. And wrong to perpetuate such an injustice. But the British Museum was not budging. The fact is they're here, they've been here since 1816. They're here legally, and that's where I believe they will stay. And that dispute has only grown in the 20-plus years since this story aired. I think there's been a reckoning.

Museums have been called to account for how they acquired these items. The British Museum and the Greek government remain at a standstill, and museums all over the world are being forced to reconsider their stewardship of art taken from other countries. It seems like the Met had a don't ask, don't tell policy. They wanted to build up their collection, and nobody was really asking questions where it came from. For people, many people in the art world, there was a sense of protecting great objects

that stood a chance of being destroyed. We no longer feel about it that way. I'm Seth Doan, and this is 60 Minutes, A Second Look. Today, who owns history? We couldn't resist calling this story losing their marbles, even though the marbles were lost a long time ago. And the marbles we're talking about aren't really marbles at all, but sculptures

that once decorated the Parthenon, the ancient Greek temple in Athens. 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley was known for his love of ancient art, its beauty, and history, and he certainly appreciated a good story. And this one mixes it all with international dispute, competing claims of ownership, museums, culture, and controversy. Known to the British as the Elgin Marbles after the Scottish Earl of Elgin, who brought them to London and sold them to the British government nearly 200 years ago, they are one of the museum's greatest attractions, inspiring awe and sometimes other emotions in the five million people a year

who come here. The story was in the headlines when he examined it in 2002. As Greece prepares to host the Olympic Games in 2004, they've launched another appeal to the British that the Parthenon marbles be returned to their original home. And today, this controversy remains heated and is changing shape. And we thought a good reason to give this story a second look. Can we go see the goddess Iris? Let's do it. This is legal scholar Alexander Herman walking us through the ground floor of the British Museum. In the 60-minute story, standing in Athens, Ed Bradley says,

This is the head of the goddess Iris. It comes from the frieze that once decorated the Parthenon and is now on display here at the Acropolis Museum in Athens. And then it hops to Ed Bradley here in London. But if you want to see the rest of her, you have to come here to the British Museum in London. We don't get the full story when we just see it in one place or just see it in the other place.

In a sense, the story is incomplete because of that fragmentation. Herman spent a decade researching his book on the Parthenon sculptures. It seems so much as controversial, even what you call these sculptures. You hear Parthenon sculptures, you hear Parthenon marbles, you hear Elgin marbles. Yeah, so traditionally in Britain they've been called the Elgin marbles because they were taken

and acquired by Lord Elgin, who's the British ambassador, sent to Constantinople, which is present-day Istanbul. It was the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Now that name has fallen a little bit into desuetude, and they're referred to by the British Museum as the Parthenon sculptures. Some people, especially those campaigning for their return, call them the Parthenon marbles because they feel that you need to distinguish the ones at the British Museum from the ones in Athens.

How important are they to the British Museum? We saw that long line around the block on both sides of the museum today. Historically, they were very important. The British Museum had been around for about 50 years. Up until that point, the collection was largely an assemblage of papers and books and little fragments and vases. They hadn't yet acquired a sort of centerpiece to the collection. And that centerpiece was the Elgin Marbles when they came in 1816. Finally, people could see what classical Athens and ancient Greece looked like in the flesh, so to speak.

And it helped to cement the British Museum's reputation and authority within the cultural sector across Britain. But for the Greek people, these marbles are much more than a trophy to showcase. They've become an important part of Greek cultural heritage because of the link back to their glory age, classical Athens, when they were developing democracy

and mathematics and science and drama and literature and everything that we now have taken from ancient Greece was all being developed in Athens within a relatively short period of time, just at the time that they were building this amazing Parthenon. So I think that link back to their ancient past is very important to them and their sense of identity. I think there's a great insensitivity to what the marbles mean to the Greek people. It's their pride. You don't take away a country's pride. This was Jules Dassin speaking with Ed Bradley in 2002. He was an American film director who was blacklisted from Hollywood during the Red Scare.

He moved to Europe and eventually became an honorary Greek citizen. It was there that he directed and acted in his best-known film, the 1960 romantic comedy Never on Sunday. His leading lady was Greek actress

Melina Mercuri, who played a carefree prostitute. You like your life. I like my life. You like your work. I like my work. Mercuri and Dassin later married, and Mercuri took her place on an even bigger stage. In the 1980s, when she became Greek Minister of Culture,

she used all of her acting skills to dramatize a campaign for the return of the marbles to the Parthenon. While our podcast team was researching Mercuri, we discovered that she'd been the subject of her own 60 Minutes story in 1982. Here she spoke about the importance of preserving a nation's culture. It's very natural all over the world you know that the American cultural life comes and takes over because of your music, because of your films, because of your books and because of the blue jeans. Everywhere you take over. So the Greek, like in other countries, forget what means Greece. We must find again our roots. And finding those roots was a mission that connected Mercury to the Parthenon marbles.

She said, quote, they are our pride, they are our sacrifices, they are our noblest symbol of excellence. She took her fight all the way to the United Nations. Molina said she hoped to see the marbles back in Athens before she died, and that didn't happen. That didn't happen, but she believed that they would be returned and that then she would be reborn. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets during Mercury's funeral in Athens in 1994. Local newspapers called her the last Greek goddess, and Jules Dassen started a foundation in her honor to continue her fight for the marbles. I think it is really such an injustice and wrong to perpetuate such an injustice.

Both Greece and the British Museum say that the Parthenon marbles are theirs. Which side is stronger? Well, the British Museum argument traditionally has been that these pieces were lawfully acquired at the time. This again is Alexander Herman. That Lord Elgin had obtained lawful permission from the Ottoman authorities, that they were vested in the trustees of the British Museum

by a British Act of Parliament in 1816. So it means clearly they have the title, and that they're restricted from disposing of those items in order to repatriate them by another Act of Parliament from 1963. So they say legally these were acquired, and legally we can't do anything to return them to Greece, even if we wanted to. But while the British may point to the fact that they had permission to remove the statues at the time and that their law prevents them from returning them, the Greek government

questions the validity of a contract made with a fallen empire. When Lord Elgin came here, Greece didn't exist as a country. It was still part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The British Museum says that Elgin acquired the sculptures legally from the Turkish government. The Greeks say he stole them. There are some sticking points, some red flags that both sides have.

Like what? So the Greeks don't like the idea of accepting a loan. So if the British Museum said, legally we're not allowed to return these outright, we will send them to you on a long-term loan. And they've done that. They've done that with an indigenous group in Canada to return material. They've done that just recently with Ghana, with the Ashanti treasure that went back to

Ghana as a loan. So not as a repatriation, but a long-term loan. So the British Museum, I think, would maybe offer that. But the Greeks have always resisted this idea of the loan. For them, they feel that a loan would be like asking for something that already belongs to them. Why would you ask for a loan if you think you are the rightful owner? The British Museum also told Ed Bradley it had another big objection to returning the sculptures. They say it would encourage a stream of similar requests from other countries for the return of objects they consider unique to their national heritage.

Not just the British Museum, but other museum giants like the Louvre in Paris and the Met in New York would be stripped of many of their treasures. Alexander Herman walked us to one side of the gallery and stopped in front of a huge square slab of marble. What's this? So this is one of the metopes. There were 92 of them. In Greek, metopes is the name for the ornate panels that adorned the upper area of the Parthenon, just above the columns. And they were part of a story that was being told along the outside of the Parthenon. Whereas the other marbles were carved kind of maybe a couple inches out,

these really come out towards you. They must come out more than a foot from the marble. Yeah, exactly. They're sculpted in high relief, and so they would have been very visible. Each side of the Parthenon depicted a different Greek myth. Each schmatope is a scene from the story. Alexander Herman showed us one side. They show a battle between Lapiths and centaurs. So the centaurs of ancient Greek mythology, half man, half horse, and then the Lapiths were human. And Herman suggests that this metope fittingly describes this two-century-old debate.

You see the centaur careening over this poor Lapith, and there's a question of who's going to win the battle. And I actually think it does a good job of reflecting the conflict over the Parthenon marbles. You know, you have two sides locked in combat, frozen in stone. Each side thinks they might have the upper hand, but really they're just stuck there. Also, it makes you think that you should work on your abdominal muscles. Yeah, they're always in very great shape, the ancient sculptures. Though the two sides remain locked in combat, the Greeks may have started making some advances

in the battle of global public opinion. Coming up on 60 Minutes, a second look, we'll examine how public pressure is now forcing collectors, auction houses, and maybe even venerated institutions like the British Museum to reconsider where these pieces belong. I think what's interesting is that both the British Museum and the Greeks, they have that important attachment to your door. A well marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.

Instacart. Grocer groceries that over-deliver. This might not seem like the most brilliant comment of all, but just looking around here, you think, this is a lot to carry to the UK. It took over 10 years for the whole project to reach its completion. So they removed roughly 90 large pieces of sculpted marbles. I mean, these weigh a lot. This is legal scholar Alexander Herman again. He's telling me exactly how much work it took to remove the Parthenon marbles from Athens. You can see the mark where they would have sawed down. They got to the sort of midpoint and they couldn't go further with the saws. And then they started chiseling it. And if you go to the Acropolis Museum, you can see the blocks with the striation marks from the saws and the chisel marks from the chisels that the workmen were using, I mean, over multiple years.

So for the Greeks, that causes them great offense that the Elgin team left behind the main part of the blocks in order to just take what they wanted, which was the sculpted part at the front. It's like just eating the frosting off the cupcake. Exactly. The extraction left many of the marbles scarred and in pieces, and the journey to England was just as rough. They put them on a succession of ships.

One of the ships, Elgin's Brig, the mentor, sunk. And so many of these pieces were under the Aegean Sea for about two years before they were rescued. So, I mean, there's an incredible story of just how they were brought to London. So what does Lord Elgin have to say about all this? No, not that one, but Andrew Douglas Alexander Thomas Bruce, the present Earl of Elgin. To tell this part of his 60-minute story, Ed Bradley did not have to go to the bottom of the Aegean Sea, but he did go to Scotland to the family estate of Lord Elgin called Broomhall.

I've heard a story that King George VI once joked with your father about his collection here. The King and Queen came in to lunch, and before we'd even been presented, the King looked around, and, my goodness, he said, Elgin, I see you've still got all the loot. There, Bradley got a tour of the house from Lord Elgin's great-great-grandson. This is a drawing as Lord Elgin would have seen it.

This is exactly how it would have appeared. The 19th century's Lord Elgin had originally planned to decorate Broomhall Estate with the marbles as part of his private collection. But later he ran into money problems and, looking to be bailed out, petitioned the British House of Commons to buy them. And that's how they ended up in the British Museum. But not all of his posh British peers agreed that the marbles belonged in the United Kingdom at all.

Not long after Elgin took the pieces away from Athens, his fellow aristocrat Lord Byron, the great romantic poet, wrote scathing verse attacking Elgin for what he had done, saying he shouldn't have taken these pieces from Greece. Here's an actor reading one of Lord Byron's poems. It starts, Cold is the heart, fair Greece, that looks on thee. Nor feels as lovers all the dust they loved. Dull is the eye that will not weep to see,

thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed by British hands. So from that moment, about 1812, 1815 thereabouts, these pieces were invested with a kind of controversy. More than 200 years of controversy. Well over 200 years. And there was a debate in Parliament when it was decided to acquire these pieces for the British Museum in 1816.

And it's fascinating to read the parliamentary debates because on one hand you had MPs who were calling Elgin a crook, saying that what he had done was equivalent to spoliation, that we should never accept this monument to our shame into our great museum. And on the other side, there were people saying that he was a savior, that he had acquired these pieces to save them from the barbarism of the local population. Lord Elgin says that his ancestors' original plan had been to make drawings and plaster casts of the sculptures.

But he decided to take what he could when he saw how the Turks, who used the Parthenon as a fortress, were defacing them. He had every idea that that was what he was doing. He was rescuing. And that's what he spoke about, my great act of rescue. So I guess one way to look at it is that instead of attacking him, people should thank him for what he did. That's what I always say. A little word of thanks never goes amiss. In the 2002 60 Minutes story, Lord Elgin's great-great-grandson said that the Parthenon sculptures or marbles in London were dug up, were rescued, not removed from the Parthenon. Yeah, I think, I mean, there is some validity to that view that Elgin's men were rescuing these pieces. There is evidence of that if you look at some

of the sculptures that remained in Athens. They were quite badly damaged, partly during the War of Independence. I mean, this was a brutal war with the Ottomans that lasted a decade. And the Acropolis itself went back and forth between the two sides. It was besieged on multiple occasions. It was bombarded. So the remnants were seriously damaged as a result of that. So you could argue that this was a rescue operation, that he saved these pieces. This is the version of the story that the British Museum tells its visitors to this day. The story also figures into a broader debate. It's not just about who has the right to display antiquities, but also who is the most responsible caretaker of them.

The Greeks have already taken down most of the remaining sculptures from the Parthenon, some of which were so badly damaged by pollution that they have to be displayed in nitrogen-filled cases. Ed Bradley makes the point that the museum, the Acropolis Museum, was in planning stages, did not exist at the time, and the Parthenon marbles in Athens were in storage, almost leading the viewer to make the connection that perhaps they're better off here at the museum, or that's how I read it. That's changed.

Yeah, I think that's changed significantly. I mean, now you have a world-class museum in Athens that could display all the pieces in the perfect places where those pieces would have fit on the structure itself. When I was in Athens on vacation, I went to the Acropolis Museum. It is a stunning museum. You see the Parthenon through the glass behind you. You have the marbles all up in their positions and where the pieces are in England, they make a point of pointing out in their view, the Greek view, they should be here and they're not. Yeah. And even beyond that sort of political argument, just the way they're displayed at the Acropolis Museum, it's exactly as they would have appeared on the building when it was constructed in the 5th century BC.

So there's something very perfect about how it's situated and how those pieces are reflected. So we're about to see the Benin bronzes. Before we ended our tour, Herman wanted us to see a few of the other prized pieces of the British Museum's collection. So these were looted by British troops in 1897 from Benin City in West Africa. They're beautiful. When did the claims to these first start? There have been movements to try to restitute the Benin bronzes going back to the 1990s, but the first official claim came from Nigeria within the last four or

five years. So this is the Rosetta Stone right here. This is it. This is the way in which the West first translated hieroglyphs. It helped kind of decode language. Exactly. It was discovered by Napoleon's Egyptologists around 1800, so around the time that Elgin's men were sent to Athens. Egypt's never filed a formal claim for it, but they have made pleas for getting this back to Egypt. If you look around the huge exhibition space that we're in now, you see a lot of things that look like they're from Egypt, certainly other parts of the world. You wonder what would be left in these museums. Yeah, I sometimes think that that argument might be overdone a little bit.

The pieces that are controversial, even in the British Museum's collection, are relatively few. You could say the Rosetta Stone is one, the collection of the Parthenon marbles, the Benin bronzes, maybe a couple of other collections. But the vast majority of things on display and in the collections, I would say are uncontroversial. When we were standing in line waiting for you and waiting for the museum to open, there was a man in line in front of us who was saying, these are ours, they have to stay. He said, when the US government gives back the land to the Native Americans,

then we'll give these back. So there's a double standard here. And his conviction was deep seated. Yeah, I think there is something about the mentality in certain parts of the British society where they want to keep things. I institutions, that that's a way of showing that they're strong and that they're able to kind of maintain that link to the past. I think what's interesting is that both the British Museum and the Greeks, they have that important attachment to past glory. For the Greeks, it's the 5th century BC when the Athenian Empire ruled the waves and they were building the Parthenon and developing philosophy and mathematics and science and the rest of it. For Britain, it's probably the 19th century, the Victorian era when they ruled the waves. And that was the time when the Elgin

marbles came into the collection and became the centerpiece of this great institution. So in both cases, we're talking about parties that have a deep connection to their past, and that is influencing how they act in the present. This is a topic discussion that's heated up quite a bit in recent years. It has. I think some of it has to do with a new generation coming into the museums, including at the higher director roles, and people who have maybe more of an open outlook on the world, looking to build relationships with communities, countries of origin, rather than just holding things. Just this past summer, a spokesperson from the British Museum told a Greek media outlet that the museum wanted to start a, quote, new relationship with Greece and come up with

realistic solutions to the ownership dispute. The statement came months after the British prime minister cancelled a meeting with his Greek counterpart over ownership of the sculptures. When 60 Minutes A Second Look continues, we'll examine another, more recent battle over cultural heritage, one that took Anderson Cooper and his team into the jungles and temples of Southeast Asia. The theft of Cambodia's cultural heritage, one that took Anderson Cooper and his team into the jungles and temples of Southeast Asia. The theft of Cambodia's cultural treasures, thousands of sacred stone, bronze, and gold artifacts from religious sites across the country, might just be the greatest art heist in history.

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History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. More than 20 years after Ed Bradley reported on Greece's attempt to retrieve the Parthenon marbles, 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper traveled to another major museum to highlight a more recent controversy in the art world.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has one of the most important collections of Cambodian antiquities in the world. But many of the finest pieces on display here in the Southeast Asian art wing are stolen. While the Parthenon marbles were removed from Greece before Greece even existed, in Cambodia, it's more of a straightforward case of theft. It began nearly a century ago when Cambodia was colonized by France. But in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, amidst genocide, civil war, and political turmoil, the looting became a global business. I'm Nadim Roberts, and I'm an associate producer at 60 Minutes.

I'm Michael Gaffshon. I'm one of the producers on the segment we did on the Lutein of Cambodia with Anderson Cooper. A longtime producer at 60 Minutes. How long? 32 years. Wow. I understand you both watched Ed Bradley's story when you started reporting your story, the one on the Parthenon marbles.

The Ed Bradley story really did encapsulate the complexities of the issues that are facing museums and indeed countries who are seeking restitution. And it was instructive, really. Seth, I was just going to say, you know, I think what does sort of connect these two stories, the Elgin marbles and Cambodian antiquities is that people feel a great sense of pride in their country's cultural history. And these pieces coming home, it's healing for people. They can sort of feel proud again.

And I think that's sort of what can maybe connect these two stories in a sense. Do you think people visiting the Met know that these were looted? I think most people walk through the Met, they have no idea those are blood antiquities. They have no idea what the history is behind those pieces. They don't know the temples they came from. That's Brad Gordon speaking with Anderson Cooper. He's an American lawyer who lives in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. He teamed up with a small, tenacious group of Cambodian investigators

trying to figure out who looted the temples and how the art ended up in homes, auction houses, and museums overseas. Gordon took Cooper and the team deep into Cambodia to the remote temples. This is probably one of the most looted sites. Yeah, from my understanding, this was number one. The scars of plunder run deep. Looters have hacked off the heads of many statues. They've stolen bodies as well.

Empty pedestals mark where gods and deities once stood. Just like the Parthenon marbles at the British Museum, many of the Cambodian antiquities were removed from their original sites in pieces. You take us to these beautiful temples of Cambodia, and you have this line early on in the story, the scars of plunder run deep. This is a podcast. We can't see what you all saw. Can you paint the picture?

So Cambodia is a country with thousands of temples. Some are very well known, like Angkor Wat, and these are just beautiful, beautiful temples. One in particular that we went to visit, it's called Phnom Sandak, and this is sort of in a remote area of Cambodia, very difficult to get to. This is not a place that tourists are visiting. We had to take a helicopter, which was about an hour and a half, two-hour flight, and then up a very precipitous mountain in four-wheel drive vehicles, and then there was a hike to the temple itself.

There were just literally these pedestals, as Brad Gordon described them. It's like a pedestal graveyard. The remnants of what was a great place of worship. We've all seen in museums these statues with no feet on them. And I don't think people realize the feet were hacked off because in order to steal them, that's the easiest way to get them off the pedestal. We know when the looters came to sites like this, the first thing they took was the heads. That was the easiest to grab. Gordon and his team were able to track down the leader of a gang of Cambodian looters. He explained how gangs of looters would spend weeks at remote temples

using shovels, chisels, metal detectors, even dynamite, to find and dig out treasures. Dozens of men would hoist heavy stone statues onto ox carts. But some of those looters had second thoughts. Here's associate producer Nadeem Roberts. They felt they had committed a spiritual crime by taking these, by, you know, hacking off and looting these statues, taking them out of the country they're from, and that if they did not try and fix this, telling Brad Gordon and his team they had taken, from where, when, that they were going to pay for it in their next lives. The teams of looters who stole from the temples helped lead Brad Gordon's investigators to some of the Western art dealers who purchased them, including British collector Douglas Latchford. Latchford portrayed himself as a scholar and protector of Cambodia's culture, a reputation he burnished by donating sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

and other prestigious institutions. He also published three books filled with the finest examples of Cambodian antiquities, many of them, it turns out, Latchford had stolen. In the case of the Cambodian antiquities, the argument for many years has been that the museums were the custodians of these artifacts, that these artifacts would have been lost, would have been plundered. And the museums have said that their role is not only to protect them, but in fact to showcase them. It's the same attitude that Lord Elgin's great-great-grandson displayed to Ed Bradley in his 2002 story,

that Elgin's family actually rescued the Parthenon marbles. But more than two decades later, Anderson Cooper found that museums were starting to shift their thinking. It seems like the Met had a don't ask, don't tell policy. They wanted to build up their collection, and nobody was really asking questions where it came from. For people, many people in the art world, there was a sense of protecting great objects that stood a chance of being destroyed. We no longer feel about it that way.

This is Andrea Bayer, Deputy Director for Collections and Administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bayer told Anderson Cooper that the Met fully cooperated with American law enforcement agents who ended up indicting British art dealer Douglas Latchford for smuggling, conspiracy, wire fraud, and other charges. We are on the verge of returning a number of them. All of them? That I can't say. This past summer, the Met returned 14 sculptures to Cambodia, saying the museum was, quote, committed to the responsible collecting of art

and the shared stewardship of the world's cultural heritage. The Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts said it was a first step, but claimed the Met still has 49 antiquities in their collection that are stolen and said it, quote, looked forward to the return of many more of our treasures. There's been a real shift since Ed Bradley did his story in 2002. Today, there is this examination of the moral argument, what the right thing to do is. How much did this come up in your story? I think it came up quite a bit. I mean, even the Met's former director, Thomas Hoving, he was sort of proud of, he was proud

that the way he collected these pieces, I mean, he even referred to it as piracy. And that's how a lot of museums operated for a long time. And it's only now that people have begun to rethink how these items ended up in museums. Is this just a case of museums at this point catching up with society? Increasingly, people are asking very difficult questions. Here's producer Michael Gavchon again. Museums were above reproach. These were temples of learning, of beauty. And now a lot of people sort of look at museums as repositories of stolen goods. So if they don't act, if they don't sort of make amends for the past, then they're going to be left with this sort of terrible image problem

and potentially become obsolete. For the Cambodian Minister of Culture, the temple's statues carry a powerful meaning. So the statues have a soul. The statues are, are they living? Of course, yes. And we believe that we can talk with them. They will hear, they will see. What do you want? What do you see? What do you do in your life, in your house, outside, in the society also? They're watching. They're watching, everywhere.

What is it like when these statues get returned to Cambodia? They're received with great reverence. They're met at the National Museum in Phnom Penh with a ceremony. Monks bless the artifacts when they return. And you really get a sense of just how spiritual these objects are, that they are really part of the Cambodian culture, the Cambodian spirit, the Cambodian soul. And there's no question that these are much more than just pieces of art. They're seen by people in museums around the world as beautiful objects, but it's more than that for the Cambodians. How likely do you think it is these Parthenon marbles will be here in London in five years, in ten years?

I think that's hard to say. There'll need to be some goodwill on both sides and the ability to take a bit of a risk. As part of his answer, and fitting for an academic, Alexander Herman referred to the words of a lauded poet and playwright. You know, Seamus Heaney, the great Irish Nobel laureate poet, said sometimes you have to walk on air against your better judgment. And in a sense, I think Look was produced by Julie Holstein. Additional producing from Hazel May Bryan. Maura Walls is the story editor and Jamie Benson is our senior producer and engineer. Recording assistance from Tony Onuchuku.

Bill Owens is the executive producer of 60 Minutes. Tanya Simon is the executive editor and Matthew Polivoy is the executive producer of 60 Minutes, Tanya Simon is the executive editor, and Matthew Polivoy is the senior producer. Invaluable support from Megan Marcus of Paramount Audio. Gene Langley produced the original 2002 broadcast story for 60 Minutes titled Losing Their Marbles. Michael Gavshan and Nadim Roberts produced the 2023 broadcast story, The Looting of Cambodia.

And thanks to the crews and editors of the original pieces. Special thanks to the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London and voice actor Gavin Budd. For more on this topic, Alexander Herman's book is The Parthenon Marbles Dispute, Heritage, Law, Politics. And as always, a very big thank you to the incredible team at CBS News Archives, who helped make this podcast possible. I'm Seth Doan.

Just a quick note that we'll be off next week, so no new episode of 60 Minutes, A Second Look. But we'll be back the following Tuesday. In the meantime, catch up on any episodes you might have missed and check out our other CBS News podcasts at cbsnews.com backslash podcasts. See you soon.