Iran has decided to sever ties with the British Museum, accusing its director of reneging on a promise to lend it the artifact known as the Cyrus Cylinder for an exhibition last month. Vice President Hamid Baqaei, who has called the museum's decision politically motivated, has also vowed to send a protest letter to the U.N. and to museums around the world.
British Museum / AP
Some historians say the Cyrus Cylinder is the world's first human rights charter. The British Museum, which has possessed it since 1879, said last year it would lend the artifact to Iran, but then reversed itself, infuriating Tehran.
The clay cylinder, often described by historians as the world's first human rights charter, has been stored at the British Museum since it was discovered in 1879. Written in Babylonian cuneiform, it describes how the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 B.C. and decreed that all people held captive there could return to their homelands, including Jews who had been exiled from Israel.
The British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor, agreed to a three-month loan on a visit to Iran in September 2009. But the museum later said it needed to hold on to the cylinder for unspecified "practicalities," the BBC reported.
Last month, the museum offered the more specific explanation that it needed to keep the artifact for another six months to compare it with two clay tablets from the same period, which it had found in storage. The museum's change of heart occurred in the context of ongoing anti-government demonstrations in Iran, leading to an often brutal police response and further political repression.
An enraged Baqaei denounced the British Museum's decision as "not acceptable," according to The Associated Press. "The Cyrus Cylinder has been turned from a cultural issue into a political one by the British," he added.
Last month, The Observer in London reported, a Foreign Office spokeswoman said, "We share the British Museum's concern that this would not be a good time for the cylinder to come to Iran."
On Monday, however, the museum said it had informed Iran by telephone on Feb. 2 that it would go ahead with the loan in July and include the newly found fragments, news agencies reported.
Iran's decision to break ties with the museum "comes as a great surprise," the museum said. "It is to be hoped that this matter can be resolved as soon as possible."
The spat with Iran is not the first time the British Museum has found itself at the center of a controversy. Greece has long protested the museum's possession of sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, known as the Elgin Marbles, and has called for their return, or at least their loan.
Last year the newly built Acropolis Museum angrily rejected the British Museum's terms for lending the priceless friezes to Athens: that Greece acknowledge that the fifth century B.C. antiquities are the rightful property of the London institution. The sculptures were taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin during the 19th century, when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire.
Acknowledging that they belonged in London "is tantamount to legitimizing the snatching of the marbles and the carving up of the monument 207 years ago," Greek Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said last June, Bloomberg News reported.
