Who Owns History?

60 Minutes: A Second Look

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.

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