Musee du Louvre

The building began as a fortress on the western edge of Paris under Philip Augustus around 1200, whose foundations are still visible in the basement. It was rebuilt as a royal residence in the Renaissance and extended repeatedly, and it stopped being the seat of the court when Louis XIV moved to Versailles in 1682, which left an enormous palace in the middle of a capital with no obvious use. Artists were lodged in it, academies met in it, and the idea of showing the royal collection there was discussed for decades before anything happened. The museum opened to the public in August 1793.

Its departments now include Near Eastern Antiquities, Egyptian Antiquities, Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Islamic Art, paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, and prints and drawings, and the first four of those are why the atlas holds it at all.

The objects that matter here are ones that carry religion directly. The stele of the laws of Hammurabi, topped by the king before the sun god. The Mesha Stele, the ninth century BCE inscription of the king of Moab that names the god Chemosh and mentions Israel. The winged human-headed bulls from the palace at Khorsabad. The zodiac ceiling from the temple at Dendera. The seated scribe. Between them they are a large part of what survives of the religious record of the ancient Near East.

The atlas names the Louvre as the custodian of objects and not as a religious body, and the word custodian is doing careful work. How several of the objects reached Paris is part of the record, and it is not agreed.

The routes are various. Some arrived through the seizures of the revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns, a large part of which were returned after 1815 while some were not. Some arrived through nineteenth century excavation conducted under permits issued by the Ottoman Empire or by Egypt, in a legal framework that allowed the excavator to keep a share and that no source country would agree to today. The Dendera zodiac was cut out of the temple ceiling in the early 1820s by a private expedition and sold on, and Egypt has publicly asked for it back. Others were bought on the market, given, or came through French archaeological missions abroad.

The museum, the source countries and the scholarship do not agree about what should follow from any of that, and the disagreement covers law, ethics and practical custody in different proportions for different objects. There is also a separate and continuing programme of research into works that changed hands under the Nazi occupation, some of which the museum holds pending identification of their owners.

The atlas does not resolve any of this. It records that the objects are here, and that where they should be is contested.