Can Egypt claim back stuff from the British Museum of Ancient Egypt?
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They can try! But it’s up to the British to give back the stolen artifacts. Egypt may not have very much leverage over the British.
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Not under any internationally recognized legal standard, no.
Even in terms of attempts at public pressure, their argument would effectively boil down to “you stole it before we got a chance to steal it!”. In general, when you’re talking about antiquity, the ‘ownership’ belongs to those who put in the effort to find, underearth and catalog the material.
They can claim stuff, getting it back may be tricky.
The British Museum is governed by a specific UK law, and in 2005 they were sued by the UK Government to block them from returning looted items in their collection on the basis that they had no legal authority to do so.
There are plans to change that, letting Museums including The British Museum return items on “moral grounds”, [but it looks like those changes have been stalled by the Government](https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/2022/10/government-delays-bill-allowing-nationals-to-return-items-on-moral-grounds/).
Returning items to other countries is a controversial topic in the UK, and generally the current Government’s supporters are on the nationalistic/imperialistic side.
They pretty much have, along with a lot of other countries.
The British Museum is outside their jurisdiction and basically spent decades saying “oh, we would totes give this back but they just seem so much safer and more accessible to the world where they are”, then as these other countries built better museums that excuse got weaker and weaker, so they go the British Government to pass a law saying they couldn’t return anything, so now they’re all “oh, we’d love to talk about this but the law says we can’t, so sad”
They already have.
Claiming it doesn’t mean they actually have to give it back. While other countries would like their artefacts back, they’re not so bothered that they’re going to do anything about it. So all the UK government has to do is say “no” and it usually doesn’t go much further
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