100 years after the battlefield looting, the Shellal mosaic remains controversial | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on Sun, 25/03/2018 - 8:00am

In defending the theft of the Shellal mosaic from Palestine, Australian officials played the Elgin Marbles card

As the first world war’s endgame was unfolding across the European western front and Middle East a century ago, Australia and Britain were tangled in their own acrimonious fight over which had the right to the most prized battlefield loot.

British and Australian officers freighted their correspondence with moral accusation, claim and counter-claim, over one of the war’s great battlefield treasures – the “Shellal mosaic”, which Australian soldiers took from Palestine as a supposed trophy of war at the second battle of Gaza in 1917.

Some former senior War Memorial officials have privately expressed discomfort at the memorial’s display of the mosaic

... it is difficult to see how a relic of this sort ... can be denied to the Museums of Australia when the Elgin Marbles, taken from a centre of world-wide pilgrimage such as Athens, are amongst the most prized possessions of Great Britain.

His Majesty’s Government have taken exception to the acts of looting committed by the enemy ... but if valuable relics of artistic and archaeological interest are to be conveyed away from the theatres of war as trophies by British troops, it is open to question whether His Majesty’s Government will not be laying itself open to similar charges.