No Head for Business

Eighteen human skulls from ancient Egypt have been withdrawn from legal sale, apparently because things that once belonged to colonialists and fascists should never be sold and because human remains, like six-week embryo Americans, have the dignity and rights of human beings. The inanimate objects in question date from the second millennium BCE, and were originally housed in citizens of an aggressively militarist and expansionist nation whose culture and religion have been defunct slightly longer than those of the British Empire. Having presumably been judged by Osiris and passed on to their reward some little time ago, the rightful owners of the skulls are unlikely to be much concerned about how some far-removed heathens treat the bits they left behind. It is true that the skulls were acquired by a Victorian colonialist who subscribed to the then-fashionable theory of phrenology, and subsequently by his fascist grandson; and the claim that selling the property of dead persons endorses the values held by those persons is very nearly as sensible as the idea that the psychological features of a human being can be read in the lumps on their cranium.