Restitution after war is an old issue, mentioned at least as far back as the reign of Persian King Cyrus the Great in the mid 6th century BC. The Cyrus Cylinder, a terracotta drum found in a temple deposit at Babylon, is incised with an account in the first person of Cyrus’ reforms, including the repatriating of displaced peoples. After expanding his empire into the area of modern-day Iraq, Cyrus allowed the Jewish people found captive in Babylon to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their destroyed temple. In biblical accounts he is said to have sent along with them the gold and silver ritual vessels that Nebuchadnezzar II had plundered from the original Temple of Solomon in 586 BC (2 Kings 25:13, Ezra 1:9, 5:14). The same King Cyrus is depicted by the Greek historian Xenophon (writing in the 360s BC) as urging his troops into battle against Assyrians by reminding his men of the victor’s right to the spoils of war, and that only out of ‘humanity’ (philanthropeia) would the victors allow the defeated to keep anything at all (Cyropaedia 7.5.73).

The assumption that ‘the winner takes all’ in war is thus firmly rooted in Western history, along with the idea that some conquerors in war might exercise restraint out of a sense of humanity. In this chapter I briefly review salient ancient antecedents that influenced early modern thinking on the topic of cultural property, a subject I have presented in detail elsewhere (Miles 2008). I then discuss the specific decision which became a significant precedent for subsequent legal decisions and for current views on the issue of cultural property and its fate in wartime: the decision made after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 by Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington (as Field Marshal of the Army of Occupation), taken in consultation with Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (British foreign secretary) and Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool (British prime minister) to repatriate as far as possible the art plundered by Napoleon and taken to Paris.