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In 1802, a marble procession of horses, humans, and gods was chiseled and sawed off the pediments where they had long watched over Athens, and marched overland to the port of Piraeus to begin a forced odyssey from which they have not yet returned. In Alexandria, at about the same time, a slab of igneous rock etched with Greek and hieroglyphics was packed onto a 40-gun ship and made to brave the waves of the Mediterranean. Later, a colossal pair of winged lions floated on rafts down the Tigris to Baghdad and eventually sailed out of the Persian Gulf, around Africa’s cape, and into the Atlantic. In 1868, a giant, heavy-browed head undertook an even longer journey, voyaging all the way from Polynesia to London, to converge with these other ancient travelers inside a single building called the British Museum.

When the British Museum opened its doors to the public in 1759, it was a new thing in the world. Scholars of museology have since given it a name: an “encyclopedic museum,” an institution that tries to tell the whole story of human culture across a single collection of objects. The Brits’ idea caught on. After the Bastille fell, the Jacobins converted the Louvre royal palace into a museum with similarly comprehensive aims. During the 19th and 20th centuries, American industrialists filled the Met and the Getty with encyclopedic collections.

The philosopher Ivan Gaskell has described an object’s entry into these collections as a “secular consecration,” which sets it apart from all other things in the world. But however consecrated these objects, a great many were acquired in unseemly ways—in shakedowns, for instance, or through shady deals with grave robbers. Some are imperial spoils, spiritual successors to the obelisks that were hauled out of Cairo and Karnak and made to stand in the piazzas of Rome. In recent decades, museum directors have been asked insistent questions about the legitimacy of these transactions, and whether they should be reversed.

It is no easy task to reverse the acquisition of an ancient artifact. The original parties are long dead. Claims of ancestry are rarely straightforward. Curators have concerns about releasing a priceless object into a possibly shoddier standard of conservation, or into the private collection of a greedy royal family. They worry that it may disappear entirely during an invasion or a civil war. Despite these complexities, there is no doubt that at least some, and perhaps many, of the items in encyclopedic museums should be returned to their originating communities or their otherwise rightful successors. But what happens after the forced migration of stone has been undone? Could there be a new encyclopedic museum, and if so, what should it be like?

I asked Erich Hatala Matthes, a philosophy professor at Wellesley College who has written extensively about cultural heritage, to imagine that humanity’s most precious cultural artifacts have all been returned to the nation-states where they were made. In this scenario, there would still be national museums, perhaps modeled after the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City or the new Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo, where curators would display artifacts against the backdrop of their home landscapes. But the encyclopedic museum as we know it would be gone. What, if anything, would be lost?

Matthes groaned. A world where artifacts have been sequestered into single-culture museums struck him as impoverished. For one, cultures aren’t easily sliced up into discrete, bounded wholes, he said. They’re connected, and museums are well positioned to demonstrate those connections. In the British Museum, you can circle a porcelain vase from the Ming dynasty, admiring its white-and-blue gleam from every angle, and then, a few rooms over, you can see how it inspired a delftware plate from 17th-century Amsterdam.

These connections can add up to something larger. The philosopher David Carrier has argued that museums offer visitors a kind of mystical experience. Upon encountering the physical manifestations of different cultures, a person’s self-conception can expand into the deep past, forming new memories that are shared, in some sense, with people who lived long ago. In an encyclopedic museum, these expansions of self and memory can extend outward to the entire interlinked human story. The classicist Mary Beard, a British Museum trustee, told me that an encyclopedic museum is a way for the world to represent itself to itself.

In a world where repatriations were the norm, how could a museum still offer this experience? Any reconstituted encyclopedic museum would have to build its collection by consent. I imagine an international trust, its collections composed solely of artifacts that have been freely lent by the world’s nations. Just as UNESCO’s World Heritage Site designations are highly coveted, and often lobbied for, national governments may eventually come to desire their artifacts’ inclusion in an international museum of this sort, especially if it’s the only one telling humanity’s story on such a grand scale.

This arrangement could help the trust avoid some of the presentation errors that Western museums have made in the past. Members of the Zuni Native American tribe used to carve elongated figures from lightning-struck pines and place them some distance from their pueblos, where, as a matter of custom, they would slowly disintegrate in the sun, wind, and rain. Matthes told me that the tribe’s elders were dismayed to find them intact and on permanent display in many Western museums, including the Smithsonian Institution. In an international encyclopedic museum, nations that contribute artifacts could set the terms for their display. Even then, Beard said, we should be careful not to impose the Western model of the museum on the world, which could itself be a kind of imperialism.

I asked Nana Oforiatta Ayim, an art historian from Ghana and an advocate for repatriation, whether she could imagine an encyclopedic museum reconstituted by consent. “One hundred percent,” Ayim said, but only if the whole idea of an encyclopedic museum had been taken apart and put back together according to new principles. “Like a lot of these museums, the British Museum was set up as an ethnographic museum to study the other,” she said. “The West was the center and subject, and anyone else was an object. Once we start embracing different approaches to objects and different approaches to heritage, that’s when we will truly begin to have an encyclopedic museum.”

But where should such a museum be located? A museum that aims to tell the story of all humanity makes an argument for itself by opening its galleries to as much of humanity as possible. Back in 2002, the directors of the Louvre, the Met, and 16 other institutions made precisely this argument in a joint declaration that justified their continued possession of objects acquired “in earlier times,” when “different sensitivities and values” reigned. “The universal admiration for ancient civilizations would not be so deeply established today,” they argued, had the artifacts in their collections not been made “widely available to an international public.” As Hartwig Fischer, until recently the director of the British Museum, used to say, his institution was “a museum of the world, for the world.”

[Read: The West is returning priceless African art to a single Nigerian citizen]

Encyclopedic museums are more accessible than the royal collections that preceded them, but they’re certainly not accessible to the entire world. As many critics have pointed out, they’re virtually all located in Western cities, in countries that are home to less than one-tenth of the global population. But existing encyclopedic museums display less than 5 percent of their collections; they have more than enough artifacts to tell an encyclopedic story about humanity several times over. Those of the future could be spread across multiple locations, with at least one on every continent. Shanghai, Mumbai, and Jakarta would be excellent candidates for host cities. As would Lagos, Kinshasa, and São Paulo—transit nodes in the global South where at least 100 million people live within a day’s train ride.

Other, less tangible goods could be redistributed under this scheme. When Chile agreed to host some of the planet’s largest, most sophisticated observatories on the high plains of the Atacama Desert, its government negotiated 10 percent of each instrument’s “telescope time” for local astronomers. As a consequence, the country’s stargazers have published widely in recent decades. Wherever a new encyclopedic museum plants its outposts, local curators will derive analogous benefits. No longer would they have to travel across the world to work at the museums with the furthest-reaching collections.

In the scenario I’m describing, the previous generation of encyclopedic museums—in London, Paris, and New York City, for example—could adapt to play a role. Their curators have accumulated a body of expertise that would be useful to an international institution like the one I’m imagining. Their buildings could even serve as its European and North American outposts. This evolutionary shift could be as ennobling as the Louvre’s transition from a palace to a place of public learning. “We are in a real mess if encyclopedic museums can’t be part of the solution,” Beard told me.

This vision is, at best, a long way off; negotiations for the repatriation of a single artifact can sometimes take decades. In the meantime, these institutions will make thousands of decisions. The British Museum has a major one coming up. On August 26, Fischer, its former director, resigned his position, citing his failure to pay sufficient attention to a light-fingered curator who had reportedly stolen thousands of the museum’s objects, selling some of them on eBay. Critics in China, Nigeria, and Greece pounced, noting that the museum had often cited its superior security as a reason for retaining their precious artifacts. Its trustees will soon appoint a new director to guide the museum out of this scandal. Their pick will give us some indication as to whether they’re satisfied with the encyclopedic museum as it exists today, or whether they’re beginning to edge toward one that really is of and for the world.

The 24-year-old was shot dead during a police operation in south London on 5 September 2022.