Turkey has launched an aggressive campaign to repatriate Ottoman-era artifacts it claims were looted by imperial powers. It has also refused Israel's request to repatriate the Siloam inscription (and other artifacts unearthed in Ottoman Palestine and transferred to Turkey). Scholars have commented that the inscription has little, if any, significance to Turkey, and as evidence point to the fact that it was not on display in a public gallery in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Hershel Shanks, founder of the Biblical Archaeology Review, has written that Turkey should be amenable to a repatriation of the Siloam inscription, given its own repatriation efforts, and other scholars have questioned whether Turkey can demand that its objects be returned, when its own museums refuse to return artifacts taken from previous colonies.