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This is ticket only.
Entrance tricks tickets.
We're about to enter the great Parthenon Galleries.
Wow.
There's a plus to coming here early.
I feel like almost you have to whisper.
Yeah, it almost feels like a kind of a spirit, spiritual space, doesn't it?
This past summer, we were fortunate enough to get a tour of the British Museum first thing in the morning.
It was a chance to beat the crowds to see some of the most significant artifacts of the ancient world.
It's quite a feat of sculpting and it's unequaled in any of the ancient sculpture that we still have with us today.
And those ancient sculptures happen to be at the center of a very modern debate.
Alexander Herman took us around.
He's the author of a book about the Parthenon marbles, perhaps better known as the Elgin Marbles.
So these are the roughly 90 large pieces of sculpted marble that were taken from the Acropolis in Athens by men working for the British ambassador, Lord Elgin in the first decade of the 19th century.
But what once was a common practice of finders keepers has become one of the longest custody disputes in cultural history.
The trouble is, those marbles are now in the British Museum in London, and the Greeks want them back.
That was 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley.
In 2002, Greece was preparing to host the Olympics and was trying to reclaim its national treasures ahead of them.