perspectives that were less Eurocentric than previously, including a project about the Muslim Hajj. He sparked debate with his claim that the ancient Persian empire was greater than Ancient Greece. In 2010, MacGregor presented a series on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service entitled A History of the World in 100 Objects, based on one hundred artefacts held in the British Museum's collection. From September 2010 to January 2011 the British Museum lent the ancient Persian Cyrus Cylinder to an exhibition in Tehran, Iran. This was seen by at least a million visitors on the Museum's estimation, more than any loan exhibition to the United Kingdom had attracted since the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition in 1972. Holding tenure when the Acropolis Museum in Athens was completed, MacGregor followed previous Directors in arguing against returning the sculptures from the Parthenon (the "Elgin Marbles") to Greece. A poll in 2014 suggested that more British people (37%) supported the marbles' restoration to Greece than opposed it (23%). MacGregor argued that it is the British Museum's duty to "preserve the universality of the marbles, and to protect them from being appropriated as a nationalistic political symbol", and that "there is no legal system in Europe that would challenge the [British Museum's] legal title" to the works. The legal basis of various Ottoman documents, now lost, to which the British Museum has traditionally appealed in order to claim ownership of the sculptures is disputed. Under the directorship of MacGregor, the Museum rejected UNESCO mediation. In January 2008, MacGregor was appointed chairman of the World Collections programme, for training international curators at British museums. The exhibition The First Emperor, focussing on Qin Shi Huang and including a small number of his Terracotta Warriors, was mounted in 2008 in the British Museum Reading Room. That year MacGregor was invited to succeed Philippe de Montebello as the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He declined the offer as the Metropolitan charges its visitors for entry and is thus "not a public institution". As of 2015, MacGregor was paid a salary of between £190,000 and £194,999 by the British Museum, making him one of the 328 most highly paid people in the British public sector at that time. MacGregor retired from the post in December 2015 and was succeeded in spring 2016 by Hartwig Fischer, till then the director of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden