#and maybe #just maybe we wont steal all the shit in there this time
I mean this with all the love in the world, but if you're going to put that in the tags on an Egyptologist's post there's going to be a strongly worded 'no, that's misinformation and I won't stand for it' response incoming.
I hate this narrative. It's reductive, it doesn't help anyone (except making the commenter feel morally superior for dunking on the archaeologists), and it's kinda just...wrong.
Firstly, the narrative that 'everything was stolen' is just flat out wrong. Most people love to use the BM as an example of 'place that steals shit' and I'm gonna let you in on a secret: the BM never had a dig team (it has archaeologists now, but it didn't back when most people conceive of this happening). The BM is where people bequeathed stuff on their death, not the ones going out there to get it. Then you have the ways in which things were acquired by those who did go out there. Most of these are ‘bought it from a local seller who’d been in the tombs themselves and had a stall to make money from tourists’, archaeologists who worked with the Egyptian government and were subject to ‘partition agreements’ whereby they were allowed to keep half of what they found (the Egyptian government got first pick), authorised removal of items by the Pasha Muhammad Ali as gifts for helping Egypt (see: Giovanni Belzoni), traded items that ended up in people’s possession, and colonial spoils (most of which were taken from the French who were doing a colonialism before that. Y’know…Napoleon. That guy.).
Secondly, the narrative that archaeologists are stealing is also wrong. It’s anti-intellectual and is one of the things those who think that learning about the past is a waste of money use to cut our funding and try to shut us down. Archaeologists are bound by the 1970 UNESCO Convention which prohibits the illegal removal, export, or transference of cultural property from a country without that country’s explicit permission. Archaeologists do not ‘steal shit’ because a) that’s immoral and b) unless those archaeologists are from the country those objects originate in, they have no jurisdiction. Egypt specifically has had control over their antiquities (aside from those being looted on the black market) since at least the late 1800s. Howard Carter got short shifted in the 1920s because he upset the Egyptian government and they chose not to let him work on Tutankhamun’s tomb anymore. You cannot dig in Egypt without the Egyptian government’s permission and all the artefacts there belong to them once they’re out of the ground. I’m sure we don’t want to go around suggesting that they’re just letting people steal from them, do we?
Finally, and most importantly: 99% of all tombs in Egypt were robbed in antiquity by the Ancient Egyptians themselves. That’s why finding an intact tomb is so rare and important. My doctoral thesis was on the Egyptian investigations (c.1090 BCE) into these tomb robberies in the Valley of the Kings/Queens. Do you know what they show? That tomb robbing, even outside the socio-economic issues of the Late New Kingdom, was a common occurrence. They would enter tombs by boring holes into the side through another tunnel, get in there, rip off the linen coverings or set them alight, watch them burn, and then collect the jewels and amulets from the bodies to barter with. That description is from Papyrus Leopold II Amherst, which has translations readily available online. All in all, the Tribunal were only interested in the robberies of the Royal tombs, and thus when someone admitted to robbing the tomb of a noble or someone else, they simply didn’t care. Those weren’t important.
Tutankhamun’s tomb was so important because it was the only one that hadn’t been robbed in antiquity, not that it hadn’t been robbed by English colonialists (tbf there are many other countries that did colonialism here but you guys are never interested in them). There’s the Deir el Bahri cache where the Egyptians, around the same time as their tomb robbery investigations, moved all the mummies they still had of their kings into one place. They didn’t even do this carefully because all the mummies are in the wrong coffins, and some of the coffins have the wrong lids/bases (i.e. it’s Amenhotep II’s mummy, with the lid of Ramesses II and the base of Thutmose III). These were mummies of royal tombs that had already been robbed and had been robbed a long, long time ago, even for the Egyptians.
I’m not sure if you read the article at all, and from the comment it seems like you didn’t, but Thutmose II’s tomb was massively water damaged. The ceiling has caved in and it’s pretty dangerous to be inside. What they suspect might be where he’s buried now is close by and covered by man-made rubble. This is a hastily constructed second tomb, if indeed that’s what it is (I don’t wanna wait a month to find out but I might get rumblings of news earlier if it is). It doesn’t guarantee that any grave goods exist within it except perhaps his mummy. It could have been robbed thousands of years ago and all we’re going to find are remnants of what used to be. We only know the other tomb is his based small fragments that still exist of the starred ceiling (reserved for royal tombs) and a smashed offering from Hatshepsut for his kA. It would be frankly amazing if he still had all his burial goods with him, but realistically, knowing Egyptian history as I do, the best-case scenario (realistically) is a few grave goods and his mummy.
In summary, archaeologists don’t steal things and most of the tombs in Egypt were looted by the Egyptians themselves thousands of years before European colonialism ever set foot in them.
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