Destroying Ancient Artifacts for Profit Is Nothing New

Story time: my Prof hauled her students all the way through Madrid to a certain museum to show us a real Maya or Aztec calendar. And when we stood under the thing - which had the diameter of my living room - she said: "Beautiful, isn't it? But it's completely useless here because it got robbed by the Spanish ages ago and has no context anymore, we don't even know how it was oriented. All we know is that it's a calendar, but not how long is measured time or how or what kind of time." Stuck with me forever.

Messing with antiques/artifacts aside - storing anything in clear acrylic/resin is a poor idea overall. They go yellow or otherwise discolor overtime.

As a comic book nerd, I've been aware of the controversy over "slabbing" in the last decade or so--taking rare vintage comics and encasing them in acrylic slabs so they are (in theory) preserved forever, then grading them and basically trading them like baseball cards. (It's also done with new comics, but people are less upset about that.) The first time someone explained slabbing to me, my first response was, "But...then how do you read them?" The guy explaining it just stared at me, as if he couldn't comprehend why anyone would want to READ an old comic. As someone who had dug through bargain bins to find discontinued black-and-white magazines featuring eight-page stories about an obscure favorite character from before I was born, I just stared back. Incidentally, the last comic convention I went to had decade-old slabs for sale, and they looked like hot garbage. Historical preservation, my ass. I can only imagine how much worse it would be to do that with cultural objects that are hundreds or thousands of years old. I just walked past the slabs at the con with a disgusted look on my face; some of what you described in this video made me want to do violence. 👿

I went to a smash room where you get a crate of glass and ceramic stuff and just shatter it into pieces, and it was fun, but one striped jug in my crate seemed oddly special for some reason, so I kept it. After I took it home I did some research and it was an original piece of Pottery from an old Irish factory, and was almost 100 years old. I don't know if I could somehow feel it, travelled and time-heavy, but I'm glad I didn't smash that one.

Anything that destroys history drives me up a wall. Reading about libraries that were lost recently in Ukraine really gets to me. Hell, Kim Kardashian messing around with a Marilyn Monroe dress angered me more then I expected. So this cruelty towards Egyptian history is a real low.

It's always way more interesting when actual modern egyptians work on excavating ancient egyptian tombs. They get to often learn that many of the things they do today were done very similarly by their ancestors thousands of years ago and is a point of cultural pride for them.

I actually have a story similar to yours about the Goodwill painting, Kaz. My brother used to be a potter so I got really into pottery and one day, I found one at an estate sale that I recognized the style of. I asked the sellers where it came from and they had no idea, saying their grandpa had had a big collection of what he called "lost pretty things" and he'd probably gotten it at an antique store. Thinking it was worthless trash, they sold this beautiful teacup with a five-strand braid handle and base to me for $10. The original price was $5 for other items like it, but they definitely doubled it because they saw I really liked it. I didn't care, it was priceless to me personally because I recognized it as a piece from an artist in a place very dear to my heart (I won't share details because they don't sell art anymore and like their privacy). After getting home, I went to their old website and shot them an email, asking if I'd really found some of their (rare) work, and I sent them pictures including their artist mark on the bottom. They answered back a few days later saying it was actually part of a set of cups they'd made for their grandma almost thirty years ago, and when she died, everything she owned had been sold by her daughter (the artist's aunt) without allowing the family to come take precious items. The aunt moved to CA with all the money, and went bankrupt a few years later, losing whatever items were left. They said they were happy to see a cup survived and someone who could appreciate it now had it. They didn't ask for it back, but I offered it immediately in my next email, asking if I could bring it to them the next time I was in the area (I went to college a few hours away, which is not very far in Michigan). They offered money but I never took it, and instead they insisted on treating me to a nice dinner in my college town. I got to hand the cup back in person and they and their sister who'd also come absolutely burst into tears, pointing out a tiny chip in the handle. I apologized, thinking it was my fault, but they laughed and said it was their grandma's doing. Apparently she'd dropped this delicate little cup in her sink while washing it once, and it miraculously didn't shatter. It just lost a little piece that she glued back on, but had come off again in the ensuing thirty years and been lost. It was no ancient artifact, but it was precious to someone. Just like historical items are precious to whole cultures. They can be shared and studied, but I believe artifacts should be handled by or with the permission of the people whose history they belong to.

OMG I nearly had a heart attack when I saw that Indus valley pottery get deliberately dropped like that. I studied Harrapan culture as part of my Anthropology and Archelogy classes and even from a small paper for it. I use to handle Yayoi pottery and Kofun pottery and you better believe we handle it with cotton gloves and gingerly because once they are destroyed they are gone forever. It's not like anyone making more of it...it's finite. It's all of mankind heritage and it's gone.

If TikTok existed in the Victorian era I can totally picture an "Eat the Mummy Challenge".

There was also that monster Giuseppe Ferlini, who dynamited the ancient pyramids of Ethiopia just to check if there was anything of value inside!!!!

As an Egyptian, every day I lament the fact that our stuff gets stolen, got stolen, appropriated, destroyed. All of that. Thank you for talking about this and - especially since even the British colonization of Egypt ended only fairly recently. Hearing about Algeria also made me sick. SWANA people get no break when it comes to looting, truly.

Before watching this I was like, you know, there's very little that someone could do with my corpse after my death that would upset me during my life, considering that then I'd be dead and would hardly mind, but 'after being painstakingly and carefully preserved by skilled people so that I could last for millennia and then being eaten by a rich person' has definitely made the list.

This is also an issue in paleontology too. It always makes me annoyed or upset when I hear about some rich person buying a complete dinosaur skull fossil or smth similar. Like how selfish do you have to be to think its ok to put it up in a corner of your house for guests to gawk at, when actual scientists who devote their lives to understanding them for everyone could actually do something meaningful with them. Any rich person who has artifacts or the like on display privately rather than donating them to a museum or repatriating them makes me angry. They have enough wealth to know better; so much they think they actually deserve it.

My first thought was that the bowl was fake. I never imagined anyone would think it was real. But you bring up a good point. If they’re selling fragment to multiply profits, who’s to say they aren’t destroying actual artifacts?

The painting at goodwill part really hit home for me. My dad told me of a decorative family sword he had that’s been with our family for a really long time. It’s engraved with the family name and gold and silver and with a few semi precious stones along the hilt. He told me when we was in his 20s he was so poor that he sold it so he could pay rent - and he got a bunch of money for it. But my dad never told my grandpa he did that, even before he died, he was too ashamed to. I wonder where that thing is sometimes, if it’s in someone’s house that has no idea where it came from and how much it meant to the family, probably not even knowing the country it came from. I used to tell my dad that I’d get it back for him someday, when I was a really little kid lol. When I tell people about it it’s kinda odd - people get really sad about my families long lost Viking sword but don’t get upset about anything taken from poc cultures. I mean the reason is obvious but - thats the double standard in the flesh!

The kind of person who would say, "Who cares? It's just stuff!" Is often the same kind of person who would gun someone down for stealing their TV.

I see an account on Instagram all the time of someone taking antique frames, spray painting them neon and selling them at extreme prices. If anyone criticises them ruining rare antique frames they say people are stumping their “creativity”. They complain constantly at the price of the antique frames that they buy to “upcycle” when they could use modern frames that have antique styles. Much less extreme than the instances in the video but it just makes me annoyed.

im colombian and here we have a museum that shows different types of precolombian gold sculptures, ornaments and such, when i was young i figured that since they came from my own country, i t was logical to asume every country had a museum that was just about their culture. When i grew up a bit more i noticed a lot of virtual tours and brochures of different european museums and galleries had african and south american artifacts, i was shocked and my mom had to explain that colonialism wasnt only about slaving and taking resourses, but also stealing our culture. That made my 7yo self shake with anger lmao

As a former mold maker/prepper: Replicas are a great way to tell stories. I got a really cool museum grade replica (meaning that with just visual inspection you won't be able to tell the difference, even for experts) of a small egyptian pendant or luck charm as a goodbye gift because the company I worked at was non-profit and the government basically pulled support which meant we had to close down. I got to handle a couple of really cool things (mostly contemporary art) and the molds in storage there would be stuff like full size t-rex and triceratops skulls.

This reminded me of the foreigners in Mexico climbing Chichén Itzá even though everyone is warned not to do that because it is fragile and just out of respect. It's considered a sacred place.