As long as there have been tourists, there have been people taking souvenirs – nowadays, there are far more laws in place to cover this, but in the past, it was seen by some as perfectly acceptable to bring back cultural artefacts, or parts of buildings that you had seen, to prove to others that you had been there. The thing is, that when it happens now, people are shocked and horrified by the sight of the looting process taking place, but somehow manage to forget that similar (unseen) processes formed part of the acquisition of many other artefacts that we see as key to the collections of museums today.

From:
Register-Guard

DON KAHLE: Egypt’s loss of treasure began with early tourists
By Don Kahle
For The Register-Guard
Published: (Friday, Jun 3, 2011 12:28PM) Midnight, June 3

CAIRO — Any tourist traveling to Egypt should stop first at the British Museum in London. The museum contains many of Egypt’s most prized relics — and it also provides a primer on how tourism got off on the wrong foot.

The Brits’ version of our Smithsonian Museum starts with an exhibit about the Enlightenment ideals upon which this museum of antiquities was built. This signature exhibition elegantly summarizes how tourism’s roots led to a franchise of consumerism, objectification, bigotry and neocolonialist venturism.
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Robbing the contents of tombs has been going on for as long as items of value have been enclosed in the tombs. Robbing the actual tombs themselves was not something that happened until the arrival of the English aristocracy in the nineteenth century.

From:
Today’s Zaman

[Digging up Turkey’s past] Tomb Raider: Charles Fellows in Lycia
27 January 2010, Wednesday
TERRY RICHARDSON ANTALYA

Robbing graves is a crime almost as old as the practice that unwittingly encouraged it — the burial of the dead with valuable objects. Gold death masks and other precious items proved too much of a temptation for unscrupulous “get rich quick” thieves in ancient Egypt, who tunneled their way into pyramid tombs in search of forbidden treasures.

Roman and Byzantine tombs were pillaged for their grave goods, and the “art” of grave robbing goes back over 2,000 years in China. Today, professional “tomb raiders” around the globe loot the burial places of past civilizations, from the graves of North American Indians to the tombs of ancient Chinese notables, and the international art market appears ever hungry for such antiquities, no matter how ill-gotten.
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