This video is really cool. It’s a curator talking about what is on the stone and why. They were supposed to be put in every temple in Egypt and were done so for many years, which is why so many have been discovered since the original famous one.
This video is really cool. It’s a curator talking about what is on the stone and why. They were supposed to be put in every temple in Egypt and were done so for many years, which is why so many have been discovered since the original famous one.
Thing is, a lot of it was looted. Not even like “Napoleon” style looted specifically for museums, like straight up, “The only reason we have it is because some officer thought it would make a nice trinket and snapped it off of some priceless altar and got bored of it and donated it later in life” sort of thing.
There’s a reason archeologists look on archeology in the 19th century with a good deal of cringe, and it’s not just the rampant racism and sexism. A LOT got destroyed in the process of “We want to learn about these things but we have no cultural frame of reference to study it in except to steal it from These People™”
They also equated “valuable” with “important for knowledge,” meaning that people like Heinrich Schliemann at Troy just bulldozed through things like pottery and domestic debris which would tell us about every day Trojan culture and just stopped when he found gold, something only the elite would have had for decoration.