Titanic vs Mummies (no Batman jokes please)

In My Humble Opinion
1

This [url=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=210026]thread
[/quote]
got me thinking about the difference in attitude between how relics from Titanic and relics from ancient Egypt are regarded (it was the “Egyptian curse” reference that triggered it). Any time I see anything about the locating of Titanic, someone is interviewed who seems to represent the general concensus of opinion that removing anything for the wreckage is “sacrilege” because the wreckage is a “tomb” and taking things is “grave-robbing.” IIRC Congress even passed a law against possessing or selling Titanic artifacts. Yet no one in the main objects to the possession, sale or display of Egyptian artifacts, which come from actual tombs and are the product of actual grave robbing.

What do you think accounts for this difference in attitude? Time? Is Titanic still to recent? Racism? The white European graveyard can’t be desecrated but no one cares if the dark-skinned Eqyptians’ tombs are disturbed? Magnitude? 1500 dead on Titanic versus individual Egyptians? Something else I haven’t thought of? Some combination?

2

Crap. This thread.

3

I think it has to do with the length of time. My sister spent one summer working on the excavation of a graveyard at the ruins of an 8th-century abbey in England, and no one had any complaints. The occupants of those graves were certainly European, in fact, literally Anglo-Saxon, so the racism explanation probably isn’t entirely correct…