The big deal about the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 was that it was one of the few tombs discovered in recent times whose treasures had not been long ago pilfered by looters.
My question is, where are all these pilfered treasures now? King Tut was a minor king, yet his tomb was brimming with golden jewelry, ornate thrones, elaborate statuettes, and other precious artifacts. Surely many of the other, more important pharaohs must have been buried with a heck of a lot more treasure. Sure, there’s no shortage of smaller pieces of Egyptian jewelry in museums around the world. But how come we never hear about anyone else’s 900-kg solid gold mummiform coffin and death mask? Were such masks never made for the other pharaohs? If not, why not? If they were made and are still extant, then why do we never see pictures of them? Why are they being overlooked in favour of Tut’s portrait? If they’re no longer around, why not? Seems to me that an ancient, elaborate Egyptian death mask would be worth more intact than melted down. Surely at least some of the grave robbers would have realized this and tried to sell some artifacts as-is to wealthy collectors…?
This is a total WAG, but I’d imagine that, to the grave-robbers, the value in the loot lies in the raw materials rather than finished object, so the precious metals were probably melted and the gemstones pried off to be made into other pieces of jewelry (or sold individually), so, basically, the originals are now gone forever.
The majority of stolen Egyptian grave goods were not taken my modern treasure-hunters; they were taken by (more or less) contemporary thieves. This stuff was scavenged, as Earthling decribes, hundreds or thousands of years ago.
You have to also realize that many of these tombs were have been hit by grave robbers in a time closer to their contruction than to the modern era. We’re not talking about some grave robbers showing up in 1892 and stealing artifacts just before a dashing young British archaeologist shows up, and then selling it on the black market to some Baron to put in his manor. Europe wasn’t even interested in ancient Egypt until the early 19th century, when Napoleon sent military and archaeological expiditions to the area, and whenthey arrived they found many sites already looted. Most of these sites could have been looted as long as 3000 years ago. It’s around that time that the Egypt of the Pharoahs lost its autonomy to foreign powers, starting with the Persians, then the Hellenistic Greeks (Cleopatra traced her decent not to ancient Pharoahs, but to one of Alexander the Great’s top generals), the Romans, the Byzantines, the Sellucids, the Ottomans, and a whole lot of other empires in between. Not only had the native government lost enough authority to allow private graverobbers to ply their trade. Many of these conquering empires used the wealth of Egypt’s dead kings to pad their own coffers.
Nametag, I realize that a lot of the grave-robbing took place a long time ago, but surely there were art collectors even hundreds of years ago. Judging from the number of classical Greek and Roman statues that have survived to the present day, it stands to reason that some rich king, pope, or emir out there may have had an interest in procuring Egyptian antiquities as well.
Another WAG: Classical Greek and Roman artifacts date from, what, around 400 B.C. and forward? Ancient Egypt, on the other hand, goes much farther back – from around 2600 B.C. of the Old Kingdom to around 1000 B.C. of the New Kingdom – which means that the stuff has had a longer period of time to get destroyed or lost, even if they had been stored intact in someone’s (or some nation’s) collection. As a reference, see what just happened to the Iraqi National Museum.
And, specifically regarding sculptures, you can’t melt marble down and make earrings from them. (Sorry if that sounded a bit snarky.)
Adding to what Earthling said about artifacts not surviving: Egypt has gone through a few “anti-pagan” purges over the past 2000 years, both Christian and Muslim in origin. The destruction of the library of Alexandria is the most famous example of this. All it takes is one fundamentalist regime trying to cement their hold over the population and a whole lot of sites and artifacts devoted to ancient gods can get destroyed quick. Remember those ancient Budhist statues the Taliban tore down a few years ago? And that’s in our era of relative respect for ancient cultures and their artifacts. Go back 1000 years to a time where people in Rome were using the Collesium as their own personal source of pre-cut stones, and you can see how little these artifacts were respected by society.
The number of bronze statues (many of the marble statues you see are later copies of the original metal ones) you could count on one hand with fingers left over. And those were found in shipwrecks.