Where did the looted Egyptian treasure go?

[si_blakely]

@Dahu

I think this is key - are all pharoahs’ tombs accounted for, or almost all? Does anyone have any more information on this?

Probably not - possible pyramid sites discovered after perusing Google Earth.

Si

[cckerberos]

@ralph124c

King Tut was a very minor king-but his tomb was packed with neat stuff. Like the pure gold mask-has anything like it ever been found?

Yep.

[Malthus]

@ClintO

When the “high quality stuff” came on the market, didn’t someone have to buy it? It would be worth more being a 2500 year old artifact and solid gold rather than being gold melted down into bars. I’m wondering if anyone has been busted trying to sell these artifacts on the black market? If robbers are switching teams, then one has to know the stuff is being sold somewhere?

Absolutely, at that time the stuff was being sold on the antiquities market rather than melted down - often being sold to tourists.

Some stuff ended up in surprising places. Like poor old Ramses I, who went from god-king of Egypt to scaring the kiddies as a sideshow attraction beside the “freaks of nature” exhibit in a tacky museum in Niagara Falls.

National Geographic

Sometime in the mid-1800s, the tomb at Deir el-Bahri was accidentally discovered by Ahmed Abd el-Rassul while he searched for a lost goat. He and his family, who were widely known at the time as “tomb breakers and mummy snatchers,” began selling off mummies, coffins, and royal artifacts to tourists and collectors. They were eventually caught and the tomb was officially discovered in 1881. At the time of its official discovery, the tomb contained 40 mummies, coffins, and other artifacts. Ramses I’s coffin was found, but there was no sign of his mummy.

Though the trail of stolen antiquities is often murky, ancient records from the tombs, diaries and letters from the mid-19th century, and scholarly conjecture suggest that the mummy was sold for seven pounds to a physician from Canada named James Douglas in around 1860. Douglas acquired the royal mummy for the owner of a museum in Niagara Falls.

Over the next 140 years the royal mummy, along with several others, some coffins, and other Egyptian artifacts shared floor space with “freaks of nature”—the two-headed calf, and the five-legged pig—memorabilia of the Wild West and the Civil War, and the barrels of Falls daredevils. The museum changed hands, and crossed and re-crossed the Canadian border several times until it closed in 1999.

[Malthus]

@GreasyJack

Of course, since most of the tombs were looted relatively soon after burial, it’s probable that a certain amount of the loot was resold to someone else, reburied and then re-looted.

Yup.

However, experts today believe that the stripping of the dead had not been done by local robbers, but by the state itself, hungry for gold at a time of economic decline. Evidence for this theory comes from the discovery of the funerary equipment and jewels for these earlier kings turning up, reused, in the burials at Tanis of their 21st and 22nd Dynasty successors.

[Malthus]

@md2000

In the book Complete Valley of the Kings, the author quotes letters between a priest/warlord running the area of Luxor toward the end of the new kingdom. Don’t have the references handy, but the implication is that this guy turned grave robbing from a fly-by-night operation to a mining indstry. he had his priests going around looking for any indication of a grave.

Since he was one of the high priests, the bodies were rewrapped, properly labelled to explain who they were, and buried in collective stashes. It wasn’t “concern for the thievery”, they were the ones doing the theiving and rewrapping, according to some theories. SO we find a dozen or more royal mummies in one of the VoK tombs; we find a huge collection in an unmarked cave on the far side of the mountain. They even slit open the wrappings, and dug inside the empty body cavity, to ensure they got all the gold they could. (Modern X-rays show they missed a few minor pieces of jewelry in the wrappings.)

Concern over plundering and doing the plundering aren’t necessarily incompatible. It is probable that later kings robbed the tombs of earlier ones (we know some of the stuff ended up in later burials with the names of the earlier kings still on it!), and in effect ordered the priestly officials to assist in this, but that the priests did so with a certain amount of reluctance. Or looked at another way, officially sanctioned plundering was okay, but unsanctioned plundering was not.

[md2000]

@si_blakely

Probably not - possible pyramid sites discovered after perusing Google Earth.

Si

@ClintO

When the “high quality stuff” came on the market, didn’t someone have to buy it? It would be worth more being a 2500 year old artifact and solid gold rather than being gold melted down into bars. I’m wondering if anyone has been busted trying to sell these artifacts on the black market? If robbers are switching teams, then one has to know the stuff is being sold somewhere?

Depends when where and how. There are stories of ancient papyrus copies of some of the oldest bibles and other stuff being used to statr fires. Once foreigners started buying stuff, the government tried to stop it so now you add risk to the situation. The Dier el Badr robbers, IIRC, one turned in the others for reward money and amnesty. One of the brothers dissappeared into Egyptian jails, never to be heard from…

Plus, “antiquities” is a relatively modern concept. People might value older items for some reasons, but without widespread scholarship and established history to validate articles, a pretty fake was just as valuable as a pretty relic - probably more so, being less worn by time. A statue loses some value when the nose is broken off; something that looks like an idol is blasphemous and if you keep it, you may be less than devout, etc…

Value for gold or silver was probably much higher than historical value. Before maybe 300 or 400 year ago, people really had no idea generally of the true nature and extent of history, especially of obscure foreign lands. Legends and fantasy might cary as much weight.

As pointed out above, some material was recycled. You can see some old Egyptian temple walls carved with sunken heiroglyphs about 4 or 5 inches deep, much deeper than they needed to be - this to make it too much work to steal and reuse the blocks. There’s a big difference between using material, statues, etc. from abandoned buildings or closed shrines, and actively digging into grandpa’s grave.

[ralph124c]

@cckerberos

Yep.

Thanks-the gold mask pictured in the link looks like King Tut’s.

[md2000]

Note this too from that link:

Psusennes I’s outer and middle sarcophagi had been recycled from previous burials in the Valley of the Kings through the state-sanctioned tomb-robbing that was common practice in the Third Intermediate Period. A cartouche on the red outer sarcophagus shows that it had originally been made for Pharaoh Merenptah, the nineteenth dynasty successor of Ramesses II.

Recycled material.