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Comment by evgen | Hacker News Reader

And if Elgin had not 'looted' them it is also possible they would be scattered around Athens as landfill and building material.

As a simple example, the Rosetta Stone that is the focus of this article was yoinked by locals for building material and used as fill in the wall of a fort some distance away from its original location. It was only saved because when some French soldiers were rebuilding the foundations of the fort wall someone recognized the significance of the inscription on the stone.

It is a sad fact that were it not for this 'looting' we would have far fewer artifacts to examine and use to inform our understanding of the past because the locals would have continued to treat these sites and objects as open-air quarries.

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this is not always true.

many idols of gods in less famous and out of the way hindu temples in india were stolen and sold off to collectors in the west. these idols were there in the community forever and cared for, when they were stolen, the community simply accepted the loss because they didnt have the resources to chase it all up.

see this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/07/the-idol-thief

from the article

Collectors often suggest that they are the custodians and preservers of antiquities that might otherwise suffer from neglect or mistreatment, but Ghiya described the callous mechanics that are sometimes required to smuggle a statue from one country to another. He recalled a squat stone Vahara—a depiction of Vishnu in his incarnation as a boar—that stood in the village of Attru, in southeast Rajasthan. The boar weighed more than a thousand pounds and its legs and torso were covered in a magnificent phalanx of tiny, intricately carved figurines. Ghiya’s thieves stole the statue in the late nineteen-eighties, lacing a chain through the boar’s open mouth and yanking it from its stone pedestal, shearing off its lower jaw and breaking its legs in the process. The piece was eventually sold to a private collector in Zurich.

This ignores the millions of artifacts in boxes that will almost certainly never see the light if day, and the untold number that the British destroyed while looting what they wanted/they colonized the area.

The artifacts are catalogued and stored, which is more than can be said when it comes to a lot of older cultures. I would have a lot more sympathy for the arguments that the rapacious British were nothing but a detriment to archaeology and understanding of the past when you could point me to the preservation efforts that existed before the British arrived. There were far worse outcomes in terms of historical preservation than to be colonized by the British (e.g. pity those locations colonized by the Spanish, who actually were as bad as you suggest the British colonizers to be.)

what is being used is preserved simply by its use. an idol in a hindu temple is sacred and washed and annointed. only when its removed from its context it needs to be preserved. the brits and other colonizers simply take what they want because guns rule.

>I would have a lot more sympathy for the arguments that the rapacious British were nothing but a detriment to archaeology and understanding of the past when you could point me to the preservation efforts that existed before the British arrived.

And I would accept this excuse if they now returned the items they looted to the countries that do have significant preservation efforts in place. Like Greece.

Sure the British could have been worse, but they were still pretty bad.

And so it goes on: Egyptian temples defaced by early Christians, Palmyra temples destroyed by Isis...

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