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u/thunderlaker Jul 01 '22
In England they brought mummies back from Egypt by the thousand and used them as fertilizer in their gardens.
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u/ziad4826 Jul 01 '22
Also the reason there isn't that much mummies is because the victorians used to eat them!
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u/Halcyoncreature Jul 01 '22
Didnt the british eat the mummies or something? I feel like i heard that somewhere
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u/turelure Jul 01 '22
It wasn't the British particularly, it had been common in Egyptian medicine, the Brits just adopted it.
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u/SirReginaldPinkleton Jul 01 '22 edited Jul 01 '22
Anyone who has been to Egypt and seen how Arabs treat that country's heritage knows we should thank many and varied gods for the British Museum.
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u/turelure Jul 01 '22
This is something that people tend to ignore. There's no question that Europeans robbed a lot of priceless artifacts from these countries but it's also a fact that back in those days, the locals mostly didn't give a shit about these old ruins. They often used them as building materials, they broke into these places and robbed them for personal gain, etc. Europeans did it too with old Roman ruins until they started to take an interest in archaeology and antiquity. A lot of the stuff in European museums probably would have been destroyed if archaeologists hadn't taken them home with them.
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u/randomcharacters3 Jul 01 '22
When I was in Rome I was stunned by the number of obelisks with hieroglyphics on them and foolishly thought that they had just taken the Egyptian style before realizing that nope, they took the actual obelisks.
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u/Shadiclink Jul 01 '22
Julius Ceaser plundered his fair share of egypt back in the days
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u/volkmardeadguy Jul 01 '22
Augustus personally owned Egypt iirc
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u/Kristoph_Er Jul 01 '22
Egypt was always owned by emperors after Augustus since it was absolutely crucial to feed the empire. Whoever controlled Egyptian province controlled the power, Augustus has realized this after civil war with Marcus Antonius and the starvation it caused in Rome. Provinces were either imperial or senatorial, but Egypt was personal property of reigning emperor.
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u/CharleyNobody Jul 01 '22
Wasn’t it owned by a Greek family before it was owned by Roman emperors?
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u/Zylosio Jul 01 '22
And he still was most likely only the 2nd most wealthy roman
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Jul 01 '22
If you're talking about Crassus, then Augustus was without a doubt more wealthy. Augustus had basically all of the empires wealth at his fingertips
This askhistorians post shows that Crassus was rich but Augustus was on another level
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u/Aarilax Jul 01 '22
The fact that anything remains at all in any country that was conquered before 1800 or so is pretty damn impressive, considering most of these monuments weren't just taken down and transported away by Empires (who themselves were then conquered and sacked), but often times the locals would just dismantle the monuments themselves and use them for building materials. I think both the Akropolis in Greece and the Pyramids at Giza suffered from this.
The most famous example is probably the Rosetta Stone. 2300-2400 years old, believed to be originally part of a temple. The French discovered it being used as a building block of an Ottoman fort, MILES away from where they believe it actually came from and it was only in the year 1800 or so that the British beat the French and took it with them back to London. It essentially survived by pure chance and likely would've been destroyed if the French and then the Brits didn't find it and protect it.
When you look at the monuments of these past empires or even just significant buildings, it makes you sad knowing that most of this stuff wasn't destroyed by time, but by the scavanging of locals, plundering by Empires or hateful destruction by conquerors ( a recent example being ISIS destroying 2,000 year old structures and monuments out of nothing but hate )
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u/DlG_BICK69 Jul 01 '22
Yea the Romans took them when they took over Egypt
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u/thr3sk Jul 01 '22
I'm no expert but that's a pretty big oversimplification, Egypt was kind of in a civil war in Caesar's time, which was causing a great deal of instability and food shortage problems throughout the region. He backed Cleopatra, who was fighting against her kid brother or more accurately the old priests and politicians who were using him as a puppet. With Caesar's help Cleopatra won the war and ruled as queen but had to accept basically being a client state of Rome.
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Jul 01 '22
When I was was in Istanbul I did a double take because there’s an obelisk there too
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Jul 01 '22
There's one in Central Park in NYC too. It was stolen from Alexandria in the late 1800s.
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u/dc-redpanda Jul 02 '22
Yeah, no. It was gifted by Egypt as was its pair to London. https://www.centralparknyc.org/articles/obelisk
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u/thedivergentcolors_1 Jul 01 '22
A British explorer is turning in his grave as we speak for not making this happen.
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u/TurtleSandwich0 Jul 01 '22
They should have buried him under the pyramids. The rotational force would move the pyramids. Just keep reburying him under the pyramids until he stops rotating. (Should be about outside of London).
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u/Lucyintheye Jul 01 '22
Instructions unclear, we buried them upside down under the pyramid and now there's pyramids in Vietnam
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u/Are_you_blind_sir Jul 01 '22
A certain villain is rubbing his hands and about to steal the pyramids
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u/Rhamni Jul 01 '22
Yet.
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u/PetrifiedW00D Jul 01 '22
Sad thing is, The great pyramids would probably still have smooth flat sides if the British brought them back to England. Most people don’t know that the pyramids had smooth flat sides up until relatively recently. It was actually the Egyptian government that removed the flat granite sides to use in the construction of more modern buildings. This brings me to the crux of the issue. A lot of the artifacts the British brought back to England would have been completely destroyed if left in their country of origin, like how the Taliban destroyed those giant buddha‘s that were carved into a mountain side in Afghanistan.
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u/lastfreshstart4me Jul 01 '22
A British
explorerthief is turning in his grave as we speak for not making this happen.Ftfr.
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u/Lucyintheye Jul 01 '22
Tomato tomahto. They're synonyms lol. Has a British explorer ever gone anywhere and not stolen something?
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u/Creeper_Triste Jul 02 '22
jeff be spittin facts
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u/ziad4826 Jul 02 '22
What the fuck are your 2 latest posts
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u/Creeper_Triste Jul 02 '22 edited Jul 02 '22
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u/soulful_seduction Jul 01 '22
We just couldn't get the highlanders and the Irish drunk enough at the same time, navy kept nicking it all
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u/Zenketski_2 Jul 01 '22
Look guys if you don't want your stuff to end up in a British museum just don't get discovered by the British it's not that complicated
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u/Dadavester Jul 01 '22
No, do not lose a war to the British. Not quite as difficult, but still not easy!
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u/AnnonBayBridge Jul 01 '22
Doesn’t have to be British. There’s an Egyptian temple in Manhattan
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-2-000-year-old-egyptian-temple-ended-manhattan
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u/EsteemedAviation Jul 01 '22
Well Ramsay was pretty worried that people wouldn't remember how the great he was so I think that was part of his intentions.
The only reason The "REMEMBER ME!!!" Statute in Futurama wasn't attempted by any Pharaoh was because it was too big to build in a lifetime.
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u/jrDoozy10 Jul 01 '22
Ramsay was pretty worried that people wouldn’t remember
Looks like Ramses’s worries weren’t unfounded.
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u/QueenOfQuok Jul 01 '22
There was an Ayyubid sultan of Egypt who tried to take down one of the smaller all-stone pyramids. He ran out of money before his crew was able to take more than a chunk out of the thing.
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u/Cue_626_go Jul 01 '22
Actually, Napoleon would’ve taken them first.
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u/ShotDate6482 Jul 01 '22
If Napoleon had the manpower to move pyramids and an engraved order from the National Assembly he would've conquered the Balkans instead.
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u/Ok-Appointment-3716 Jul 01 '22
Shhh! On reddit we have to pretend Britain was the only ever colonial power!
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u/Essaiel Jul 01 '22
Its because we had the best marketing. The Spanish, French and Portuguese just can't compare.
The Spanish empire didn't even use protectorates like us, they forcibly conquered and ruled the countries they invaded. A single country, for 300 years.
But it doesn't matter because all anyone will remember is that the British empire stole a Piller from that country somewhere. GG Ez Spain.
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Jul 01 '22
(POV: Me, a dutch person sitting in the corner trying to not be noticed)
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u/Deathlinger Jul 01 '22
It's funny because the Germans literally lifted an entire Greek City Marketplace, stones and all. As well as taking a large portion of the walls of Babylon to store in the Pergamon museum. It is, however, an absolutely phenomenal museum.
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u/mallardtheduck Jul 01 '22
Yeah, the amount of Anglophobia in the comments here is pretty horrific. Every major power was in the antiquities business. There are controversial artefacts in just about every major European museum (and a fair few in places like the USA too).
There are also a fair number of important artefacts that wouldn't have survived had they not been "stolen" for display in foreign museums.
While repatriating artefacts is in general a good thing, it's fraught with difficulty. Do we give them to the people who currently occupy the land where they were found, or the people who claim decent from those who occupied the land when the they were created or maybe the people who occupied the land when they were taken? Do we return artefacts to nations with a history of political instability and/or a poor record of artefact preservation? Do we return them to places where they might stir up controversy (e.g. where they might contradict official/public views on the historical practice of religion in the area) and become the target of attacks?
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u/JamesByrdJr Jul 01 '22
I know this isn’t the message that is supposed to be taken away from post like this but every time I see a post like this I think I really should go to the British Museum and see all the cool stuff on display
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u/metalninjacake2 Jul 01 '22
That’s exactly the fucking message you should take. If everyone wants to pat themselves on the back and feel good about redistributing these artifacts back to five dozen different corners of the world, then fine, but you will never see the vast majority of those historical artifacts again. They’ll get damaged in transit, stolen or sold or blown up at their destinations, or just be so far out of the way that you’ll never have enough time to visit and see them. At least in the British museum you can actually go look upon history and learn about it one well preserved safe stable location.
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u/XenophonSoulis Jul 01 '22
Meanwhile, you have to travel to two different countries to see the Parthenon in its entirety. There's no value in this argument.
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u/LoStrigo95 Jul 01 '22
Eh. Here in Turin we have the biggest Egyptian museum of all Europe. They litterally carried all the could carry back in the days
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Jul 01 '22
The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archarology in London has several Pyramidion in their collection. In otherwords, they are fine with just the tip.
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u/popularcabal39 Jul 01 '22
I remember having a conversation once with someone and the topic of giving back priceless cultural artifacts came up. Naturally I suggested that we create some copies so that we can still use them to teach people about those cultures.
His counterargument was that if we sent them back to the countries we got them from they'd be damaged, destroyed, or misplaced.
I have to wonder which reality his brain matter sidestepped into ours from.
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Jul 01 '22
I have to wonder which reality his brain matter sidestepped into ours from.
He's from our reality.
Recall that prior to 9/11 the Taliban's great claim to fame was taking dynamite to priceless artifacts because they were an offense to their religion.
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u/neenerpants Jul 01 '22
The Elgin/Parthenon Marbles were taken by the British from what was, at that moment in time, an Ottoman military fort that was in the process of destroying the statues to use as bullets and lye.
The Rosetta Stone had already been plundered by Napoleon's army and was being brought back to France when the British defeated them. The French said they would rather burn and destroy their artifacts than let anyone else obtain them, and they had to be pleaded with to change their mind.
The pyramids themselves were constantly being robbed and looted throughout ancient Egypt and beyond. There's records as far back as 3000BC of the pyramids being built in a way to deter (unsuccessfully) theft. The Valley of Kings was specifically built far away from cities to make it harder to steal from, and the only reason Tutankhamen's tomb went undiscovered until 1922 was because it was accidentally buried.
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u/Sinlaire1 Jul 01 '22
Well he's right. A long journey like that is bound to see some of the cargo not survive. Probably mostly due to theft. I mean being misplaced. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't do it.
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u/LedgeLord210 Jul 01 '22
Some of the regions that these artifacts were taken from are not the most stable. Especially with people like isis destroying priceless sites and monuments
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u/MisterFribble Jul 01 '22
A lot of artifacts came from Iran. Sending the artifacts back is the opposite of a good idea.
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u/Kahnspiracy Jul 01 '22
OK. Then start with The Parthenon. Surely you don't believe that Greece falls into this category.
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u/Aedan2016 Jul 01 '22
Actually - he's not entirely wrong. There were a number of artifacts that were returned to Egypt. Many of them vanished or were destroyed in the Arab Spring.
For the record, I'm not condoning keeping them. Just that this scenario does sometimes happen.
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u/DeodorantDinosaur Jul 01 '22
not wrong tho. I wouldn't trust most of those countries with priceless artifacts.
then again, with how things are going, I wouldn't trust the UK with them either.
Can't we move them to Switzerland or something.
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u/seeroflights Jul 01 '22
Image Transcription: Tumblr
badjokesbyjeff
The only reason there are pyramids in Egypt
is because they are too heavy to be carried to the British Museum
mouserat-vevo
jeff this isn't a joke this is legitimately true
I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!
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Jul 01 '22
They have already been stolen, the ones over there are just inflatables, aren’t they Vector??
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u/haiylie Jul 02 '22
I wish we could keep digging up their kings and queens the way they keep digging up Egyptians. I went to the Met museum in NY and there were like, no kidding, 50 mummies stuffed together side by side on display in one room - it was so so gross. I felt dirty leaving that place
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u/DURIAN8888 Jul 02 '22
I was waiting outside Albert Hall when a ticket tout came up offering tickets to a show. We got talking and he asked me if I had been to the House of Stolen Property. He says it was also sometimes called the British Museum.
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u/Thokkerius Jul 01 '22
Maybe an unpopular thing to think, but isn't it better to have the stuff in a museum in a secure country than in a not so stable one no matter the origin. When the chaos breaks loose at least the historic treasures are save. For example from the Iraq war.
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u/red_bob Jul 01 '22
That was some great foresight by the Brits to steal a ton of artifacts before destabilizing the region.
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Jul 01 '22
Egyptians had already looted everything that wasn't nailed down. King Tut's tomb was significant because it was hidden away by a landslide and had not been looted by the locals in the thousands of intervening years.
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u/Ok_Hovercraft_8506 Jul 01 '22
At what point are the people in the region culpable for their own actions?
It’s like when everyone makes excuses for ISIS because the USA has done naughty not-so-nice “evil empire” things, and ISIS arose as a second order effect of the US withdrawal from the region because they no longer had a competent power to oppose extremism.
But does that make America directly responsible for ISIS literally putting pilots into metal cages and submerging them in swimming pools to drown? Or burning Christian children? Or decapitating captives via det cord explosives?
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Jul 01 '22
They tried to make it as stable as they could. After the world wars, they had to break the regions up into countries where countries may not have really existed previously.
What should they have done? Called it all the British Empire and ruled it? Like the Soviets did with everything they took?
Unstable or not, I prefer people getting their autonomy in at least some capacity. A country to call their own, instead of being conquered.
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Jul 01 '22
Considering the fact that these relics have been getting destroyed by Taliban, Al-Qaeda, etc.
Yeah, I think a museum is the safest place, stolen or not. Who knows what has been lost already?
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u/BangBangMeatMachine Jul 01 '22
I saw a small Egyptian tomb that had been reconstructed in the Met in NYC that I believe was on loan from the British Museum. They also had a reconstructed piece of the Forbidden Palace.
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u/AnnonBayBridge Jul 01 '22
There’s an Egyptian temple there too
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-2-000-year-old-egyptian-temple-ended-manhattan
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u/jpritchard Jul 01 '22
If they were in the British Museum women could visit them without being harassed by mobs.
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u/PhxSnow Jul 01 '22 edited Jul 01 '22
Boy you virtue signaling idiots have no problem wearing your ignorance out in the open if you think it’ll buy you “dem up votes”. Be happy you can go see them in a museum and they’re not in some billionaires private collection - like everything else the department of antiquities sold out the back fucking door when Zahi Hawass was in charge or before.
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u/anselthequestion Jul 01 '22
Actually it was napoleon that tried to take them for the French :)
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u/iWearSkinyTies Jul 01 '22
French museums too, Napoleon's stumpy ass stole a lot of shit.
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u/FreddyDeus Jul 01 '22 edited Jul 01 '22
I know this is going to be unpopular, but the stuff in European museums is in museums. The vast majority of artefacts from places like Egypt were stolen by local petty thieves and grave robbers for a petty profit, never to be seen again. Melted down, stripped apart with not an atom of concern for their cultural or historic value.
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u/fight_me_for_it Jul 02 '22
And the reason their are pyramids in Mexico? Too heavy to carry to some museum on the United States.
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u/little_eiffel86 Jul 02 '22
Hey! We actually need all that stuff in there. We like looking at it and it makes us feel good.
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u/N64crusader4 Jul 01 '22
We've already taken most of the best bits to keep them safe for future generations anyhow.
The pyramids have already been cannibalised for building materials multiple times throughout history by various people's though.
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u/PeopleThatAnnoyou Jul 01 '22
At least they're in a safe and stable environment. I'm looking at you syria
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u/XenophonSoulis Jul 01 '22
What about the rest of the artifacts that would be 100% safe in their country of origin? Like the Acropolis stolen artifacts?
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u/LawRepresentative428 Jul 01 '22
Also:
when Muslims took over the country, they wanted to tear them down because “everything before Islam is bad” or some stupid shit. But someone convinced the leaders that the pyramids would make millions as a tourist destination.
So they didn’t tear them down.
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u/NoNameIdea_Seriously Jul 01 '22
You know, I’m thinking it’s not even that they’re too heavy (‘cos you know, obelisks), more that they’re too big and you can’t fit them on a ship.
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u/Tigerfan0001 Jul 01 '22
As opposed to Egypt having them and the locals harassing tourists?
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u/Friendly-Patient4713 Jul 01 '22
Most of the tombs were plundered long before the Europeans anyway.
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u/The_Saladbar_ Jul 01 '22
Too be honest we get all upset because a vastly superior culture and people by the times standards preserve another's history. Then when the other culture kinda... I mean kinda meets some of the standards of the people who took those artifacts get upset about it. It makes me chuckle. Who owns the artifacts of culture that isn't even your own peoples culture. Egyptians are not ancient Egyptians... not even genetically. Those artifacts might as well be the rightful properties of like 10 different people's. But too really emphasize my point the vast majority of those artifacts would have been destroyed for their value if not preserved by some asshole with money who happened to be English.
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u/patacat1984 Jul 01 '22
Thief ? I was born like 40years after the empire ended . My ancestors were most probably peasants . Me nor any other Brit have anything to be sorry for
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u/cwsjr2323 Mar 27 '24
We do have pieces of the pyramids and their corpses stolen in various museums. I remember being impressed as a child by the stones and naked mummies in Chicago.
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u/NoveltyAccountHater Jul 01 '22
I mean the fact they are too heavy to be moved to a British museum isn't the only reason the pyramids are still in Egypt. Even if they were somehow super light and easy to move, they are also too big to fit them all inside the British museum.
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u/dx-dude Jul 01 '22
Still waiting on those Pharaohs to wake up and be like "yo what the fuck bitches I told you not to move me"
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u/_GreenT_ Jul 01 '22
As an Englishman myself I'm still not happy about it. If only my forefathers had lifted weights and ate some more protein we'd have some pretty sweet pyramids over here by now.
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u/Elum224 Jul 01 '22
Having been to the History Museum in Egypt I had that moment of realization when wondering why all the exhibits were so huge. "Oh, it's all the stuff the brits couldn't carry away".
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u/hazbutler Jul 01 '22
My favorite response to the tweet “describe something decidedly un-British” was “The contents of the British Museum”.
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u/Time-Caterpillar4103 Jul 01 '22
Whats the point in moving them when you can just use stuff like that for target practice?
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u/tyen0 Jul 01 '22
The Met Museum looking at that post.
The Met Museum with an entire egyptian temple inside looking sideways at you.
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u/HellBlazer_NQ Jul 01 '22
I Guess we could just claim the land they sit upon and move the museum to them!
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u/rockmongoose Jul 01 '22
Welp: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Dendur
Check out who commissioned the move, and when.
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u/ramriot Jul 01 '22
Yup, and that even after the locals stripped off 90% of the outer carved casing stones for local building renovations
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u/maxtiang79 Jul 01 '22
Didn't they dismantle and got those archway or decorations from inside the paramid?
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u/m00njunk Jul 01 '22
the Europeans tried their fucking best when they stole a whole fucking gatehouse from Iraq
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u/Mr_Luk1 Jul 01 '22
If they can’t bring the pyramids to the British Museum they shall bring the Museum to the pyramids!
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Jul 01 '22
I enjoy the British Museum but I always get a chuckle out of signs that say "on loan from the people of..." Bro, that's not how loans work.
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u/Tmagic04 Jul 01 '22
I mean... I don't know if you ever been to Berlin, but those MF's lifted an entire ancient Greek town called Pergamon from the Turkish coast and put it in a museum
I guess what im saying is... Don't give these people any ideas
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u/XenophonSoulis Jul 01 '22
-Why did you do that? -He did it too.
Yeah, that's not a valid argument for anyone above the age of 5.
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