I do not know why my British colleagues have so much difficulty with this concept. Here's Egypt's Monica Hana on the difference between archaeological finds and portable antiquities:
"It's history being lost forever, every single piece they take out and they sell on the antiquities market loses seventy percent of its history, because it just turns from a historic object into a mere artefact and so we are losing history here... Egyptian history, history for the whole world... by the clock."
Monica Hana on brightcove.com
Now of course it's only a short wait for the ideologues of the antiquities collecting community to chime in and start a quibble about "how many percent" she should have said, as if that was the main point. Isn't it so easy to tut-tut or get indignant when this kind of erosion is happening in foreign lands but less easy to even see a problem when it happens at home?
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