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intact. Stolen,” he said. “Well, take the eyes out, and how does the king see? That’s why the punishment for looting was severe.” A few minutes later he pointed to a small scrap of something like paper, in a glass case. “That’s papyrus. It was the predecessor to paper.”
    One of the earliest recorded trials of a thief in human history occurred during the New Kingdom Period in Egypt, and its details were captured on papyrus, after the man was caught stealing from a tomb. His punishment was death on the stake. “It’s not a great way to go,” mused St. Hilaire with a smile, “but gruesome punishments didn’t stop the looting.”
    When tombs continued to be raided, Egypt’s ruling class regrouped. “Some priests-kings got together and said, ‘We now rule this kingdom.’” These new pharaohs decided that the buried kings and their treasures were vulnerable, so they moved all of them into one tomb—in the Valley of the Kings. Local thieves, though, quickly became a minor irritation compared to the invasions by a parade of foreign powers: Libyans, Nubians, Assyrians, Persians, and Macedonians. Alexander the Great fell in love with Egypt and wanted to be a pharaoh. Then the Romans arrived and carted off thousands of treasures to Europe. “Where are the most Egyptian obelisks found today? Not in Egypt. In Italy. So if you want to see an Egyptian obelisk, you go to Rome.”
    When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he brought scientists from France to help him categorize and organize the artifacts he pillaged. Napoleon would never have considered it pillaging, though. “Both the Louvre and the British Museum started to collect around roughly the same time, so we know there was a healthy international trade in Egyptian artifacts.” The Louvre built up a lot of its early collection from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, and after Napoleon was defeated by Lord Nelson, much of the loot was redirected to the British Museum.
    â€œArchaeology and museums grew up together,” St. Hilaire explained. “It is important to understand that modern scientific archaeology is a relatively new idea. That practice started fairly late in human history, when the folks from Britain ended up in modern-day Iraq and Egypt. For many years, the difference between archaeology and treasure-hunting is indistinguishable. Looting was the norm.”
    In the nineteenth century, Egyptomania hit Britain and other parts of the world full force. The aristocracy in London held mummy-unwrapping parties. Ancient Egyptians could not have predicted the value the world would place, thousands of years later, on the objects they created. Stealing cultural heritage became mainstream, and a group of collectors sprang up, first in the West and then in wealthy pockets around the globe. “What’s important to remember is that there was nothing illegal about taking these artifacts. It was all a free market at that point.” This was Indiana Jones for real. Men came to the desert from far-off lands and carried pieces of it home with them.
    In Egypt, that changed in the mid-twentieth century, when the country began to wrestle back control of its cultural heritage from foreign-interest groups. The Department of Antiquities was created to take stock of ancient treasures and move forward on archaeological work. Of the sixty-three tombs excavated from the Valley of the Kings when it was rediscovered in 1992, not one dig had been led by an Egyptian. But by 2002, Zahi Hawass, an Egyptian archaeologist and showman, had taken charge of Egyptian antiquities and seemed to rule the billion-dollar industry with the power of a pharaoh. Hawass, head of what’s now called the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told a writer at The New Yorker, “To control all this, you have to make them fear you and make them love you at the same time.” He controlled the pyramids at Giza and all the