Grave robbery

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Grave robbery, tomb robbing, or tomb raiding is the act of uncovering a grave, tomb or crypt to steal commodities. It is usually perpetrated to take and profit from valuable artefacts or personal property.^{[n 1]} A related act is body snatching, a term denoting the contested or unlawful taking of a body (seldom from a grave), which can be extended to the unlawful taking of organs alone.

Grave robbing has caused great difficulty to the studies of archaeology, art history, and history.^[1][2] Countless precious grave sites and tombs have been robbed before scholars were able to examine them. In any way, the archaeological context and the historical and anthropological information are destroyed:

Looting obliterates the memory of the ancient world and turns its highest artistic creations into decorations, adornments on a shelf, divorced from historical context and ultimately from all meaning.^[3]

Grave robbers who are not caught usually sell relatively modern items anonymously and artifacts on the black market. Those intercepted, in a public justice domain, are inclined to deny their guilt. Though some artifacts may make their way to museums or scholars, the majority end up in private collections.^[4]

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