Looting Greece

Greece's efforts to turn its coastline into an open water museum may be subjecting it to looting. The thought of the government offering redundant or unwanted antiquities for sale at reasonable prices has not occurred to them and so the collector will get it anyway and besides many people find smuggling antiquities exciting and profitable.

That is why men like Wallis Budge, Howard Carter and many more upstanding individuals participated in such ventures.

You might want to look at Norbert Schimmel's collection of Amarna talatats in the Metropolitan museum of art or Ani's book of the dead in the British museum, the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin or the Dendera zodiac in the Louvre or perhaps George Ortiz's collection of Egyptian middle kingdom bronzes in Switzerland not to mention the mask called Kanefernefer in the St. Louis art museum and that is just some of the Egyptian pieces, Greece is no different.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/30/greek-shipwrecks-scuba-diving-ban