Recently, more than ever, Mesoamericanists have had reason to share in the regret felt by Egyptologists at one aspect of the history of antiquities-looting in Egypt - one clearly tinged with tragic irony. For, as Brian Fagan (1975: 11, 261) and others have pointed out, attempts to remove sculpture from ancient Egyptian sites on a large scale began only in the 1820s, and that was just the period when Champollion was achieving his basic decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Since the coveted basrelief sculptures usually had to be prised from their settings by using chisels and crowbars, any associated hieroglyphic inscriptions tended to end up in smithereens. Champollion himself, as he travelled through Egypt seeking and transcribing texts, became appalled at the destruction, yet more than half a century would pass before collectors and museums came to recognize the damage they were causing through their purchases.