This is the same for a lot of supposed “theft” by museums. Lots of “priceless” objects now were at the time junk, so they were thrown away.

> This is the same for a lot of supposed “theft” by museums.

Not to mention that in many countries art pieces predating a certain era are simply destroyed (on the ground that they're older than a particular religion).

And most of the pharaohs' tombs were pillaged and unique pieces were melt by actual thiefs for their gold.

These evil, evil, museums displaying these around the world for any visitor to see when you think these could have been melt for gold by thieves or simply destroyed because they were impure!

Evil western civilization. That western civilization is so evil it must be replaced!

Alternate theory, both are true.

Western societies took advantage of multiple other societies to plunder their treasures. Those same societies didn't have the infrastructure and/or care to preserve these things themselves.

Sometimes two things can be true.

If they do not care about them, they are not "treasures" by the standards of those cultures but rather "waste."

Not necessarily true- the majority of people don't know about 3-2-1 backup strategy and I've seen hundreds of "help! my { phone | SD card | computer } died and I lost all my family photos" posts