Wow, those Egyptians astound me. I visited the Valley Of The Kings in the early 1980s as a kid and found a variety of artifacts -Pottery at Aswan, stone tools at the Pyramid of Zozer, Roman glassware at Alexandrea etc- (one was a human bone with knife marks in it from the very tomb of King Tutankhamen... which I found on the rubble on the floor of the burial chamber) and when I tried to give it to security, they laughed at me and said "No! Rock. Not want". I even took them to the Cairo Museum where I was ignored and sent away.

These days they accuse the West of hundreds of years of looting their treasures when in reality, they've been ignorant of their own heritage for thousands of years. The kicker for me is that nobody in Cairo today is related to the people who lived there in the past. You should have seen the spectacular pieces other tourists found in the dirt whilst we were there.