Grave Robbing: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:Graverobber.png|link=Girl Genius|frame|In some areas, graverobbing is an honorable family business.]]

 

{{quote|''"And it's my job... to steal and rob... '''GRAAAAAAAAAAVESSSSS'''!"''|[[Large Ham|The Graverobber]], ''[[Repo! The Genetic Opera]]''}}

 

{{examples}}

== Anime and Manga ==

* [[Yu-Gi-Oh!|Bakura, the Tombrobber.]] Some justification in that his start was robbing from the evil kings who sacrifice his village for dark magic.

* In Scotland back in the day, selling corpses to medical schools could be quite lucrative as mentioned in the article. Thus, many were obtained through not-so-legal methods.

** Not just Scotland, the practice was common in many countries. "Doctor riots", mobs beating up medical professionals after a grave had been found desecrated, occurred in several US cities in the nineteenth century. Scotland is most famous because of those jolly chaps [[wikipedia:Burke and Hare murders|Burke and Hare]] who realised that waiting for bodies to be buried, then digging them up took longer than making fresh bodies out of unsuspecting boarders.

** Note that at the height of the British graverobbing trade, stealing the corpse itself wasn't actually against the law: officially, a dead body had no monetary value, so taking one wasn't a criminal offense. Stealing anything buried with the corpse ''was'' illegal, so graverobbers often stripped a body naked and threw everything it wore back into the coffin. This legal loophole existed because the government knew that medical schools needed bodies to study, so dragged their feet about closing it.

* Egyptian pyramids were often targeted by thieves for the incredible amount of wealth stored in there. Tutankhamen's tomb is famous for being one of the rare exceptions.

** Tut's was a cave tomb in the Valley of Kings, the smallest and most easily overlooked. None of the pyramids has anything worth stealing left in it.

** Speaking of body desecration, [[Fridge Logic|currently there is a number of mummified corpses on display in the central museum of Cairo (and maybe other ones too) for all those tourist drones to gawk on and serve as an attraction (along with the tombs themselves)]].

* Leonardo Da Vinci often resorted to this [[For Science!|to advance his research]], as did Michelangelo for his art.

* Ed Gein, the infamous source of inspiration for [[Psycho|Norman Bates]], [[Silence of the Lambs|Jame Gumb]], and [[The Texas Chainsaw Massacre|Leatherface]], exhumed bodies from graveyards and created trophies out of their bones and skin.

* The [[Values Dissonance|United States]] [[wikipedia:Pillaging#Looting of Native American archaeological sites|systematically plundered and destroyed many Native American sacred sites]]. This practice continued well into the 20th century until it was banned by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990.

** [[Fridge Logic|Not sure how this gains anything,]] since the same amount of work (or more) is going into the fake burials. Then there's the smell and health hazards of the real bodies lying around.

** The fires used to incinerate wood (or garbage) aren't nearly as hot as crematorium fires (a few hundred degrees versus a few thousand—thus much, much cheaper to run), so homeboy just lit some trash on fire, gave the ashes to the bereaved, and threw the bodies in a mass-grave in a nearby swamp. But yes, the smell was how the dumb-ass got caught.