For History.com, I wrote about some very ancient watersports:
Sometime in 1820, a Greco-Syrian merchant, diplomat and antiquities hunter named Giovanni Anastasi brought workmen with crowbars to a secret site in the desert opposite the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes (Waset), within the boundaries of present-day Luxor. There, he had them pry sections of thick plaster from the walls of an ancient tomb chapel carved into the limestone hills during the 18th Dynasty, before 1350 B.C.
Anastasi then sold the 11 plaster fragments, containing portions of eight painted scenes, to the British consul general, Henry Salt, who included them in an antiquities collection he eventually unloaded at a loss to the British Museum for what he called the “miserable sum” of £2,000.