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Hot take; would humanity have as many if Europeans/British didn't excavate them and put them in their own museums? I'm thinking we'd still have some, right? How much longer would it have taken to decipher?
That topic would make an interesting YouTube series.
Europeans pretty notoriously also destroyed a TON of things, especially in the antiquarian days. Schliemann with "troy" would be one of these but also like all of the native American things that weren't precious metals. So many Maya codices just torched. So many things just plowed under and away.
The codices weren't destroyed by antiquarians, they were destroyed by Catholic priests and their cronies who thought they were sinful long before the antiquarian era.
But what Schliemann did to Troy (and to other digs he supervised) was criminal. What happened with Pompeii, similarly criminal.
Yeah, I should have clarified on the codices
Thing is, a lot of it was looted. Not even like "Napoleon" style looted specifically for museums, like straight up, "The only reason we have it is because some officer thought it would make a nice trinket and snapped it off of some priceless altar and got bored of it and donated it later in life" sort of thing.
There's a reason archeologists look on archeology in the 19th century with a good deal of cringe, and it's not just the rampant racism and sexism. A LOT got destroyed in the process of "We want to learn about these things but we have no cultural frame of reference to study it in except to steal it from These People(tm)"
They also equated "valuable" with "important for knowledge," meaning that people like Heinrich Schliemann at Troy just bulldozed through things like pottery and domestic debris which would tell us about every day Trojan culture and just stopped when he found gold, something only the elite would have had for decoration.