Reading about Ancient Egypt, I keep coming across this figure of the tomb-robber, which the Pharaohs and their architects took extreme measures to protect themselves from, building false walls, tunnels, mazes, and so on, to fool them, placing tombs at the bottom of shafts and other inaccessible places.
My question is this: Who were these tomb-robbers? If they were ordinary Egyptian peasants, wouldn't they have been over-awed and frightened by the superstitions and magic surrounding the burial places of the Pharaohs and his family and court? It suggests, to me, that these tomb-robbers were not superstitious and perhaps not even religious.
The problem is that some of those robbers worked in the tomb they built, during my egyptology course, I saw a papyrus about the trial of tomb robbers who worked in tomb building. They knew where the entrance were and what were the plans of the tombs, but that's just one catgory. Moreover the gold of the new empire pharao's was probably taken by a later dynasty to finance their success during the third intermidiary perdiod. Don't forget that Tutankhamun was an almost insignificant pharao in comparison with Tutmosis III or Ramses II.