Some years ago, I'd stumbled across a story that Thutmose II (maybe Thutmose III, it's been a while), who had gone to Giza and that the Sphinx had "spoken to him", begging Thutmose to excavate and restore it. Previous to this point, according to the tale I'd seen, the Sphinx, approximately 1,200 to 1,500 years old by this point, had been buried to its head in sand dunes and had been largely forgotten.

Recently it had come back to mind, and now, I can't help but wonder: was there any sort of organized archaeological...anything, really...back in the Classical Mediterranean World?

Obviously there was tomb-robbing and some might say that they were, in a very lose and extremely unscientific process, archaeologists of a sort, but that's not really what I mean. And while a modern understanding of what we might call archaeology didn't really exist, was there any sort of concerted belief by some contemporaries of this period that there was something to be learned by reconstructing the past through the recovering artifacts from those that came before as anything other than curiosities? The earliest records of anything of the sort I seem to be able to find, aside from the 'rediscovery' of the Sphinx by Thutmose would be various Byzantine religious archaeology, but that was in the 5th-8th centuries mostly if I recall and quite different.

And even if this was the case that it was considered such a taboo to "break" a myth by finding the mundane truth of the matter by recovering and examining artifacts or locations; to what extent was there a genuine antiquities market in, say, the Roman era, for Egyptian relics that even relative to them were absolutely ancient?

How widespread would the interest in it be: would they be confined, essentially to the provinces of Egypt and Libya and the Near East, or would there be some sort of desire of these sort of antiques throughout the Empire? Would they be actually displayed as antiquities, or would they simply be treated as a curiosity or novelty that someone might have?

Or, was there a sense of cultural superiority in a lot of ways by many of these ancient peoples such that the thinking was "They are not from our culture, and they are from millennia ago, so these things are junk and we don't have any interest in them at all", and thus there was essentially zero interest in this sort of material history until the birth of modern (that is, post-17th century) archaeology, first as an art and hobby and later as a genuine scientific and academic field?