Many museums are privately owned and funded - the luckier ones have endowments. While some items are donated by patrons, when items show up on the market museu

Many museums are privately owned and funded - the luckier ones have endowments. While some items are donated by patrons, when items show up on the market museums do purchase them. This isn't really a government funding problem, most museums in the US get most of their funding from private donations. (While ancient manuscript fragments are purchased by museums, the larger collections are held by academic libraries, and while those do need public funding, they typically do have the ability to purchase items relevant to their collections.) The reasons things got complex here was that the private party was selling an antiquity through an odd venue (a lot of antiquities are sold on eBay, but it's mostly common items of less historic interest). These sort of things would usually be sold through Sothebys, or Christie's, or some other auction house where they'd catalog the item, and make sure researchers and interested parties would be aware. This one slipped under the radar until the researcher at UT spotted it because of the fact that it was on eBay. This item turned out to be a highly historically significant find discovered by researchers too late for an institutional purchase (which is a slow process), and sold in a way that doesn't fit typical institutional purchase models. There's also tension between academic researchers and antiquities collectors that this helped exacerbate. Antiquities collectors are seen by researchers as encouraging looting of archaeological sites and of buying historically significant items and harming the public at large by preventing the possibility of research. Many antiquities collectors, and especially dealers have their own low opinions of academics as well.