Societies with high human capital respect the dead and won't seize upon the first opportunity to rob their graves (rationalizing as "learning" or whatever doesn't cut it). There's plenty of other material that was willfully published to learn from.
To me the long dead are meaningless, and the recently dead are mostly so. I have the utmost respect for the living, and those who are recently dead have people who care about their legacy. But the farther you go back you go, the less direct connection the dead have with the present, and the simple fact is that the dead are gone.