[CPProt.net] keeper of the pharaohs

[CulPropProtNet/MuSecNetwork]

keeper of the pharaohs

Weekend • June 11, 2005

Yvonne Lim
yvonne at newstoday.com.sg

THAT Indiana Jones hat and roguish smile are more than a tad familiar, but
Zahi Hawass (picture) isn't a movie-star: He's more, he's the real thing.

The man has dominion over Egypt's famous ancient monuments, discoveries
like the fabulously-named Valley of the Golden Mummies under his belt, and
an outspoken personality that television viewers so love but harassed
museum curators around the world dread.

Working with the stuff of legends, he's a folk icon of sorts himself (by
his own modest account, "more well-known than a movie star to Egyptians").

Meet the guardian of the Sphinx and the Gil Grissom of CSI: Ancient Egypt
— in this first of an occasional series of travelogues that take you Out
of Office, on an offbeat trek around the world.

[Page turn]

What's a folk hero from Egypt without oodles of extravagant, Arabic charm?
Think Omar Shariff.

Even forewarned of the famed advances of the Egyptian male (one taxi
driver offered to marry my single female friend, we were serenaded through
the Khan-Al-Khalili market with cries of "You want souvenir? You want a
man?", and someone was offered 12 camels for his woman) – I learn just how
potent the Hawass charm can be, when a hardbitten female journalist fairly
swoons at his feet during a round-table interview.

Her Malaysian newsroom colleagues, upon learning she was to meet National
Geographic's explorer-in-residence, had assailed her with requests for
autographs.

Until about 25 years ago, the only faces audiences saw on TV, lecturing on
the mysteries of the pyramids or guiding them through shadowy torch-lit
tombs of the pharaohs, were white ones.

"The documentaries showed a foreigner entering a tomb, and a local there
smiling like stupid," says Dr Hawass. That all changed after he was named
secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities – effectively,
the steward of 30 dynasties of pharaohs, queens and their monumental
treasures.

Since he burst on the scene in the mid-1980s, Dr Hawass has been driving
to reclaim Egyptology for the Egyptians.

Up until half a century ago, locals couldn't scribble notes inside the
Cairo museum, then under French directorship, without being tossed out –
for fear 'the natives' would learn how to read the hieroglyphics and
unseat their European superiors, according to Dr Hawass' account.

"Now, children stop me on the streets and ask me, "Uncle, what are you
going to find next?", says the farmer's son who wrangled a Fulbright
scholarship to study in the US.

He passes that remark about more-than-movie-star celebrity with an utter
lack of self-consciousness, just to make the point that "Egyptology is in
the heart of everyone here now".

But fixated foreigners like us, when we meet him, always seem to ask one
question: Has he ever been cursed?

"No one has entered more sealed tombs than I have," he points out –
letting the evidence that he is standing hale and virile before us speak
for itself.

While wild rumours were spun around the "mysterious" deaths of people
connected with the opening of King Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922 (even though
the man who actually did it, Howard Carter, lived to a ripe old age of
66), more balanced minds have long since debunked the theory of a
"pharaoh's curse".

Ancient fungal spores, if anything, have been identified has the main
threat to the health of archaeologists invading a tomb for the first time.

Scorning at face-masks, Dr Hawass, does, however, avoid shaving on the day
he opens a tomb – in case ancient germs infect a fresh cut. He also airs a
freshly-opened tomb for two days. But that's as far as the ritual goes.

"Accidents happen," he says matter-of-factly. Like the time in a tomb 30
feet underground at Bahariya, when he broke a lamp and was knocked out
cold by the electric current. "If I had died then, everybody would have
believed in the curse!"

[Page break]

"There is no curse of the pharaohs. The only curse is us."

Dr Hawass says this more than once. By "us", he means the thousands of
black-market plunderers, corrupt bureaucrats, fortune hunters, bumbling
amateur excavators, New Age theorists (searching for the secrets of the
extraterrestrials -- "pyramidiots", he calls them) and tourists.

Bit by bit, they are probably doing more to destroy legacies from the dawn
of human civilization than 5,000 years have.

At Giza, the grubby fringes of the city and exhaust-belching packs of tour
buses push almost right up to the feet of the pyramids (including the
Cheops pyramid, the last surviving wonder of the ancient world) –
disgorging smog and tourists like Moses' locust swarm.

In Luxor, in the Valley of the Kings where Egypt's royalty hid their dead
(unsuccessfully) from ancient tomb-robbers in vast underground mazes, we
spot areas of priceless wall paintings or hieroglyphics chipped off by
modern-day thieves.

Fragile artwork on walls and ceilings are showing signs of the moisture
and vibrations created by 5 million tourists tramping through the tombs in
a year. All over Egypt, leaking sewers, rising water tables, the rumble of
tour-bus traffic, and more, are threatening its historical treasures.

"Egypt's monuments can be finished in 100 years because of what's
happening," says Dr Hawass. "Mass tourism is the worst. It is very
important for Egypt's economy, but very bad for Egypt."

He adds, "Of the foreigners who come to excavate, maybe some of them care
about preservation, but the majority care only about discoveries."

No case illustrates this more poignantly than that of Egypt's most famous
figure, the boy-king Tutankhamen. When Howard Carter unearthed his tomb in
Luxor in 1922, the Englishman's team hacked the mummy into 18 pieces, to
get at the jewellery and gold mask adorning it. Enough of the tomb's loot,
thankfully, has landed up in the Cairo museum where it is the most popular
exhibit next to the infamous "mummies' room".

Ironically, King Tut's celebrity is being used today to help drive the
rescue and preservation of Egypt's antiquities.

Early this year, a team led by Dr Hawass applied modern CT scan technology
to a 3,000-year-old riddle: Just how did King Tut die? (See boxed story).
The "curse", incidentally, raised its hoary head when, on the day the
mummy was to be scanned in Cairo, it rained in the desert and the CT scan
machine broke down. "For an hour, Siemens (which supplied the machine) was
so afraid because they thought no one would want to use the machine after
that!" he laughs.

The fruits of that intense study will go on exhibition in the US and
Germany, with the proceeds to go towards restoration efforts in Egypt,
says Dr Hawass. And following the first success, the same non-invasive CT
scan forensic method will now be used on hundreds of other mummies –
revealing more about the ancient Egyptians than perhaps was ever possible.

Meanwhile, massive efforts – always hampered by a lack of funds – have
been made to manage tourism at places like Giza and Luxor, restore and
conserve monuments, and limit excavations. There are currently about 200
archaeological teams working in Egypt, says Dr Hawass.

"I have said, no more amateurs, you have to be an expert if you want to
excavate here. Two teams asked if they could be permitted to drill in the
pyramids. Would you like me to drill in your Notre Dame Cathedral?

"Any new excavations must be at the Nile delta area where the rising water
table is damaging what's under the ground." But no more new digs, he says
emphatically, in the upper Nile region as these do more harm than good to
the underground tombs.

The new rules in Egypt have upset some foreign archaeologists, Dr Hawass
admits. And not a few government officials and museums have bristled, too,
at his straight-talking campaign to get Egyptian artefacts – many of them
taken out of Egypt illegally years ago – returned from abroad.

The royal corpse of Ramses I was returned from Atlanta recently. Also
targeted are the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti in Germany, and the
Rosetta Stone, key to the mystery of the hieroglyphs, now lying in the
British Museum.

Yet there is more this guardian of the dead wants to do, before he joins
them.

In a room in the Cairo museum, the mummies of great kings and queens lie,
their unwrapped shrunken, leathery faces exposed to the indignity of
tourists gawking, scrutinising, poking fun.

"I don't like mummies in general," says Dr Hawass, with more than a bit of
irony. When Princess Margaret visited about 25 years ago, he says, she
covered her eyes and "ran away" rather than gaze upon the features of
Ramses II. "A mummy is a human being. I don't like looking at mummies for
thrills," she had told Dr Hawass.

He adds, "I took her point. I began saying to everyone, mummies shouldn't
be shown in a museum. If I had the power, I would return every mummy to
its tomb. That's what I want to do before I die."

For the voyeuristic, a trip to Egypt might be a good idea before this
happens. But until then, the dead, and Dr Hawass, will just have to put up
with the curse of the living.