The King of the pharaohs
Thursday November 27, 2003, The Guardian

Tim Radford meets the man who put Egypt back into Egyptology


Zahi Hawass is overlord of the underworld. At 56, he is the secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. The Sphinx, the great pyramids at Giza and the step pyramids of Saqqara all lie within his dominion. So too does all the buried treasure of Egypt, be it 100,000 years old or 100. The pharaohs of 30 dynasties are his, and all their coffins and grave goods, and in his care are the ruins left behind by the armies of Alexander, Marc Antony and Napoleon.

Hawass's sway matches that of any pharaoh, and his influence does not stop at Egypt's borders. He says things that can rattle teeth and raise dust in Berlin, New York and London, especially when he starts asking for his mummy back - the royal corpse of Rameses I was returned from Atlanta last month - or the bust of Queen Nefertiti from Germany, or the Rosetta Stone, key to the mystery of the hieroglyphs, now in the British Museum.

Hawass is not a demure man. He began a lecture in London last week with a 14-minute promotional video showing himself opening sarcophagi and exploring pyramids in his broad-brimmed hat, and stepping out with Bill Clinton, the Blairs and Laura Bush - with a cameo role for Egypt's most famous actor, Omar Sharif. By Hawass's own account, he gradually took charge of an underpaid and sometimes corrupt army of guards and inspectors, and a haphazard system of storage for two centuries of archaeological plunder, and turned it into an efficient professional bureaucracy. The French, British, Germans and Americans may have launched the science of Egyptology: but Hawass has begun to reclaim it for the Egyptians.

He has done this in the face of a 4,000-year-old tradition of tomb robbery, a thriving black market in Egyptian artefacts, and leaking sewers and a rising water table that threaten tombs that have survived 4,500 years; not to mention five million tourists a year, each exhaling an ounce of moisture inside tomb and temple, centuries of bureaucratic inertia, a bit of hostility from some Western scholars and, of course, a cadre of New Age theorists convinced the pyramids were put up by extraterrestrials or that each open tomb invokes an ancient curse.

Hawass speaks English swiftly and volubly, sentences tumbling out, the grammar sometimes awry but the words vivid. And he talks tough. Egypt has far more history than you could shake a stick at, and it is being rediscovered faster than it is being conserved. So in the next few years, Hawass is going to put archaeological excavation in upper Egypt on hold. He will close pyramids one at a time for restoration and clear the immediate site of car parks and camel-hirers, souvenir hustlers and pizza stands. He will also open 13 new museums, train more graduates, and preserve more tombs.

"We are the only ones who really can care about the preservation," he says. "Foreigners who come to excavate, maybe some of them care about preservation, but the majority care about discoveries. I made these new rules: if you come and discover a tomb, you should preserve it, you should do the conservation, don't give it to me to do.

"I spent, in the last year, half a billion Egyptian pounds in preservation, not one pound came from foreign aid, because most of the foreigners working in Egypt concentrate on discoveries - and we do help them, but we ask: if you discover something, you should really publish it. Also, in the rules we are making, you need to publish it in your language, and also in Arabic, because this can help the Egyptians to understand. And if you discover something, you cannot go and reveal it in your country without telling us. It has to be reviewed by us and announced by us in your name. Then after that you can take it and announce it everywhere."

Hawass has done a fair bit of discovery himself: he started as an inspector of antiquities with a graduate degree in the Graeco-Roman period, fell in love with Egyptology, did a master's degree, got a Fulbright scholarship at the age of 33, chose the University of Pennsylvania, and then returned at 40 to make a career at Giza, home of the pyramid of Khufu - the Greeks called him Cheops - and the Sphinx. He and his colleagues discovered another pyramid at Giza, they unearthed the dormitory village of the craftsmen and labourers who put up the pyramids on a diet of bread and onions and beer and the roasted flesh of 11 cows and 33 goats every day. He overcame a childhood fear of the dark, survived a heart attack and a near-electrocution. And - after a donkey accidentally stepped in a hole in the ground at the oasis of Barahiya - he began to dig in what became known as the Valley of the Golden Mummies. He knows what it is like to hold something hidden 40 centuries ago.

"The first statue I found was a statue of a dwarf. When I entered a shaft, about 5 metres down, and I held this statue in my hands, it was exactly like when I held my first son, when he was born - exactly the same feeling. When you enter the shaft for the first time - that no one has entered before you - in the dark, the excitement and the adventure go to your heart, it trembles the heart, and this is why when you reveal it, you tremble the heart of the people," he says. "When you see it in a movie, it is a thrill, but in a movie, they set this up. But for us, it is not a movie. It is real."

The antiquities council has 30,000 officials and more than 4,000 archaeologists. Each foreign team, from a recognised institution, must agree to employ an Egyptian inspector on the dig, providing experience and a network of international contacts, and have their research translated into Arabic. They must conserve and catalogue what they find and above all, they must publish. Hawass wants an end to the free-for-all. Modern Egypt has no place for Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. He thinks some British archaeologists are upset because for the first time in the history of Egyptology, there are rules. Honest people and serious researchers agree with him, he says.

But he did discover one researcher working on five sites at once. "How? How can you excavate five sites at once? There is no way. Take one site, finish it, and I give you another. If you discover a tomb, you cannot go and discover another tomb, no! You have to restore this tomb first and publish. Some people discovered 13 tombs in the last 10 years and never published one tomb. No. Sit down, stay home, publish them, bring me the books and I will let you work again," he says.

He wants no more adventurers, thieves or people with bizarre theories to confirm. Years ago, he coined the word "pyramidiots" to describe those with daft ideas about the pyramids: the word deserves a place in the Oxford English dictionary. Tough talk, however, began in Egypt itself.

"I did something very important that people will appreciate in the future. Our monuments are stored in very bad storage magazines: you yourself can go and open them, by hand, get in and take artefacts. Or you can go and bribe a guard," he says. "That is something I really looked at carefully, at the beginning. I contracted the Egyptian army to build for us 37 new storage magazines, with well-made shelves, conservation rooms, photography department, lab for recording: it's like museum storage, a museum, but not open to the visitor; it is a museum for scholars to keep and record monuments, and these are fantastic: we completely stopped most of the artefacts leaving Egypt."

He has also asked for the return of a few selected items. By international convention, property removed illegally after 1972 must be returned. This is being interpreted generously. The mummy of Rameses I turned up in a Niagara Falls museum in 1860: a museum at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, returned the roving royal in October. Scotland Yard helped crack an important papyrus theft 10 years ago; Swiss authorities intercepted 280 artefacts in Basle and have just shipped them back to Cairo. He has his eye on Nefertiti, supposedly shown to Egyptian authorities under a mask of muddy gypsum and allowed to go to Germany. When Egypt asked for it back in the 1930s, Hitler stepped in. It remains in Berlin. The British Museum's Rosetta stone - showing the same text in Greek, hieroglyphic and demotic - helped scholars crack the language of the pharaohs 200 years ago.

"I am saying: I give you exhibitions, you should help me. Ninety five per cent of Egyptians never saw the Rosetta stone, never saw the bust of Nefertiti, never saw the Zodiac in the Louvre, never the statue of Hemiunu, architect of the Great Pyramid at Hildesheim Museum, never saw the statue of Ankhkhaf, architect of the second museum at Boston Museum of Fine Arts in America. I need them to be shown for a [short] period of time: even though I know all of them went, legally, in old times. Except the bust of Nefertiti. That left illegally," he says. "What I am saying is that we need to have good cooperation between all of us. I believe that Egyptology is not just for us Egyptians, it is for everyone. These monuments do not belong to us, they belong to everyone. We are only the guardians."

His father was a farmer: Hawass senior told his son never to put his hands in the dirt. "He died when I was 13. He was a good man and I still remember what he told me. He said: 'Never be afraid of anyone. You have to trust yourself. [And] you have to be honest. If you are honest, nobody can get you.'"

Not even, by the way, a cursing pharaoh. If there was any truth in the curse of the mummy, propagated since Carnarvon and Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutakhamun, Hawass would have been dead many times. He doesn't shave on the day he opens a tomb in case ancient germs infect any fresh cuts, and when he moves a lid he stands well back and lets the fresh air blow away the foulness of 20 or 30 centuries. But he doesn't worry about the curse. When he pushed a lamp too far in a tomb at Bahariya, the wire broke, and he fainted from the shock.

"When I got up I told my colleagues that if anything had happened to me, everyone would believe in the curse. I found in one of the tombs an inscription saying, 'If you touch my tomb, you will be eaten by a crocodile and hippopotamus.' It doesn't mean the hippo will eat you, it means the person really wanted his tomb to be protected."