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UNIT 4: ENVIRONMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
obliged to spend half his time in pursuit of private funding.
Egypt’s own Supreme Council for Antiquities is beginning to go commercial. Earlier
this year, its officials obligingly staged the ‘discovery’ of a tomb by the Giza
pyramids for Fox Television. The US network paid US$60,000 for the privilege.
National Geographic recently coughed up US$30,000 for exclusive film rights to
the cache of mummies at Bahariya.
These sums are paltry compared with the task at hand, however. Much of the site
at Akhmim, for example, lies beneath a village and a modern cemetery. Relocating
them will cost as much as $10m. The budget for dismantling and rebuilding the
2,500-year-old Temple of Hibis at the oasis of Kharga, which is threatened by
rising groundwater, is a hefty $6m. This is only one of hundreds of monuments —
including some 200 medieval buildings in the centre of Cairo — that need urgent
attention.
Fixing the Temple of Hibis is likely to exhaust funds earmarked for work
in Egypt’s oasis regions. Too bad, because these remote areas have lately
produced remarkable finds: some recent desert discoveries include a Sixth-
Dynasty governor’s palace that proves early Egyptian occupation of the oases, a
gold crown from the Ptolemaic period, and a surprising cache of Greek papyri,
among them unique scriptures from the Manichaean religion that vied with early
Christianity.
More pressing perhaps is that many desert sites need protection from treasure
hunters. At an abandoned Roman fortress town 40km from Kharga, scavengers
last year used backhoes to rip open cemeteries, leaving a macabre scattering of
discarded mummy parts. At a nearby site that can be reached only by four-wheel
drive vehicles, a desert guide recently caught a group of American tourists redhanded.
They were using metal detectors and air compressors to sift through the
ruins for booty.
Yet the damage from pilfering pales in comparison with the organised menace
of mass tourism. At sites such as the Valley of the Kings or Sakkara, thousands
of visitors mill about each day in cramped tombs that were designed for one
occupant’s afterlife. The deterioration of the paintings and reliefs on their walls
is plain to see. Even the apparently indestructible pyramids of Giza are suffering.
With each visitor who descends to their inner chambers exhaling some 20 grams
of clammy water vapour, cracks have begun to appear. The antiquities service
now works the great structures in shifts, closing one each year for rest and
recuperation. Sadly, this solution cannot work for monuments that are more
unique or more delicate.
“Tourism is already a catastrophe,” says Mr. Stadelmann, who like most
Egyptologists is understandably worried about the future. “But we have to admit
that without tourism there would be no public interest, and without that there
would be no money for our work.” He is right, but as tourist numbers grow, Egypt
is going to have to find a better balance between showing off its heritage and
preserving it.
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