Dig days: Against all odds
By
Zahi Hawass
As you know, I am appalled by Joan Fletcher's announcement that she had found the mummy of Nefertiti. First of all it has no scientific basis, second she ignored the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) regulations, and third she misled the public. In my last column I quoted a letter from Dr Rosalie David, professor and director of the Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at the School of Sciences in Manchester, in which she stated that Joan Fletcher was not an expert on mummies and that in fact her study was on wigs and hairstyles.
I would like now to share with you passages of a letter from George Tassie, an archaeologist who works in the Delta and who wrote in response to the offensive article published by The Times on 22 August 2003 entitled: "How Nefertiti Put a Curse on British Archaeologist".
The most disturbing part of The Times article, he wrote, was the interview with an unnamed British Egyptologist who declared that Dr Hawass and the Supreme SCA were practicing a form of cultural nationalism and that, desirous to keep Egyptology for Muslims, they had issued new regulations that make life "very hard for foreign Egyptologists". This is a dangerous and inflammatory remark, presumably based on the fact that there is now a moratorium on excavation in the Nile Valley.
During the Eighth International Congress of Egyptologists (Cairo: 28 March--3 April 2000) members of the SCA voiced their concern at the rate of destruction of sites in the Nile Delta, and many leading archaeologists from around the world called for attention to be directed towards that area, and other threatened regions.
For that reason it was declared that while concessions would be granted during the upcoming 10 years, for widespread restoration, conservation, archaeological survey, documentation and epigraphical work, new concessions would not be granted between Giza and Abu-Simbel. However, new applications for excavation concessions in the Western Desert, the Eastern Desert and the Delta would be granted.
These regulations are welcomed by the larger community of archaeologists who are concerned with protecting Egypt's cultural heritage against such modern threats as salinisation of the soil from the high water table and the flooding of vast areas of land, mechanised farming techniques and agricultural expansion, the activities of the sebakhin (people who dig in ancient mud-brick settlement sites for fertiliser or for brick manufacture), not to mention building and development projects, pollution, and expanding urban development, all of which are acutely felt in the Delta. Although sites in Upper Egypt are similarly threatened, they do not face problems so severe as those in Lower Egypt.
In cases where an archaeological site in the Nile Valley does face a direct threat from any of the above causes, and just reason can be given for its excavation with a view to protection, the SCA will grant permission for such archaeological work.
The anonymous Egyptologist's claim that Egyptians do not like the British and resent them for their colonial past is too outrageous to dignify with further comment. I shall simply refer him or her to a paper by DM Reid (1984) entitled "Indigenous Egyptology: the decolonisation of a profession?" (Journal of American Oriental Society 105: 233-246).
The SCA recognises the need for more collaborative projects between international and Egyptian archaeologists, and the dissemination of both academic and technical information. We welcome help both in terms of teaching young Egyptian in the advanced techniques of field archaeology, and in building an archaeological infrastructure. We are custodians of a rich world heritage and welcome all who wish to protect it.
