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Egypt’s Chief Archaeologist Defends His Rights (and Wrongs)

By Hershel Shanks

On Sunday, January 16, I interviewed Zahi Hawass in his office in Zamalek, the elegant Cairene island in the Nile and home of the Gezira Sports Club, from which Hawass commanded an army of 32,000 employees as secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. The following Thursday, I left Egypt. And five days later the mass protests erupted that would topple the government of Hosni Mubarak. As part of an effort to save his thoroughly despised regime, Mubarak appointed Hawass Minister for Antiquities. One blogger described Hawass’s appointment this way: “Zahi Hawass, the bombastic, clownish pseudo-archaeologist who has […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Hershel Shanks, First Person: “A Name in Search of a Story,” BAR 24:01.

2.

Manfred Bietak, “Israelites Found in Egypt,” BAR, September/October 2003.

3.

I am advised by Joseph Aviram, president of the Israel Exploration Society, which is publishing the final report of the excavation, that the volume is nearing completion. Shmuel Ahituv and Esther Eshel, who were recently assigned to publish the inscriptions, have completed their work, and the volume awaits only the final contribution of excavator Ze’ev Meshel. The volume should be in print, according to Aviram, in 2011. But, still, that is 35 years after the excavation, an embarrassment to Israeli archaeology.

Endnotes

1.

See J.B. Prichard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton, 1969), p. 229.

2.

Dr. Hawass has written an article on this in English in the Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. He correctly regards the suggestion as pure “speculation.” For text of article, google “Ibsha.”

3.

See Hershel Shanks, ed., Ancient Israel—From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2011), p. 41.