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

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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 tyrannized, bullied, and manipulated Egyptologists and Egyptian Villagers 036alike for years now, today officially accepted President Hosni Mubarak’s appointment as Minister of State for Antiquities.” On March 3, Hawass resigned but was reappointed in March (see sidebar).

But my interview with Hawass was before all this. True, Hawass was widely vilified—but also widely admired. The New Yorker called him the “international star of Egyptology … at the intersection of archaeology, show business and national politics.”

The New York Times, on the other hand, had characterized him as “obnoxious.” He threw “tantrums,” the Times said, at his subordinates. I was also aware, as the Times put it in another article, “He has been taken to task for his critical statements about Jews.”

I found him confident, overbearing, domineering, brash and loud. But he was also sometimes reasonable and often even charming.

Here is a taste of the atmosphere of the interview. Dr. Hawass had told me why he thought the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston should return to Egypt an ancient Egyptian bust. He then addressed me: “Do you agree on this?

HS: I don’t know.

ZH: I’m asking you. You ask me questions. I have to ask you questions.

HS: You’re the expert.

ZH: I’m not the expert. But you are a wise man.

HS: No, we have a division of labor. I ask the questions, you answer them.

ZH: How long are you staying in Cairo?

HS: We’re going to Alexandria on Tuesday.

ZH: If you need me to arrange for you anything, tell me.

At the beginning of the interview, I told Dr. Hawass: “We are the Biblical Archaeology Review, so I would like to ask you how the Israelite enslavement in Egypt and the subsequent Exodus look from the Egyptian point of view. How does an Egyptian scholar look at this?”

ZH: You are talking to me as an Egyptologist. You are not talking to me as someone who reads the Bible or the Quran. If you talk about Moses, we have no evidence at all about the Exodus, except the Israelite Stele in the Cairo museum [that mentions Israel in the late 13th century B.C.E.].

HS: The Merneptah Stele.

ZH: Yes. Why would we not have any evidence of the Bible in Egypt? Because if you look at ancient Egypt, what the king or the pharaoh had to do, he had to build a tomb for himself. He fights the enemies of Egypt. He unites the two lands. If he will do that, he will become a god. Therefore the scenes on the temple and the tombs have to do with this. There is no way in his tomb or in his temple that you will see anything connecting Egypt with the Bible [nor with the events of the Exodus].

Second, we discovered until now, in my opinion, 30 percent of the Egyptian monuments and it’s still 70 percent buried underneath the ground. Maybe one day, something can be discovered to tell us about Moses and how he lived in Egypt and how he escaped with his people.

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We talked about the context that archaeology might provide to the Biblical account. Hawass mentioned the painting in the Beni Hassan tomb of Asiatic traders coming down to Egypt. The leader of the Asiatics is named Ibsha.¹

ZH: Some people think that Ibsha is Abraham or Abram.² We think no.

Dr. Hawass was also not so sure that slavery, or the corvèe existed in ancient Egypt. “We are not sure; we don’t know,” he said.

I countered by drawing his attention to an ancient Egyptian papyrus listing slaves, some with Semitic names.^a One was named Shiphrah (see Exodus 1:15).³ (In the Bible, a woman named Shiphrah was a midwife whom Pharaoh instructed to kill any male Hebrew baby she delivered.) “I don’t know who Shiphrah was,” he replied. “I’m not talking about the Bible. I’m talking about archaeology, about what I know as an Egyptologist.”

I then turned to a four-room house discovered by the prominent Viennese Egyptologist Manfred Bietak in an old excavation report. This house design—three parallel long rooms internally separated by rows of pillars and a broad room across one end—is recognized as the standard Israelite house design, although a few have been found elsewhere. On this basis, Bietak concluded that the occupants of this house “could have been early Israelites, although we cannot prove this with any certainty.”^b Hawass agreed that it “may be. ‘Maybe’ is a word that you can make any interpretation of anything. I have no objection. We know from the holy books that they [the Israelites] lived here. But I’m talking to you as an archaeologist. I don’t like the word ‘maybe.’ I like absolute evidence. I don’t mind if it can be. I have no objection. I am not against discovering something like this. I would like that to be happening.”

From this, we turned to an Egyptian tomb discovered by the French archaeologist Alain Zivie at Saqqara about 25 years ago but very little known in the United States or in Israel—the tomb of Aper-El. Aper-El was a vizier of Egypt, second only to the pharaoh. All seem to agree that this is a Semitic name, the equivalent of the Hebrew Abed-El, Servant of God. This certainly doesn’t mean that the story of Joseph, who in the Bible rose to be the vizier of Egypt second only to Pharaoh, is historical, but it may provide a context for the Biblical story. Here Dr. Hawass was satisfied with “maybe”:

ZH: I wrote the introduction to the book that Alain Zivie published in Arabic. I said maybe. Why not have an Israelite placed in the Egyptian administration? Maybe. It can be. Aper-El was a prime minister in the time of Amenophis III and Akhenaten. [14th century B.C.E., two centuries before the rise of Israel].

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[But it may not be.] Look at my name. My name [Zahi] is Jahi in ancient Egyptian. Jahi means Zahi. That was a city in ancient Syria. My name is not Egyptian. And there is no one in Egypt whose name is Zahi except me. What I am saying is just because you have a Semitic name, you can’t show that this man is an Israelite. He can be, but he cannot be.

There are two options. He can be an important person who rises [to the office] at the time. If the Israelites lived with the Egyptians—and they did live in peace together—then why not someone could rise, someone could be trusted by the king and rise to this position.

Or maybe he was named Aper-El because an Egyptian loved a friend [an Israelite], whose name is Aper-El, and he called his son Aper-El.

What I’m saying is the name Aper-El could be an Egyptian’s name, like my name, Zahi. I’m Egyptian. But my name is Syrian. I’m not Syrian. We have someone, his name is Hitler, it doesn’t mean that he’s German. I’m saying that the name could be an Egyptian, but his father could be a good friend of an Israelite by the name of Aper-El and he gave his son the name.

I then turned to another subject, a site in Sinai called Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, excavated by Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ze’ev Meshel in the mid-1970s. Kuntillet ‘Ajrud was a caravanserai and religious center at an important crossroad of tracks in the desert. Two large pithoi, or storage jars, recovered in the excavation featured scenes and inscriptions painted on them. The inscriptions refer to Yahweh, the personal name of the Israelite God, and his asherah (or Asherah), perhaps his consort. Some believe the pictures portray Yahweh and his consort. Both the paintings and inscriptions are extremely faint and pale, requiring the most careful handling and storage. Israel returned these artifacts to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace agreement with Egypt. Rumor had it that the finds from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud still lay in the boxes they were returned in. I asked Dr. Hawass about them. “I don’t know where it is,” he answered. “If you want we can look into it. Send me the information. I will look at this and find out what this is.”

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Dr. Hawass then threw in a justifiable dig: “But if it belonged to Israel and they gave it to Egypt, why did they not study that and publish it? I have never seen any publication saying what you are telling me.”

“You are very right,” I replied.”^c

ZH: Send me an e-mail, explain to me the discovery, and I will look and see where it is.

Within days the Egyptian protests erupted and some archaeological looting occurred. According to a report issued by Dr. Hawass on February 3, 2011, there was a “break-in at the storage magazine at Qantara [on the western bank of the Suez Canal ]. We do not know exactly how many objects were stolen from this magazine, but a total of six boxes were taken.” Of course, Israeli archaeologists wondered if this looting included the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud finds. Then on March 3, the Egyptian press reported that 30 truckloads of antiquities had been moved for safekeeping from the Qantara storage facilities to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Included were “Sinai artifacts that were retrieved from Israel following the signing of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.” So we now know where they are. Whether they will ever be exhibited in Egypt—or conserved—is another question.

As is well known, Dr. Hawass has mounted a vigorous campaign to obtain the return of antiquities found in Egypt long ago. He explained:

ZH: I’m not against every [Egyptian] artifact in every museum. But anything that I do have evidence that they are stolen from Egypt should be back. I’ve [had] returned until now more than 5,000 artifacts.

HS: Do you feel that eventually you’ll get Nefertiti back from Berlin?

ZH: I have proof that this bust of Nefertiti left Egypt illegally. Just last week I sent my official request to the museum in Berlin to return it. [The request was promptly turned down.—Ed.]

ZH: There are six unique artifacts that are the icons of our Egyptian identity. They should be in Egypt. [See Rachel Hallote’s column.]

HS: What are they?

ZH: The Rosetta Stone from the British Museum in London; the bust of Nefertiti from the Neues Museum in Berlin; the Zodiac of Dendera from the Louvre; the statue of Ramses II in Turin, Italy; the statue of Hemiunu, architect of the Great Pyramid at Giza, in the Roemer-und Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany; and the bust of Ankhhaf, architect of the second pyramid at Giza, in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. [Identifications added to this paragraph.—Ed.]

Initially, Hawass wanted only to borrow these pieces for a short time, but he was treated badly by the museums:

ZH: When I began to look at these six unique objects, I said to myself, first, let us ask to have 044the bust of Nefertiti for a loan for three months and put it in the grand [Cairo] museum. They did not trust us. They said, “How can you guarantee that you will bring the bust back?” I said “Well I am not the Pirates of the Caribbean.” When I asked for a loan of the bust of Ankhhaf from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, you know what this director wrote me in a letter: ‘The bust of Ankhhaf is very fragile and it cannot travel.’ Very stupid answer. On the other hand, for the last 30 years, we are giving the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston free exhibits, cooperation, working in Egypt. What is their return? Is it to write to me a letter that the bust is fragile and it cannot travel?”

It would not be an honest interview with Dr. Hawass without talking of his allegedly anti-Semitic statements. Perhaps the most pervasive quote comes from an interview with Dr. Hawass in February 2009 on the Arabic television program El-Beit Beitak, where he stated, “The only things that the Jews have learned from history are methods of tyranny and torture—so much so that they have become artists in the field.”

In my interview, Dr Hawass stated that “What is said in El-Beit Beitak it is not from my mouth. It is from the mouth of the reporter who was interviewing me and they put it on me. I did [not] say this anywhere. I will never say anything to be anti-Semitic because I am Semitic.

In an article in a London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Dr. Hawass wrote: “The idea of killing children, old people and women and ignoring taboos runs in the blood of the Palestinian Jews.”

I asked Dr. Hawass if perhaps he spoke differently to an Arab audience than to a western audience. “No,” he replied. “I speak to the non-Arab audience like to the Arab audience. I am a man who is like this.”

On his Web site, however, Dr. Hawass does seem to state that he speaks differently to an Arab audience: “I was writing in Arabic in El-Sharq El-Awsat for a Middle Eastern audience. The cultural gulf between the West and the Middle East is so deep that I cannot blame people for misinterpreting my statements, but I would like for everyone to know that the tone that I adopted and the words that I chose were tailored to convey my emotions to other Arabic speakers in an idiom that they would appreciate.”

Substantively, Dr. Hawass explained in our interview:

ZH: I was really talking about history. Look at Israel. Look at history from the beginning, and how much they suffered, and what the Romans did against them, and how they began to be everywhere. No one thought they could have a nation. I want them to learn that the Palestinians will never be destroyed. They have to give them the land. They have to give them peace. That is my point. I tell them, “Learn from your history. You succeeded. You never knew that you can have a home after what happened to you. Then look at the Palestinians, they have the same problem that 045you had. Give them peace. Give them a nation.”

Dr. Hawass strongly asserted that he is not an anti-Semite: “Look at me. I’m a Semite. How can I be an anti-Semite? I have nothing against the Jews. Actually if you look at the Jews, they are my best friends. I lived in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania for seven years. Ninety-five percent of my good friends were Jews. But they agree with me completely.”

Dr. Hawass also pointed to another accomplishment demonstrating his friendship for Jews and Jewish culture—his restoration of synagogues in Egypt, the most prominent one being the Maimonides Synagogue, where the physician, rabbinic scholar and leader of the Egyptian Jewish community in the 12th century, Moshe ben Maimon, was buried before his body was removed to Tiberias in present-day Israel. “Before me, no one really ever touched the synagogues of the Jews in Egypt. Go to your rabbi in Washington DC [Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs of the American Jewish Committee]. He was here last month to thank me for the Maimonides Synagogue. It was neglected. I brought the glory to this temple, I restored it and I made a press conference to say that. And now I’m going to finish all the restoration of the nine temples in Cairo and one in Alexandria. Go to the Maimonides Synagogue. Tell me if a man can do this and be anti-Semitic.”

I asked Dr. Hawass about his relationship with Israeli archaeologists.

ZH: I have none. I will never do anything with Israeli archaeologists until they make peace. I am not going to cooperate with them in anything until they convince their government to make peace.

HS: But Egypt and Israel have made peace.

ZH: It doesn’t matter. I’m talking about peace for the Palestinians.

HS: You won’t work with an Israeli archaeologist?

ZH: No, no.

HS: Have you been to Israel?

ZH: No. I will not go. At all.

HS: Will you come as my guest?

ZH: I will not go. I will go when they make peace with the Palestinians.

HS: But to learn archaeology?

ZH: Why do I have to learn archaeology? I can learn it from reading. But to go there?

HS: And see the sites?

ZH: No, I need peace. I need them to make peace with the Palestinians.

HS: Would you be interested in talking to Israeli archaeologists in Egypt?

ZH: Why not? Yes, if they come, they can meet me. I am friendly with everyone. They have a role, in my opinion, that is to convince the Israeli government that for Israel to live in the future, they have to make peace. Peace is a security for the Israelis and all of the Jews. All the good Jews that I know, all of them, they agree that Israel has to work more on peace for the Palestinians.

HS: But you’ve got to talk. You don’t like the government’s policy. So okay. But you’ve got to talk.

ZH: I agree with you.

HS: So come to Israel as my guest. We won’t have anything to do with the government. You’ll come at no cost. We’ll only do archaeology.

ZH: Do you go there all the time?

HS: Yes, I know it well. I’m friendly with them. We don’t talk politics. We do archaeology. You’ll see wonderful things. Yes, you can read about it. But if you read about the pyramids, that’s different from seeing them.

ZH: I agree.

HS: So, would you come with me? Just me?

ZH: I will think about it.

HS: Okay. And you will let me know?

ZH: Yes.

Since then, the political situation in Egypt has changed. On March 3, Hawass resigned. On March 30, he was reappointed minister of antiquities.

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 […]