Former Egyptian antiquities minister faces questions over theft from pyramid

In April 2013, the three Germans -- two amateur archaeologists and a film-making accomplice -- crept inside the inner sanctum of the Great Pyramid at Giza, the last the seven wonders of the ancient world to remain relatively intact.

The trio, conspiracy theorists Dominique Gorlitz, Stefan Erdmann and Peter Hoefer, wanted to show that the pyramid was not the final resting place of the pharaoh Khufu, as has long been accepted, but was in fact a relic of an even older empire.

In an attempt to prove this, they scraped off part of the pyramid's cartouche -- the insignia that denotes for whom the pyramid was built -- and took it back to Germany for testing. Following an international outcry, the samples were later returned, and the men put on trial in absentia -- along with five Egyptian officials accused of helping them to illegally access the pyramid.

All eight were convicted on Tuesday, after a trial in which the five officials claimed that it was in fact Hawass, a controversial former antiquities minister, who had facilitated the theft of the samples, during his involvement in a documentary about the cartouche in 2010...

In an angry phonecall, Hawass added: "I was not in charge in 2013. This [theft] happened in April 2013 ... There is nothing against me. I just have to go to the district attorney to prove that what happened in 2010 was according to the law."...

In an interview with the Guardian last year, Hawass hinted that he would be interested in a comeback, emphasising that he was the only man for the job.

"When I talk people listen to me, when [others] talk people sleep," he later added.

One of history’s great tragedies is current Egyptians are in charge of ancient Egypt’s artifacts. Nobody there really cares at all about anything previous to Islam except for the tourist value. All of the treasures of antiquity are moldering in their cases in the Cairo Museum, literally rotting from exposure to the air and humidity.

All anybody has to see are the ridiculous and amateurish “restorations” of the Sphinx and the pyramids to see what happens when uneducated and unskilled primitives are in charge.

"Bingo. That concrete they’ve been stuffing in every crack in the monuments will accelerate the disintegration from the rising ground water due to the Aswan High Dam."

At the end of the Ice Age, there was a melt 'overshoot', the water was higher than today and salt water extended as far inland as the Aswan High Dam location.
When the Russians were digging down to make supports for the dam, they encountered this 'silting' from that water and claimed they'ed found evidence for the 'Great Flood', not so.

In the book "Noah's Flood", the anecdote about that went as follows, if memory serves; drilling to check the bedrock the Russians found that there was none -- that the Nile flows down a silted-in canyon or gulch like our own Grand Canyon, one that was eroded out during the million or so years that the Mediterranean was cut off from the world's oceans and dried up and blew away.

Interestingly, Herodotus records a claim from the Egyptians that sea estuary of the Nile reached inland as far as , but that the Nile had since silted it up.

The Egyptians... told me that the first man who ruled over Egypt was Min, and that in his time all Egypt, except the Thebaic canton, was a marsh, none of the land below Lake Moeris then showing itself above the surface of the water. This is a distance of seven days' sail from the sea up the river... Now if the Nile should choose to divert his waters from their present bed into this Arabian gulf, what is there to hinder it from being filled up by the stream within, at the utmost, twenty thousand years? For my part, I think it would be filled in half the time. How then should not a gulf, even of much greater size, have been filled up in the ages that passed before I was born, by a river that is at once so large and so given to working changes?

...One fact which I learnt of the priests is to me a strong evidence of the origin of the country. They said that when Moeris was king, the Nile overflowed all Egypt below Memphis, as soon as it rose so little as eight cubits. Now Moeris had not been dead 900 years at the time when I heard this of the priests; yet at the present day, unless the river rise sixteen, or, at the very least, fifteen cubits, it does not overflow the lands. It seems to me, therefore, that if the land goes on rising and growing at this rate, the Egyptians who dwell below Lake Moeris, in the Delta (as it is called) and elsewhere, will one day, by the stoppage of the inundations, suffer permanently the fate which they told me they expected would some time or other befall the Greeks.

"In the book "Noah's Flood", the anecdote about that went as follows, if memory serves; drilling to check the bedrock the Russians found that there was none -- that the Nile flows down a silted-in canyon or gulch like our own Grand Canyon, one that was eroded out during the million or so years that the Mediterranean was cut off from the world's oceans and dried up and blew away. "

I read that. People I tell have a hard time visualizing that.

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