Posted on 02/14/2011 6:59:00 PM PST by Pan_Yan
A few days ago, in the shadow of the great Pyramids at Giza, the Egyptian monuments that draw millions of tourists to visit Egypt every year, the opinion among workers on the lower rungs of the economy was unanimous: The big man had to go.
No, they weren't talking about Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian dictator chased from power last Friday. On the president, opinions were mixed. But the answer to the question "what would you most like to see changed about the regime" could be boiled down to two words: Zahi Hawass.
Mr. Hawass, who has run Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities since 2002, is the gatekeeper to Egyptology, a National Geographic Explorer in Residence (a lucrative perch) since 2001, whose rise in Egypt was at least partially sponsored by Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of the ousted leader. With his Indiana Jones-inspired hat and patter about the "mysteries of ancient Egypt," he's become something of a global star in the past decade.
And today, he was besieged by a few hundred employees of the council and unemployed archeology graduates, demanding better pay and jobs. Hawass, a larger-than-life figure resented by other Egyptologists for the tight grip he exercises over access to Egypt's monuments (I've met a few foreign archeologists over the years who claimed he refused to issue permits because their theories did not square with his own) is a reminder of how much of the ancien regime remains after Mubarak's ouster.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Ping.
....Is there a money trail on this fellow??????
(See #3 here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt's_Ten_Greatest_Discoveries)
Come to think of it maybe this revolution isn't so bad as I am thinking....
The real "Indiana Jones" died on December 27, 2010.
This nut has a tv show now. I’ve only seen a couple of episodes, but he has a short fuse.
Sounds like more twaddle to me. I’d say that he’s doing his job, and the camel riders and would-be mummy thieves resent it.
Well... I think Zahi is an attention-grabbing nitwit... but I suppose I'd also go bat guano if somebody seriously tried to say that the pyramids were built by aliens.
Agreed but that’s no reason to deny access. The ancient aliens charlatans just make up their own evidence anyway so letting them study won’t do any harm.
You would think it would be on the Speculation Channel... but no, it's the History Channel.
According to articles at his website, Hawass put these restrictions in place mainly to protect the pyramids and the Sphinx, and to make a better atmosphere for the tourists. He claimed the camel riders and vendors were overrunning the place, harassing the tourists for money for every little thing. From what I understand, the camel riders required money from the tourists to take their pictures, and vendors were constantly following the tourists around wanting to sell them souvenirs.
He’s an attention-hound, but I don’t see that he’s done much harm. If ancient Egypt’s portable remains are valuable to humanity, they should be stored somewhere more functional than modern Egypt. That’s just common sense.
I’ve seen a lot of his shows, and you get 75% Hawass opinions and 25% Egyptian stuff on screen.....
He’s quite the little dictator from what I’ve read. As I understand it you don’t want him to even suspect there might be some artifact under your house because it will be a pile of rubble by nightfall.
That makes sense to me. And the other protest seems to be that everyone working for the Antiquities Commission wants a big raise in pay.
Where’s that going to come from, if the tourist business has been shut down by all this turmoil? Tourism is just about Egypt’s only source of income.
This guy may be a bit of an eccentric, but I think he’s protecting Egypt’s antiquities as best he can. It’s not his fault if stuff was stolen from the museum. It’s the rioters and the revolutionaries, who were encouraged by Obama and his pals. I presume the reason he didn’t immediately announce that valuable stuff had been stolen was that he didn’t want any more thieves to try their hand at it.
As usual, the Christian Science Monitor gets everything backward.
Actually, there was a paragraph in the middle of the article listing his good points, but I wasn't able to get it in the excerpt.
The Muslims and Muslim Brotherhood will want to destroy these pagan relics once they run the place because all of history that does not jive with their contrived false "god" allah and their twisted version of history has got to go.
Zahi Hawass is the one man who stands in their way... hence he had better "take the money and run" or stay and face a nasty beheading or firing squad. He is a marked man and if he is smart he had better get out of Dodge ASAP.
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