Tourists ride camels in front of Giza pyramids on April 23, 2006. 23 Apr 2006 REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
Posted on 05/04/2007 9:47:05 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
...the legendary Pyramids of Giza are endangered now -- and the agent of their peril is a gloomy Egyptian stable-owner by the name of Hesham el-Ghabri... "They forbid us to ride around the pyramids," grouses the owner of the TWA Stable ("Camel and Horse Riding")... "They accuse of us being terrorists. They say we are going to bomb the pyramids." "They" are high officials at Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities -- the government body responsible for administering the Pyramids of Giza along with the rest of this country's innumerable ancient monuments -- and they have not actually accused el-Ghabri and his ilk of being terrorists, although perhaps they might as well have. "The people here have been handed a gold platter -- the pyramids," storms Dr. Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the council. "Instead of guarding it, they (defecate) in it." His solution? Ban them all -- the touts, the hawkers, the confidence men, the camel-for-hire stable-owners... Hawass calls it a matter of "site management." ...Several blocks south of the sole official eastern entrance to the pyramids, an entrance known as the Sphinx Gate, somebody has removed a three-metre wide section of the Supreme Council's new wall. The gap is being used by the camel- and horse-handlers and the touts to enter. The only difference now is that everyone must pay baksheesh to the police in order to pass. In fact, an officer is stationed at the gap all day, precisely for this... Hawass vows to close off all eastern access to the pyramids... "When you are head of antiquities at a place like this, you have to have courage," he says. "The people are angry, but the pyramids are more important than the people."
(Excerpt) Read more at thestar.com ...
Tourists ride camels in front of Giza pyramids on April 23, 2006. 23 Apr 2006 REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
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AHuh. Well a bit premature. But certainly not unlikely that someday some really radical jihadists will want to blow them up, as they did the “false idols” of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.
Just Damn.
Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
Heh heh... I selected that quote in part because I don’t like Zahi “Zowie” Hawass — but I only dislike him in a good way. The other part is, in the case of Egyptian Moslems, he is 100 per cent correct.
Choice A: no pyramids
Choice B: no Egyptian Moslems
Easy choice to make. ;’)
Good point. After blowing up the Budha statues, I can see his argument?
“The people are angry, but the pyramids are more important than the people.”
lol Fits in with PETA or one of the US environmental wacko groups.
A medieval caliph tried to demolish the Giza pyramids because they were products of the Time of Ignorance (believe it or not, that’s the Moslem term for the time before Islam). He had his crews start with Mycerinus, the smallest of the three large ones there (there are some, by comparison, tiny ones around the plateau; if they were by themselves, they’d be pretty impressive). They worked for months, and the damage they did by hauling away stone shows, but the estimated time to destroy even the small one showed that the process of demolition of all three would take perhaps a century. So the caliph called it off.
Also during the Moslem period, the smoothing face stones were removed from the pyramids in order to build various structures in Cairo. As late as the 19th century, the somewhat obscure Abu Roash pyramid (built, or at least begun, by Khufu’s son and successor, Djedjefre) was still providing building stone for Cairo. It may have been abandoned work (Khafre, Djedjefre’s brother, built the number two pyramid at Giza), but clearly was cannibalized for over 4000 years by later people in search for construction materials.
No, it fits in with the analogous fact that we have all those memorials, museums, and monuments on the Mall in DC, and don’t permit people to tie up their horses in the lobby, or shovel garbage out of passing cars onto the lawns.
Vendors are banned from the Mall, but the little scamps find ways to sell bootleg ice cream bars and stuff for even amounts ($1, $2) then push their carts away to hide so fast it’s rare to see which way they went.
"Man fears Time. Time fears the Pyramids." -- Arab proverb
The Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt, will soon be granted new protection in an attempt to control tourism, traffic and vandalism, Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Discovery News.
At the same time, Egyptian authorities are encouraging tourists to educate themselves about the tombs, and experience the art within them, without visiting the fragile sites in person.
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