Zahi Hawass's Most Important Accomplishment: High-Res King Tut

Way back in 2008, I was invited to a conference being held in Alexandria, Egypt, about cultural heritage policy. There was a lot of talk about economic development through tourism, and a lot of quieter complaining about the damage tourists were doing to overvisited sites, and about inadequate budgets to enable the Supreme Council for Antiquities to do all it needed to do to protect, secure, and conserve its massive portfolio of sites and to improve its mostly dilapidated museums. One thing no one was talking about at that meeting was the possibility of tapping the vast revenue potential represented by image rights (except for trademarking the Pyramids, a pretty silly idea). I had run a conference several years earlier on the policy challenges of videogames and had learned that even then 3-D image-capturing was already beginning to be done, with the pilot project I recall being a 360-degree camera sweeping around the interior of Saint Peter's in Rome. It was not hard to imagine a huge demand by videogame makers and film makers for computer-generated graphics built out of laser-captured imagery allowing one to go into King Tut's tomb (imagine Spielberg wanting to make another Indiana Jones film and knowing he could have the "real" interior of the Pyramid of Giza if he paid a licensing fee). I raised this idea at the meeting, to resounding silence.

Little did I know that Zahi Hawass had already made a deal, back in 2002, for something like what I was suggesting. Only a decade later, the imagery is beginning to be made public. Here's a story about it. What's missing from the story is the economic boon the imagery represents. For that, one needs to go to the report by the company doing the work for the SCA. The key sentence is buried deep in the report, but is reassuring: "The copyright of the data will belong to the Supreme Council of Antiquities."

This might be the best thing that Zahi Hawass accomplished. It should pay dividends forever, and is a win-win-win: fragile tombs can be closed to save them from further degradation by overtouristing; licensing of image rights will bring in a substantial and permanently renewable revenue stream; and the ability of millions of people to see, in movies and videogames, the incredible beauty of Egyptian antiquity as never before shown to them will also act as a powerful advertising tool to spur future tourism.

Egypt's archaeological sites and museums will be getting a security upgrade

This sounds like a very good development, not just because better-armed guards, if they are properly trained, will have more deterrent effect, but also because the security plans will "be updated periodically to meet new or unexpected challenges." One hopes that Egypt will settle down and fulfill its promise of establishing a stable democratically-run government, but gaming out the possible scenarios for political breakdown and creating agreed-upon contingency plans now is very prudent. It may be touchy to raise the question of whether the Tourism and Antiquities Police might once again melt away, as they did during the January uprising, but that sort of possibility has to be put on the table, just in case, so that if security does need to be turned over there are clear directions as to how the SCA can fill the security gap at least temporarily.

We're Gonna Need More Guns, continued

Reports from Luxor Times and Al Ahram to the effect that ten armed masked men broke into a storehouse in Tel El daba', Facous, Sharkia governate, which was guarded by a policeman and three "Ghafir" guards working for the SCA; it is not completely clear from the reports if all four were armed but the Luxor Times describes the gang as having taken away "their weapons", so it appears that more than one was armed, though no information is provided as to whether these arms were handguns or automatic weapons. The gang apparently caught these four by surprise, or perhaps they were unwilling to engage in a firefight they would probably have lost, or perhaps they feared having their families targeted if they fought back (this was a common problem in Iraq where both site guards and looters often were locals who knew each other).

This is by no means the first time since the revolution that an armed gang has attacked a storeroom, but by now one would have hoped that the SCA and the Egyptian government would have responded by providing their own guards and police with the arms and additional security needed to fend off such attempts. But with the country still in transitional turmoil, and Zahi Hawass first in then out then in, that has proved difficult.

Clearly, more needs to be done to protect all storerooms (not to mention sites!). This particular storeroom contained artifacts excavated by Dutch and German archaeologists over the last thirty years; other storerooms that have been looted also have contained the fruits of foreign-led excavations (including one by the ultra-wealthy Metropolitan Museum). One wonders what steps, if any, those archaeological organizations and their governments might be taking now to beef up security at least for the artifacts that their archaeologists helped bring out of the ground. Obviously it would be difficult if not impossible for a foreign group to arm Egyptian guards, but surely there must be other steps that could be taken to help, including paying locals to set up a monitoring system to warn guards of impending attacks, providing remote sensing devices to detect intruders, hardening the sites themselves, etc. Does anyone out there know if any such plans are afoot?