Egypt's 'Indiana Jones' to quit over looting of ancient sites

[bluedigger]

The archaeologist who styles himself as Egypt's Indiana Jones, battling to save the nation's rich heritage, has said he will resign as antiquities minister, complaining that treasures are being looted and ravaged with little protection from the authorities.

Dr Zahi Hawass, who has come under fire for his links to the ousted president, Hosni Mubarak, said the country's antiquities were in "grave danger" from criminals, with the new military regime that took power last month failing to preserve law and order.

"Since Mubarak's resignation, looting has increased all over the country, and our antiquities are in grave danger from criminals trying to take advantage of the situation," he wrote on his website, going on to list dozens of archaeological sites across the country raided since Mubarak's ouster on 11 February.

Egyptian newspapers yesterday widely quoted the fedora-wearing TV personality saying he was not willing to participate in the government of Essam Sharaf, named as the new Prime Minister by the military on Thursday, after the Mubarak-appointed Ahmed Shafiq resigned.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/egypts-indiana-jones-to-quit-over-looting-of-ancient-sites-2232961.html

[TheMadMonk]

1. Is our past so valuable that we should forgo the future to preserve it?

Anyone with half a brain knows that anywhere there is a breakdown of the established system of law and order (for good reason or ill) shit like this happens.

For the best part of half a millenium European colonials looted the world without restraint. Two millenia earlier another bunch of Eurpean colonials spent half a thousand years trashing the joint from Albion to Afghanistan.

Looting of antiquities is nothing new. They are simply one more casualty of war and unrest.

Save what you can of course, but first and foremost, see that those that cannot be saved are WELL SPENT.

[bluedigger]

2. That's a pretty fatalistic attitude.

Very Rumsfeldian of you. I think it is always a shame when a nation forgoes it's custodial duty to preserve it's history. Only rarely do resources suffer due to ideology, like the the Buddhas in Afghanistan, but they have more frequently been targeted by black marketeers, or subject to collateral damage. As you point out, such has it ever been, yet countries still seek to retrieve their history in international courts. It will be interesting to see where these latest treasures end up. Of course, that is unlikely...

[TheMadMonk]

4. Just how many times in the past do YOU think entire cities and nations...

...were flattened over ideological differences? The invasion of Iraq may well have been about oil, but the sacking of Falluja, and other individual battles across inumerable wars are virtually all about ideological differences and come prewrapped in flags and vestments. Dresden and other such atrocities are often the price of ideological failure.

Pol Pot's regime of regressive terror is another example to put the lie to your "rarely". Mugabe, Idi Amin. The deliberate and public targetting of specific icons may be "rare" but the wanton wholesale destruction of entire regions' cultural herritages (past and present) is no new thing nor a phenomenon of an abandoned past.

Whether or not the wars are about ideology or profit, the battles themselves are made to be about ideology, simply because it's the most cost effective way of getting individually sensible human beings to collectively put their own lives on the line for someone else's benefit.


The difference between now and then is a sense for the value of what is being lost and the slow evolution of a primitive global conscience enabled by near instantaneous communication and a still somewhat chancy sense of collective fair play.

Of course I don't believe that priceless antiquities SHOULD be subject to looting and destruction. I was simply noting that in all of recorded (AND RECOVERED) history, matters like this have rarely if every turned out otherwise.

Suing for repatriation of artefacts is a very recent phenomenon indeed. One enabled by our evolving global conscience. It's also one which so far has mostly seen a lot of scientifically valuable material lost to "repatriation" whist items of cultural or ecconomic importance remain firmly in the hands of the looters and their inheritors. I like the idea, but so far I'm not particularly enamoured of the results.

[laconicsax]

3. FWIW: Indiana Jones was a looter.

Just to say.

[Pacifist Patriot]

5. "It belongs in a museum."

LOL! Fun movies, but his "archeological technique" always bugged the daylights out of me. Thieving and that's about it.

[semillama]

6. His methods and approach weren't all that off for the time period, though

Scientific archaeology as we know it wasn't really practiced today.


Although I think Hawass is an ass, I still have to admit he did a great job keeping Egypt's antiquities in the forefront of people's minds. We need a similar cheerleader for American antiquities.

[Pacifist Patriot]

7. I'm anachronistic in that respect.

I cringe anyway. :-)