Feature: Ian Parker, Letter from Cairo, “The Pharaoh,”

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November 16, 2009 Issue

ABSTRACT:
LETTER FROM CAIRO about archeologist Zahi Hawass, the secretary-general of that country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (S.C.A.).

Hawass is a lordly, well-dressed man of sixty-two. Hawass is the international star of Egyptology, thanks largely to a steady flow of television documentaries and books to which he is attached. The oddity of this role, at the intersection of archeology, show business, and national politics, makes controversy unavoidable, but Hawass is so often found in the middle of an argument that one can usually assume the fuss is strategic. Tells about “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” an exhibition of artifacts from the Cairo Museum which, since 2005, has visited seven cities around the world. Hawass says that by next spring, the show will have made more than a hundred million dollars for the S.C.A. Writer visits the Giza plateau with Hawass. Egyptology is a small, backbiting world. But this can only partly explain the strength of feeling about Hawass. Some colleagues complain that he excavates incautiously, puts public relations before science, hypes his own archeological finds, and takes credit owed to others. Even his admirers are likely to concede some of the charges. Yet even Hawass’s harshest are willing to place his swagger in context: that is, they recognize that ancient Egypt has been largely in foreign hands for two hundred years. Hawass’s task—in effect to Egyptianize Egyptology by means of a personality cult—is not an easy one. Tells about a dig overseen by Hawass at the Valley of the Golden Mummies. Writer visits Hawass in his office in downtown Cairo. Tells about Hawass’s friendship with the independent Italian television producer Brando Quilici, with whom he has now made four films. To the discomfort of some Egyptologists, Hawass is more than a participant in Quilici’s breathless shows; he is a collaborator, in a way that allows the space between the discipline of Egyptology and its popularization to shrink to nothing.

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