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158<br />
UNIT 4: ENVIRONMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS<br />
obliged to spend half his time in pursuit of private funding.<br />
Egypt’s own Supreme Council for Antiquities is beginning to go commercial. Earlier<br />
this year, its officials obligingly staged the ‘discovery’ of a tomb by the Giza<br />
pyramids for Fox Television. The US network paid US$60,000 for the privilege.<br />
National Geographic recently coughed up US$30,000 for exclusive film rights to<br />
the cache of mummies at Bahariya.<br />
These sums are paltry compared with the task at hand, however. Much of the site<br />
at Akhmim, for example, lies beneath a village and a modern cemetery. Relocating<br />
them will cost as much as $10m. The budget for dismantling and rebuilding the<br />
2,500-year-old Temple of Hibis at the oasis of Kharga, which is threatened by<br />
rising groundwater, is a hefty $6m. This is only one of hundreds of monuments —<br />
including some 200 medieval buildings in the centre of Cairo — that need urgent<br />
attention.<br />
Fixing the Temple of Hibis is likely to exhaust funds earmarked for work<br />
in Egypt’s oasis regions. Too bad, because these remote areas have lately<br />
produced remarkable finds: some recent desert discoveries include a Sixth-<br />
Dynasty governor’s palace that proves early Egyptian occupation of the oases, a<br />
gold crown from the Ptolemaic period, and a surprising cache of Greek papyri,<br />
among them unique scriptures from the Manichaean religion that vied with early<br />
Christianity.<br />
More pressing perhaps is that many desert sites need protection from treasure<br />
hunters. At an abandoned Roman fortress town 40km from Kharga, scavengers<br />
last year used backhoes to rip open cemeteries, leaving a macabre scattering of<br />
discarded mummy parts. At a nearby site that can be reached only by four-wheel<br />
drive vehicles, a desert guide recently caught a group of American tourists redhanded.<br />
They were using metal detectors and air compressors to sift through the<br />
ruins for booty.<br />
Yet the damage from pilfering pales in comparison with the organised menace<br />
of mass tourism. At sites such as the Valley of the Kings or Sakkara, thousands<br />
of visitors mill about each day in cramped tombs that were designed for one<br />
occupant’s afterlife. The deterioration of the paintings and reliefs on their walls<br />
is plain to see. Even the apparently indestructible pyramids of Giza are suffering.<br />
With each visitor who descends to their inner chambers exhaling some 20 grams<br />
of clammy water vapour, cracks have begun to appear. The antiquities service<br />
now works the great structures in shifts, closing one each year for rest and<br />
recuperation. Sadly, this solution cannot work for monuments that are more<br />
unique or more delicate.<br />
“Tourism is already a catastrophe,” says Mr. Stadelmann, who like most<br />
Egyptologists is understandably worried about the future. “But we have to admit<br />
that without tourism there would be no public interest, and without that there<br />
would be no money for our work.” He is right, but as tourist numbers grow, Egypt<br />
is going to have to find a better balance between showing off its heritage and<br />
preserving it.<br />
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