Cairo Museum Attacked
The world is watching with bated breath the unfolding of events in Egypt, where mobs of protesters, acting in imitation of the successful riots in Tunisia, have been demanding the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, long-standing president of Egypt. Politicians fear that the fall of Mubarak will usher in a new, anti-American, anti-Israel government - bad enough in itself, but disaster if there is a domino effect and other countries rebel against their Western-friendly dictators. Archaeologists, who rightly feel that governments come and governments go, are more concerned about the possibility that a new government may be of the Muslim extremist variety and indulge in an orgy of Taliban-style destruction of Egypt's heritage.
The fear is not unrealistic; Egypt - like all other Muslim countries - is littered with statues and frescoes that have been vandalised by religious zealots. For some strange reason, these idiots target the eyes of the pictures and statues: perhaps they are allergic to feeling that they are being watched!
Against this is the fact that Egypt depends heavily on tourism for its national income - the country has no oil, and potatoes and cotton are not as valuable exports as might be wished. When Muslim fanatics murdered 90-odd tourists at Deir el-Bahri a few years ago the tourism industry went into near terminal decline for the next couple of years and the drastic drop in everyone's incomes meant that the fanatics issued an official statement promising not to attack Western tourists in the future. It is not impossible that the same sense of self-preservation may cause them to hold their hammers when it comes to Egypt's cultural heritage.
There was a cheering sign that this might be so in recent events at the Cairo Museum.
Friday, January 29, 2011, was to be the big day of protests as thousands took the streets - so the organisers hoped - at the end of Friday prayers. Their hopes were fulfilled as riots took place in Cairo, Rafah, Luxor, and various other places. On Friday night the poorly paid police, overwhelmed by the number of protestors (and quite possibly sympathising with their aims) suddenly withdrew to their police stations, leaving the rioters in control.
The mob had enjoyed a bit of success earlier in the day when they successfully set the headquarters of the ruling party on fire. The building is - or was - right next to the museum and there was considerable anxiety lest the fire spread to the museum building. However the real danger occurred when the police withdrew, for almost immediately numerous people targetted the museum, climbing over the iron railings and smashing their way into the building.
There they were confronted by the souvenir shop. It is said that the IQ of a mob can be calculated by taking the IQ of the least intelligent member of the crowd and dividing by the number of people in the crowd - and what followed proved this. Being ignorant peasants who had never been inside the museum in their lives, they were dazzled by the "gold" objects on display for sale to tourists - anodised aluminium, of course. They spent nearly an hour looting the shop to jubilant cries of "Allahu akbar!" - "God is great!" - and fondly imagined that they would become rich, either by melting down the gold or by selling the "antikas" to Western tourists.
Only nine men realised that the souvenir shop wasn't worth touching. They headed straight for an upstairs room where Greek and Persian period objects were on display and started to smash the display cases. They destroyed 13 of these cases, looting anything that seemed valuable. They also smashed one of the cases in the Tutankamun exhibition. Clutching their ill-gotten gains - which included two large statues, one of which they carelessly broke in half - they headed for home.
Meanwhile other members of the mob, plus nearby residents and a group of students, heard what was going on and headed for the museum with a very different aim in mind. Arming themselves with anything they could find - including a number of truncheons "acquired" from the police - they formed a human chain around the museum. They were aided by three heroic policemen who had refused to leave their posts. Together they stopped the looting and arrested the looters.
Among the latter were our dastardly nine, who had ripped the heads off two mummies (described in some reports as "royal mummies" but that appears to be journalistic hyperbole. Mind you, goodness knows what they intended to do with heads!). The villains must have been optimistic to think that they could lug two large statues through the crowded streets without detection! All the loot was recovered (though I'm not sure about the souvenir shop) and initial damage assessment indicates that while up to 100 items have been damaged, none of them are seriously hurt and repairs should be easy.
By the time the army arrived to take the place of the absent police, the museum was once more safe and sound. It is this latter reaction that gives me hope. There is no doubt that Egypt is terribly poor and that jobs are as scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth. It is also a fact that there is a good deal of corruption by government officials with its concomitant oppression of the poor. Mubarak has given the country 30 years of stable government, but he has failed to tackle the fundamental problems - though whether anyone else could have done better is a very moot question.
If - which I very much doubt - the riots will bring about an improvement in the lot of the average Egyptian, then jolly good luck to them. But destroying the treasures of the past, as the Iraqis did following the American invasion, will not help the country and will only condemn it to even worse problems in the future if tourism stops or is significantly reduced. Whether the people who protected the museum realised this or were acting out of pride in their heritage, I do not know, but I am delighted that they behaved in this way. (The military has mounted special armed guard on the pyramids and the temples of Luxor and, we can hope, on other important sites, showing that they are far more cultured than the American barbarians who allowed the Baghdad Museum to be looted while securing the Oil Ministry just down the road.)
So whatever happens, I wish the people of Egypt well and I congratulate them on acting to preserve their national and cultural heritage. Keep up the good work, lads!
ripped the heads off That is what the initial reports said. It now appears that the heads - or skulls - had been brought into the museum to test a new CT scanner and had nothing to do with the royal mummies in another part of the museum. It doesn't say much for Zahi's grip on the situation that it took over a week for him to work out where the heads came from! Return
© Kendall K. Down 2011
