Zahi Hawass

Hawass was Associate Director of Excavation at Hermopolis in 1968 and Tarrana 1970–74. Since 1975 he has been Excavation Director and Restoration Director at various sites throughout Egypt, predominantly Giza.[5]

From 1969 to 1975, Hawass was Inspector of Antiquities for a multitude of archaeological expeditions, for instance the Yale Expedition at Abydos, Egypt in 1969, and Abu Simbel between 1972 and 74.[6]

He sporadically taught Egyptian archaeology, history and culture at universities in Egypt and the USA between 1988 and 2001, most notably at the American University in Cairo, the University of California, Los Angeles and Alexandria University. Hawass has described his efforts as trying to help institute a systematic program for the preservation and restoration of historical monuments, while training Egyptians to improve their expertise on methods of excavation, retrieval and preservation.[7]

Zahi Hawass and Barack Obama, June 2009

Hawass was Inspector of Antiquities for Giza 1972–74, First Inspector until 1979 and Chief Inspector in 1980.

Starting in 1987 he held the position of "Director General of the Giza monuments", which includes the sites of Giza, Saqqara, Memphis, Dahshur, Abusir and Bahariya Oasis.

After the discovery of Gantenbrink's Door in 1993, he left the position – according to Hawass, a resignation[8] – but was reinstated several month later, following a change in leadership and the transformation of the "Egyptian Antiquities Organization" into the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

He was promoted to "Undersecretary of the State for the Giza Monuments" in 1998.[9]

Hawass continues to be involved in archaeological projects at Giza and other sites in Egypt. Currently, he heads the science committee overseeing the Scanpyramids project.[10]

In 2002 Hawass was appointed as the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. When US President Barack Obama visited Cairo in June 2009, Hawass gave him personal tours of ancient Egyptian archaeological.[11] Facing mandatory retirement, he was promoted by President Hosni Mubarak to the post of Vice Minister of Culture at the end of 2009.[12][13]

On January 29, 2011, in the midst of the Egyptian protests of that year, Hawass arrived at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to find that a number of cases had been broken into and a number of antiquities damaged, so police were brought in to secure the museum.[14] According to Andrew Lawler, reporting for Science, Hawass said that he "faxed a colleague in Italy that 13 cases were destroyed. My heart is broken and my blood is boiling".[15]

Hawass later told The New York Times that thieves looking for gold broke 70 objects, including two sculptures of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, and took two skulls from a research lab, before being stopped as they left the museum.[16]

Hawass was appointed to the position of Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, a newly created cabinet post, by Mubarak on January 31, 2011, as part of a cabinet shake-up during the 2011 protests.[15][16][17] A press release including a statement from Hawass stated that he "will continue excavating, writing books, and representing his country,"[18] ensuring that archaeological sites in Egypt were being safeguarded and looted objects returned. Regarding the Egyptian Museum looting, he said that "The museum was dark and the nine robbers did not recognise the value of what was in the vitrines. They opened thirteen cases, threw the seventy objects on the ground and broke them, including one Tutankhamun case, from which they broke the statue of the king on a panther. However, the broken objects can all be restored, and we will begin the restoration process this week."[17] Hawass rejected comparisons with the looting of antiquities in Iraq and Afghanistan.[16]

On February 13, Mahmoud Kassem of Bloomberg reported Hawass as saying that "18 artifacts, including statues of King Tutankhamun," were stolen from the Egyptian Museum in January; Kassem, paraphrasing Hawass, continues, "The missing objects include 11 wooden shabti statuettes from Yuya, a gilded wooden statue of Tutankhamun carried by a goddess and a statue of Nefertiti making offerings."[19]

Egyptian state television reported that Hawass called upon Egyptians not to believe the “lies and fabrications” of the Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya satellite television channels.[20] Hawass later said “They should give us the opportunity to change things, and if nothing happens they can march again. But you can’t bring in a new president now, in this time. We need Mubarak to stay and make the transition.”[16] On March 3, 2011, he resigned after a list was posted on his personal website of dozens of sites across Egypt that were looted during the 2011 protests.[21][22][23][24][25]

Hawass was reappointed Minister of Antiquities by then-Prime Minister Essam Sharaf,[26][27] On March 30, 2011, a tweet was posted stating "I am very happy to be the Minister of Antiquities once again!"[28] but resigned on July 17, 2011, after Sharaf informed him he would not be continuing in the position.[29] According to opinion report from an Egyptian commentator in The Guardian, Hawass was "sacked".[30]

Hawass has since begun working as a lecturer in Egypt and all around the world, and promoting Egypt's tourism globally in cooperation with the country's Ministry of Tourism. He also writes weekly articles in various newspapers and magazines, and continues working as an archaeologist and consultant.

Zahi Hawass at a book signing in Mexico City, August 2003.

As his biography at the National Geographic Explorers webpage notes, he states that he is

responsible for many recent discoveries, including the tombs of the pyramid builders at Giza and the Valley of the Golden Mummies at Bahariya. At Giza, he also uncovered the satellite pyramid of Khufu. In 2005, as part of the National Geographic Society-sponsored Egyptian Mummy Project to learn more about patterns of disease, health, and mortality in ancient Egypt, he led a team that CT scanned the mummy of King Tutankhamun. His team is continuing to CT scan mummies, both royal and private, and hopes to solve some of the mysteries surrounding the lives and deaths of such important figures as Hatshepsut and Nefertiti.[31]

Hawass has repeatedly spearheaded movements to return many prominent and irregularly taken Ancient Egyptian artifacts back to Egypt from collections in various other countries. Examples of these artifacts include: the Rosetta Stone, the bust of Nefertiti, the Dendera zodiac ceiling painting from the Dendera Temple, the bust of Ankhhaf (the architect of the Khafre Pyramid), the faces of Amenhotep III's tomb at the Louvre Museum, the Luxor Temple's obelisk at the Place de la Concorde, and the statue of Hemiunu.

In July 2003, the Egyptians requested the return of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum. Hawass, then serving as Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo, spoke at a press conference saying: "If the British want to be remembered, if they want to restore their reputation, they should volunteer to return the Rosetta Stone because it is the icon of our Egyptian identity."[41][42] Referring to Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum, Hawass said, "These are Egyptian monuments. I will make life miserable for anyone who keeps them."[43]

Alex Joffe of the Wall Street Journal expressed the opinion that the looting of antiquities during the 2011 Egyptian revolution made Hawass' campaign to return Egyptian antiquities to Egypt "misguided or at least poorly timed."[14]

In 2019, Hawass relaunched his restitution campaign, asking the Berlin State Museums, the British Museum and the Musée du Louvre: “How can you refuse to lend to the new Grand Egyptian Museum when you have taken so many antiquities from Egypt?" All three museums refused his loan requests.[44]

In 2022, Hawass launched another petition, calling once again on the British Museum to return the Rosetta Stone, the bust of Nefertiti, and the Dendera Zodiac ceiling to Egypt.[45] He plans on sending the petition, signed by a group of Egyptian intellectuals, to European museums in October.[45][44]

Zahi Hawass examining a Mummy (2018).

Hawass has been skeptical of the DNA testing of Egyptian mummies; "From what I understand," he has said, "it is not always accurate and it cannot always be done with complete success when dealing with mummies. Until we know for sure that it is accurate, we will not use it in our research."[46]

In December 2000, a joint team from Waseda University in Japan and Cairo's Ain Shams University tried to get permission for DNA testing of Egyptian mummies, but was denied by the Egyptian Government.[47] Hawass stated at the time that DNA analysis was out of the question because it would not lead to anything.[48]

In February 2010, Hawass and his team announced that they had analyzed the mummies of Tutankhamun and ten other mummies and said that the king could have died from a malaria infection that followed a leg fracture.[49] German researchers Christian Timmann and Christian Meyer have cast doubt on this theory, suggesting other possible alternatives for Tutankhamun's cause of death.[50]

In 2012, a study signed by Hawass disclosed that Ramses III may have had a haplogroup that is associated with the Bantu expansion and is the most dominant in Sub-Saharan Africa, E1b1a.[51]

Hawass has been accused of domineering behaviour, forbidding archaeologists to announce their own findings, and courting the media for his own gain after they were denied access to archaeological sites because, according to Hawass, they were too amateurish.[52] A few, however, have said in interviews that some of what Hawass has done for the field was long overdue.[52] Hawass has typically ignored or dismissed his critics, and when asked about it he indicated that what he does is for the sake of Egypt and the preservation of its antiquities.[53]

Hawass has been a long-standing opponent of normalised relations between Israel and Egypt.[54] In January 2009 Hawass wrote in Asharq Al-Awsat that "The concept of killing women, children, and elderly people ... seems to run in the blood of the Jews of Palestine" and that "the only thing that the Jews have learned from history is methods of tyranny and torment—so much so that they have become artists in this field." He explained that he was not referring to the Jews' "[original] faith" but rather "the faith that they forged and contaminated with their poison, which is aimed against all of mankind."[55] In an interview on Egyptian television in April 2009 Hawass stated that "although Jews are few in number, they control the entire world" and commented on the "control they have" of the American economy and the media.[56][57][58] He later wrote that he was using rhetoric to explain political fragmentation among the Arabs and that he does not believe in a "Jewish conspiracy to control the world".[59]

Criticism of Hawass, in Egypt and more broadly, increased following the protests in Egypt in 2011. On July 12, 2011, The New York Times reported on a story on page A1 that Hawass receives an honorarium each year "of as much as $200,000 from National Geographic to be an explorer-in-residence even as he controls access to the ancient sites it often features in its reports."[60] The Times also reported that he has relationships with two American companies that do business in Egypt.[60]

On April 17, 2011, Hawass was sentenced to jail for one year for refusing to obey a court ruling[61] relating to a contract for the gift shop at the Egyptian Museum to a company with links to Hawass.[60] The ruling was appealed and this specific sentence was suspended pending appeal.[61][62] The following day, the National Council of Egypt's Administrative Court issued a decree to overturn the court's original ruling, specifying that he would serve no jail time, and would instead remain in his position as Minister of Antiquities. The jail sentence was lifted after a new contract was solicited for the running of the gift shop.[60][63]

As Minister of Antiquities, Hawass has been closely associated with the government of former President Hosni Mubarak. His resignation as minister on March 3, 2011, and his re-appointment to the Ministry on March 30, 2011, have been seen as part of the overall events surrounding Mubarak's resignation. It was reported that his re-appointment angered numerous factions, who opposed the appointment of any of the old guard under Mubarak to new positions in the government.[64] The 2011 Egyptian protests resulted in increased criticism of Hawass. Demonstrators called for his resignation, and the upheaval has increased attention on his relationship with the Mubarak family and the way in which he has increased his public profile in recent years.[60]

Hawass has lent his name to a line of men's apparel, described by The New York Times as "a line of rugged khakis, denim shirts and carefully worn leather jackets that are meant, according to the catalog copy, to hark "back to Egypt’s golden age of discovery in the early 20th century"; the clothing was first sold at Harrods department store in London, in April 2011.[61] Critics say the Hawass clothing commercializes Egyptian history, and objected to their understanding that "models had sat on or scuffed priceless ancient artifacts during the photo shoot," an accusation that was denied by Hawass and the clothing manufacturers.[61] Hawass already sells a line of Stetson hats reproducing the ones he wears, which "very much resemble" the ones worn by Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones movies.[61]

Zahi Hawass receives the Grand Prize of the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Culture (2018).