GOLDEN MUMMIES
“All the devils came for me,” says
Hawass. “The accusations brought
against me were just the talk of people
who had hated me for years.”
ALL THE SUNS MAN CAN REMEMBER
The entrance to the laser show consists of a gate in the wall separating
the work sites at the foot of the Great
Pyramids from Giza’s dirty, charmless downtown and the Pizza Hut
across the street. The chairs inside
sit arrayed just out of the reach of the
Sphinx’s heavy stone paws: the rows
and rows of foldable white chairs
would be at home at a high school
commencement. When the show begins at 7:30 pm, laser effects swirl
around monuments buttressed by archeologists’ scaffolds as the Sphinx
tells the story of ancient Egypt.
“For five thousand years, I’ve seen
all the suns man can remember in
the sky,” says the Sphinx itself,
voiced by Omar Sherif. “I saw the
history of Egypt in its first glow as
tomorrow I shall see the east burning with a new flame.”
After ten years working on the Giza
plateau, Hawass was appointed to the
board of trustees of a governmentowned company behind this nightly
spectacle. His connection to the company, Sound and Light, came to the
fore in 2009, when he canceled the
results of an auction for a contract
to operate a gift shop in the National
Museum. Even as Farid Atiya, the
HUFFINGTON
07.22.12
businessman who won the auction,
complained, Hawass planned a second round of bids. He also lobbied the
government to simply give Sound and
Light the contract - which the government eventually did.
When the new gift shop opened
the State Council, a the judicial body
closed it. The council sided with
Atiya, but Hawass wrote to the Prime
Minister to tell him Sound and Light
and AUC had already invested too
much in the project for the store to
be shuttered.
That was in early January 2011.
A month later, as Mubarak handed
over control to a military council,
Hawass remained as prominent as
“ALL THE DEVILS
CAME FOR ME.”
ever, but the gift shop, empty since
the break in, would soon prove troublesome again.
By late February, a group of about
150 young Egyptian archeologists
were opposing Hawass, publicly demanding opportunities in a field they
claimed the toppled regime had ceded to foreigners. Hawass resigned on
March 5, sayin