Just went to the Cleopatra exhibit in Philadelphia. Of course Zahi Hawass appears in the presentation. He is obviously good at getting in front of a camera. He is very good at being a spokesman. How well regarded is he as an archaeologist and Egyptologist?
I am not an archeologist yet [working on getting into UofATuscon for it now] so take it with a grain of salt, from watching pretty much everything on Egyt that has been on TV in the last 20 years.
The guy is a well educated jackass. Boob. Moron. He is good for getting face time on every program shot in Egypt because oddly enough he is in the hierarchy of bureaucracy you have to go through to get permission.
How I hate him, let me count the ways …
How about total inability to not be total flash - One memorable “live” event he did a parallel dig where he went down into the tomb, ripped open the sarcophagus and manhandled the mummy with no protective gear on.
Firstly - you carefully take copious notes, drawings and photographs of every step of the process because all data are important to forming an accurate picture of what happened thousands of years ago in the process of burial. Secondly, you carefully remove the items and preserve them in a laboratory so you can maintain any small clues and details about the items. Thirdly, fungus, spores, dust, mold, mildew and cross contamination. You do not want to catch some of the nasties from spore exposure they can and have killed archeologists and workers on digs. You do not want to cross contaminate your remains, frequently chemical and DNA analysis is carried out and if you cross contaminate the grave goods or body it fucks up your results.
I have friends who are archeologists. One friend literally took 3 weeks removing random broken stuff from a jar piece by piece in a whitesuit lab. Under a camera. With an assistant taking still pictures, notes and bagging samples. That ass Hawass would probably dump it on the floor of the tomb and turf through it pointing stuff out then having some poor schlub sweep it up and turf it back in, just to get face time on a camera.
Hawass also has this charming habit of denying permits to dig anywhere that someone non-egyptian might find something of note, and has been known to jump in and turf archeologists off their dig sites as soon as it appears they might actually have found something interesting. He has been totally dismissive of DNA unless it suits him to get something flash out [like Hatsepshut] though he claims it is all for the benefit of egypt, to maintain control of their history.
About the only thing I like about him is he is anti-afrocentric. His response to all the claims of black pharohs is that they were certainly not black [except for the few that had documented ethiopian mothers.]
And if he ever googles and gets this post, I will never get permission to do anything in Egypt for the balance of my professional life. Good thing my field of interest is in steppes nomads.
He looks and talks exactly like a friend of mine, so I always giggle when I see him. I wonder if he is gay like my friend.
Heh…he sounds like the kind of person who vanity Googles twice a day…
I am not in the field and don’t know his credentials but it has always struck me that he fancies himself to be the Egyptian Indiana Jones. I’ll be leaving for Cairo Sunday. I’ll say hi for you if I see him. 
Aw, jeez, aruvqan, and I liked him so much! I have seen him do some questionable stuff, though. I mean, anybody who knows anything about forensics or Egyptology knows not to just dive right in and rip things apart. Feh.
hey, watch him and be entertained, just try to keep in mind he can totally fuck with any non egyptians attempt to work in their chosen field, if they chose Egypt.
He sounds just like the sort of person who gets people to post on as many M.B.s as possible with questions/opinions etc.about himself to help promote his fame.
From what I’ve seen of him, in the archeological field he is totally useless and unproffessional.
He comes off as a careless phony to me. Good on public relations, not good on actual scientific work.
It requires payment to read the full article, but this profile of him in the New Yorker from last November seemed to me rather well balanced. Bottom line, he’s a showman and a narcissist, but that’s to be expected and even appropriate in the somewhat political role that the Egyptian government have promoted him into.
Granted that current role was partly created because they realised that they had a native archaeologist, trained and experienced, with the requisite media profile, who was ready and willing to fill it.
I met someone this weekend who is an egyptologist, and has been a very close colleague of Hawass for decades. She said his scientific skills are very well respected, but says quite candidly that he is overly impressed with himself, and she and other colleagues even tease him about it openly.
An exhibit of Cleopatra artifacts is on tour (currently at the Franklin Institute, I just saw it Saturday and met her the same night, sheer coincidence). In the gift shop is a souvenir hat for sale as “Zahi Hawass Hat”. (I resisted the temptation to re-label it “Zahi Asshat”). He tries to be an Egyptian Indiana Jones.
Anyway, she says his credentials are great, he studied at top schools in the U.S., and has done a lot to move Egypt forward in how it manages its antiquities, so she just takes the other aspects of his personality in stride as part of the whole package.
Is Hawass one of the first prominent native Egyptian Archeologists?
Before him, IIRC all the significant work was done by westerners.
I’ve read that Egypt is trying to reclaim some of it’s lost heritage.
Perhaps the next generation of native Egyptian Archeologists will be better educated in field work and more professional?
Does anyone know the reputation of the archeology programs at the universities in Egypt?
Wow…he really did that?
Yep. He does stuff like that all the time. Watch Chasing Mummies, you’ll see how he does business. I do think that a great deal of the sloppiness is due to security concerns and budget restrictions. Not every pissant tomb can be guarded 24/7, nor can he tote around every piece of equipment he might desire at all times. Cross contamination is a deal better than nothing to work with because the site was raided. That said, he is an ass.
I’ve never met the guy personally but I have a few friends who have worked with/for him in various capacities. The general consensus is that while his archaeology cred may be sound, he is tremendously full of himself and rules Egyptian archaeology with an iron fist. This is perhaps best viewed in the context of Mediterranean and near eastern archaeology in general, in which local power and control tends to be concentrated into a few despotic individuals. It’s the sort of heirarchical structure that (fittingly enough) goes back thousands of years.
Also he’s made some comments that make it clear he really dislikes Jews.
I don’t regard him very highly, but there’s less reason to suspect his credibility than there is his character.
I don’t get it. Aren’t Egyptians “black”? This ladlooks pretty black to me, certainly has darker skin than some “black” Americans I’ve seen (who looked light-brown to me).
Were the pharaohs not really Egyptian? Or does “black” mean something else in this context?
Aruvqan, I agree with everything you’ve said. However, is everything presented on video an accurate representation of how he works, or is it often a post-hoc staged recreation? Specifically, perhaps the real work was done earlier in the project and the sarcophagus-ripping incident was the Cliff’s Notes version shown to the public?
I’ve no evidence that this is the case other than my naive belief that real excavation of the invaluable sites that Hawass has access to cannot be done nearly as shabbily as they appear on TV.
He made the claim on live tv that he was first opening it right then and there … it was that special on about 4 years or so ago where the people ran the little rover unit up the shaft and found the sealed door hatch.
Frankly, I really don’t care if it was staged or not, you need to use proper technique to preserve any trace evidence of the burial technique, grave goods and the like. You can tell an amazing amount about a grave site by little things like pollen and plant samples, residue from graveside meals, the fact that leftover ritual preparation items were turfed into giant jars and tossed in with the bodies in a number of cases [perhaps indicating that they had been ritually cleaned and consecrated and it was just not appropriate to reuse it for someone else] and then there is the whole health issue about exposure to fungi and molds.
I’ve been wondering this same question since I saw that same special that aruqvan mentions.
On the one hand, I can appreciate Egypt trying to take control of their remaining antiquities and stop being a stomping ground for non-Eqyptian relic collectors. On the other, there’s keeping stuff in Egypt and then there’s preventing non-Egyptians from doing anything just because they aren’t Egyptian.
CookingWithGas said:
That’s because there’s already one of those, we don’t need any more. 
phaemon, “black” in this context means of African descent, i.e. “Negro”, not just dark skinned. There’s a political movement that promotes the idea that the ancient Egyptians were African-Blacks. Like saying that Jesus was Black, the idea is to promote Black pride by associating an ancient civilization with Blacks to offset the historic European attitude of them being “savages”.
TO be accurate, there was coastal and nile headwater ‘black’ tribal blood brought into Egypt through a combination of trader intermarriage, war slave importation and area conquest with intermarriage. You run into the problem of sorting out royal marriages of state involving women from the southern areas’ tribes as concubines and secondary wives.
Unfortunately our ancestors of prechristian tribes really were rather colorblind vis-a-vis black and white. Makes being prejudiced a bitch to maintain when the nigger in the woodpile is 2500 years ago and thoroughly mixed in to the lily white appearing descendants. :smack: