Egypt Scholar Loves Being in Limelight

The tiny lecture hall was crowded, hot and sticky. But few in the audience--even those who had to sit on the floor-- seemed discomforted as they gazed at slides of mummified Egyptians and followed Zahi Hawass on his personal journey into antiquity.

“This is love,” the archeologist said, tenderly describing a 2,500-year-old woman who was found curled next to a child, as if to comfort it even in death.

This sensitive scholar in his sober dark suit isn’t the Zahi Hawass the world knows. For that Hawass, the swashbuckler in the Indiana Jones hat, rewind to last May and a live TV special in which nearly 6 million Americans watched the burly 51-year-old Egyptian plunge into an ancient tomb, exclaiming: “Let us go inside and start our adventure!”

On Fox television, Hawass had a co-star for maximum showbiz effect: actor Bill Pullman, described by anchorman Hugh Downs as “the man famous for saving the world in ‘Independence Day,’ ” the space-aliens movie.

Downs introduced Hawass as “the man who may know more about Egyptian antiquities than anyone in the world.”

Hawass himself admits to some distress at the show’s easy blend of fact and fiction, science and celebrity. But he refuses to be faulted for trying to show the world that science isn’t boring and to combat pseudoscientific theories about ancient Egypt.

“Archeologists should go to the public,” Hawass said. “The public needs to know.”

Among scholars, he is scholarly. On television, he’s a showman, with a movie-star smile creasing a broad, round face under close-cropped, graying hair. He looks a bit like a stone statue from his excavations that he identifies as Bis, god of good times.

Hawass’ profile has been rising since the 1980s, when he first became the government archeologist in charge of Egypt’s most famous symbols--the pyramids and the Sphinx.

His rise hasn’t been friction-free. Hawass has been accused of grandstanding and of hogging the credit for work that often involves scores of researchers. “I suffer a lot from jealousy,” he says.

Kent Weeks, an American expert on the tombs of southern Egypt, says Hawass’ “popularity and his popularizing have raised eyebrows among some of his colleagues.”

Weeks, who himself has written for general as well as specialist audiences, doesn’t fault Hawass for reaching out to the public. For the most part, Weeks says, Hawass succeeds at the important and difficult task of making scholarship accessible without dumbing it down.

Central to Hawass the scholar and Hawass the media star is his love for his subject. To succeed in any field, he says, “the most important thing is to dedicate your life, and to do it with honesty and passion.”

The ancient remains about which he is so passionate aren’t just dust and ragged mummy wrappings to Hawass. They are his heritage.

Egyptology hasn’t exactly been dominated by Egyptians. It was a Frenchman and an Englishman, Jean-Francois Champollion and Thomas Young, who in the 19th century deciphered the Rosetta Stone, the key to reading hieroglyphics. An Englishman, Howard Carter, unearthed the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922 and established the model for adventurer-archeologist.

Even today, Hawass said, for the most part “when you talk about Egyptian archeologists, you’re talking about foreigners.”

He takes pride in having turned a few young Egyptians on to archeology while teaching at Cairo University and the American University in Cairo. Even more, he’s sure, have been inspired by his TV appearances.

“It’s very important for Egyptians to understand that they once led the world in science and technology and they could make modern Egypt like that,” he said.

Growing up in his village along the Nile, Hawass wanted to be a storyteller, like the itinerant tale-spinners who would pass through. He studied law but got bored. He switched to archeology, then a new department at Alexandria University. But he was more interested in a diplomatic career.

He discovered his calling after graduating in 1967, when Egypt’s government archeology department, the Supreme Council of Antiquities, sent him to help excavate a Greco-Roman cemetery.

Unearthing toys and tools or burial scenes like the swathed remains of a woman holding the hand of her husband, he found himself making a personal connection to the long-dead.

“You can look at them as if they were alive,” he said. “Inside me was the love of archeology. I did not find it until I began to dig.”

In 31 years he has risen from inspector to undersecretary of state, earning a doctorate in Egyptology from the University of Pennsylvania along the way.

As a scholar, he is perhaps best known for the excavations of the graves of laborers who built the granite-and-limestone pyramids outside Cairo. The digs have opened new windows onto how ordinary Egyptians lived in ancient times.

As chief curator of the pyramids and Sphinx, he has had to balance conservation against the tourism that brings in the cash that makes research possible. He has allowed the pyramids to be used as backdrops for car races, tennis tournaments, a spectacular millennium concert. The crowds are kept as far away as possible, he said, and he has lectured organizers about cleaning up the trash left behind.

Cairo and its 16 million inhabitants have encroached on the pyramids over the centuries. The monuments now stand at the end of a busy road, hotels poised around them like sentries. It could be worse. Soon after he took over responsibility for the area, Hawass found private homes being built around the pyramids.

“Against all odds, Zahi said, ‘This is not acceptable,’ ” Weeks said. He credits the Egyptian with getting the homes removed.

Hawass, usually wearing jeans, presides over an office behind the largest pyramid, Cheops’ tomb. As a high-ranking civil servant he could have marble floors and fine furniture. But he’s content with a mud-walled shed lined with fading carpets, stuffed with books and decorated with photos of Hawass showing Princess Diana and Brooke Shields around the pyramids.

His own interests have recently shifted from the pyramids to secrets deep underground in another corner of the desert.

The initial discovery of tomb after tomb of mummies near Bahariya oasis, 215 miles southwest of Cairo, was not made by Hawass. He was even skeptical when his deputies first told him they believed they had something unusual. But it is Hawass who is now directing the excavations and giving an interview a day--to Fox, CNN, National Geographic.

He tells of mummies encased in sheaths of gold, mummies in pottery coffins shaped and decorated like humans, tombs covered in breathtaking paintings. His coffee-table book on the excavations is due in stores in September.