Big Daddy of the Mummies

He sucks in the dusty air, blows it out and squints up at the face of these ancient rocks from beneath the brim of his trademark Panama -- “my famous hat,” he calls it. It is a fine day for television, and Zahi Hawass is ready for action.

“I’m sorry, your name?” he asks an Australian television reporter, whom he has already chided for failing to “do your homework.” The two are walking, over and over, to the mouth of the tomb of an ancient king. They chat in canned bits, and when they stumble in the dust, they go back and start over.

When the sound technician approaches with the microphone, nobody has to tell Hawass what to do -- he springs to his feet and sets about fumbling with the buttons of his shirt. “You know how many times I’ve done this? You know why?” he says. “Because I’m good, damned good. If you see me on television, you’ll understand.”

Hawass, 56, is the pugnacious, nationalistic and hopelessly hammy head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. He stands guard over archeological treasures -- from the Great Pyramids of Giza to the Sphinx to the mummies’ tombs -- with a surreal blend of panache and belligerence.

A chapter of a forthcoming book he has written devotes considerable space to his own circumcision -- he doesn’t believe there’s an appetite for archeology that isn’t autobiographical. It was Hawass, too, who sent a robot into the heart of one of the Great Pyramids, the exploration broadcast live last fall on international television.

“I’m great!” he crows suddenly one recent afternoon, hopping over puddles on his way to smoke his habitual water pipe in a back-street teahouse near the banks of the Nile. “It’s a masterpiece, really,” he says soberly, recommending one of his own newspaper columns as he settles into a seat under the tinsel of last year’s Ramadan feasts.

Beneath his airs and exclamations, Hawass is a scholar fighting furiously and cannily for his country. He comes from a nation chafed by the tension between progress and preservation, trying to find a way forward by capitalizing on its glorious past, and wrestling all the while with a history of colonialism.

Hawass is an Egyptian who grew up listening to the drone of Europeans who lectured on Egyptian history. Born in a village, he stumbled into archeological studies after floundering in law school. From those indifferent beginnings, he has grown into a powerful figure, an arbitrator feared, emulated and sometimes resented by colleagues.

In a very real way, Hawass is the antiquities council -- especially since the promotion that bumped him to the head of the government agency last year. His whims can open tombs to ambitious scholars, and his judgments can cast hard doubt on the value of their discoveries.

Within President Hosni Mubarak’s government, his control over the fields of treasures is virtually absolute. And Hawass has a plan: He wants to save the monuments, retrieve looted artifacts from abroad and bring dominance in the field of Egyptology back home.

To that end, Hawass quarrels often with foreign Egyptologists, and he has kicked 14 excavations out of the country so far this year. In a feud with post-colonial overtones, he has singled out the British as “stupid”; threatened to ban Britain’s York University from the country; and demanded that the British Museum lend back the Rosetta Stone, which has been on display in London since 1802. He’s scrapping quite publicly with a British researcher who believes she found the mummy of Queen Nefertiti in a tomb in the hills of Luxor.

He’s calling noisily for the return of all far-flung artifacts stolen or smuggled out of Egypt through the centuries. The response has been decidedly mixed. A nasty spar with a Berlin museum over a 3,300-year-old limestone bust has caused a commotion in the international antiquities community. Still Hawass pushes on.

Critics say he’s a bully. Hawass says Egypt has been “prostituted” by foreigners. “I have a system and rules, and it can upset people,” he says. “I stop amateurs from destroying the monuments.”

He says the important thing is to follow the rules -- his rules -- and that everybody, including Egyptians, must cooperate.

“I have a strong personality. If I’m a piece of cake and do everything the foreigners said, they’d love me, but history would punish me,” Hawass says. “I’m giving every minute of my life to control everything in my own country, and people who criticize this are lazy, stupid jerks.”

Despite his defensiveness, Hawass maintains the upper hand: Researchers who have worked in Egypt say nobody would dare complain publicly about him for fear of losing hard-won access. Striding through the clusters of scientists and workers in the Valley of the Kings, Hawass cuts a commanding figure. The men fall away, waiting for the crumbs of cheer or recrimination he scatters in his wake.

“You criticized your colleague,” he tells one in Arabic. “Don’t ever do that again.” The man nods quickly.

Some 70% of Egypt’s ancient ruins remain buried in the sands. Hawass wants Egyptians to dig them up, Egyptians to study them and Egyptians to view them in Egyptian museums. He wants Egyptians to talk about them on television.

And for all his eccentricities, for all the first-person non sequiturs that disrupt his academic discussions, the Egyptian public has embraced Hawass for what he is, a true patriot.

“Who speaks on TV? Foreigners. Who makes discoveries? Only foreigners. I felt we should do it ourselves,” he says.

He has coaxed U.S. and European universities to grant scholarships to seven Egyptian graduate students to study Egyptology. The scholars are sent in exchange for a pledge: They must come home to work in Egypt, and sponsor more students once they’re established. That way, Hawass figures, one day there will be enough local talent to produce a strong Egyptology department within Egypt -- a dream for a man who peppers his interviews with asides such as “See how Egyptians are smart?” and “By the way, Egyptians are generous.”

Into this realm strode Joann Fletcher, an Egyptologist at York University. In a stale tomb in the Valley of the Kings, she claimed to have identified the mummy of Nefertiti, the “Great Royal Woman.” Based on her theory, the Discovery Channel made a documentary, “Nefertiti Revealed.”

Hawass was furious. As far as he was concerned, Fletcher had broken the rules. She never discussed her hunch with the Egyptian government, he says -- a serious faux pas in his eyes. Under the contract that every scientist must sign before starting a dig, only Egypt -- in effect, only Hawass -- has the right to announce discoveries to the media.

In Fletcher’s case, that would have been difficult, her colleagues say, since the work of the York team was affordable only because the Discovery Channel pitched in millions of dollars. In exchange, mummification expert Stephen Buckley says, the network was eager to produce a documentary.

Fletcher never said the mummy was the corpse of Nefertiti, Buckley points out, only that the remains were those of a royal woman in the right age range. He says the British team raised the possibility to Hawass, who was skeptical.

Hawass isn’t interested in particulars. His recrimination has been as hot and relentless as a sandstorm. Besides threatening to ban York University from Egypt, he began a searing publicity crusade to attack Fletcher personally and professionally.

He insists the mummy could well have been a man. He sneers at each piece of Fletcher’s evidence -- she never measured the pelvis, he says, and probably mistook the shaved head of a priest for the clean scalp of a queen. According to Hawass, even her interpretation of the pierced ears was flawed.

As for Fletcher herself, he dismisses her as a novice starved for fame. “I think she’s crazy,” he huffs for the benefit of visiting reporters.

Fletcher could not be reached for comment; both York University and her close friend Buckley said she wasn’t available to talk.

“He’s been very personal, which is unfortunate,” says Buckley, who worked on the dig with Fletcher. “Obviously, he’s in a difficult position, and it’s a sensitive issue politically. He’s playing to an Egyptian audience, and it’s their Nefertiti.”

That was only the most recent fight. Giving a June speech at the notoriously staid British Museum in London, Hawass told the audience that the pharaohs there were speaking to him. Moreover, he said, they were complaining of heat and ill treatment, and demanding to come home to Egypt.

“It was a riot,” he says. “It was like a bomb went off in London, a bomb!” During the same trip, he called for the return of the Rosetta Stone. Just a three-month loan, Hawass says -- but the British have made their skepticism plain.

Today Hawass is in his glory, steering the Australian television crew past the gods and goddesses twined into intricate hieroglyphs on the walls, to the dark resting place of the mummies. He is breathing the musty air of ancient tombs and gleefully ridiculing Fletcher.

He has meticulously planned the walk up the sun-scorched trail to the tomb of Amenhotep II, and decided on a sunrise interview overlooking the Valley of the Kings. And he has settled on a piece de resistance: For the first time, cameras will enter the antechamber where three mysterious mummies lie.

Hawass will speak in thrilling tones of the “Mummies’ Curse,” and then he will stand over the blackened bodies and systematically debunk the theory that Nefertiti’s might be among them.

“He’s really an actor,” Sabry Abdel Aziz, Egypt’s head of Egyptology, says softly. He is standing with the workmen, security police and entourage of scientists, waiting in the outer tomb. While Hawass complains about Fletcher’s claims, Aziz shrugs and smiles.

“This glory,” he says, running his eyes lovingly over the hieroglyphs, “pushes people to many things. It makes them crazy sometimes.”

A wall of brick and plaster was erected recently to plug the entrance to the tomb from the greater burial chamber -- all the better, says Hawass, for the cameraman to capture the workmen ripping it down. They won’t dislodge all of the bricks, though, because Hawass thinks it will give the film a shot of drama if he and the reporter are forced to squeeze through a tight hole. “It should be difficult, that’s good for the cameras,” he says.

The workers pound away at the wall, and Hawass plops down to rest, smearing dust over the seat of his dungarees. He stares around him, shushing away conversation: “I don’t like to corrupt my mind when I’m getting ready for the filming.”

These theatrics have their practical side: The Australians have paid $3,000 to follow Hawass through the ruins. His department badly needs the cash -- and the tourists lured to Egypt by such programs -- to carry through with the new museums and preservation projects Hawass has in mind.

The Egyptian government can’t afford Hawass’ vision; the antiquities bureau is perpetually underfunded, he says.

Tourist flow to Egypt dwindled drastically after the triple blows of Sept. 11, the 1997 massacre of dozens of tourists in Luxor by Islamic militants, and the war in Iraq. The falloff is a serious problem for Egypt, whose economy depends heavily on tourism -- but Hawass also has an opposing preoccupation.

He’s worried about preserving the stones, which are so delicate that even condensation from visitors’ breath eats away at them. In 50 years, he fears, Egypt’s monuments will be gone.

“I must do battle daily with Seth, the ancient god of evil and the enemy of success,” he writes in his forthcoming book, “who appears in the form of careless tourists, greedy politicians, jealous colleagues and the destructive forces of nature that threaten to destroy our heritage.”

Now his voice is echoing through the tomb, ringing in rooms laced with the ancient script of the Book of the Dead.

“History,” Hawass bellows, “will judge me!”