The design of the Underwater Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Alexandria
According to the design proposed by French architect Jacques Rougerie and agreed by UNESCO, the museum will consist of a three-story building. One story will be onshore, another offshore and the third under the waves along with a large open-air terrace to act as a window so that visitors to the museum will be able to view Alexandria’s Eastern Harbor. This will be decorated with four tall glass structures resembling the sails of a boat, which, according to Rougerie, will recall the lighthouse of Alexandria that illuminated the library and the world.
The onshore story will house objects raised from the seabed at several sites on the Alexandria coast, not only in the Eastern Harbor itself. There will be space for further items that are yet to be discovered and cannot be left in situ.
Fiberglass tunnels will help viewers to pass from the onshore area to the underwater section. To solve the problem of the bay’s murky waters that might make the monuments difficult to see, builders will probably have to replace the water with an artificial lagoon.
The second story would contain important items from the sea that might be installed in their original environment and exhibited in aquariums. The third level would be an underwater plexiglass tunnel providing a unique window on the sunken capital of the Ptolemies.
In the case that the feasibility study determines that the underwater museum can be constructed safely, then it will be built over three years. There is yet no data regarding cost of the construction. There are no serious concerns over the water pressure on the walls, since the harbor is only five to six meters deep.
Tips to enjoy your camel ride on a pyramid tour
Many tourists like to have their picture taken atop a camel with the pyramids in the background and some venture into a camel ride around the complex. It’s all part of the exotic flavor of an Egyptian tour. However, you must be prepared to avoid possible conflicts with the vendors of these services that might turn this fun activity into an unpleasant memory of your trip. The following is excerpted from a report by Susan Hack on How to visit the Pyramids.
Instruct your taxi to head directly to one of the two official Giza Plateau ticket booths. One is located just north of the three main pyramids up the hill from the entrance to the Mena House Hotel. The other sits in front of the Sphinx by the Sound and Light Show. A frequent Cairo taxi scam is to hijack first-time visitors and drop them instead at some distant stable offering horseback and camel rides, where the driver receives a commission.
A photo of yourself on a camel with the Great Pyramid as a backdrop is best arranged in the car park just in front of the smaller Pyramid of Menkaure. Don’t accept “As you like” for a price.
Bargain and expect that you will pay at least five Egyptian pounds to take a photo of a camel without getting on it, ten pounds for a photo taken by the driver of yourself sitting atop of a camel, 20 pounds for a photo and a short 10-minute ride from the Pyramids to the Sphinx, and 60 pounds for a ride of one hour that circles around the complex.
Make sure to specify local Egyptian currency in advance; sometimes a cameleer will agree to a figure and later reveal that he wants euros or dollars. Don’t dismount in an isolated spot but near groups of people or a tourist police officer who can mediate a price dispute.
Inevitably you will be asked for more money than originally agreed on because the ride has been longer, hotter and more troublesome, according to the poor camel driver walking beside you in the hot sand making sure “Paris Hilton,” “Posh Spice,” or “Cleopatra” doesn’t spit on you.
I might add that you must state clearly beforehand that you’re paying not only to climb the camel but to dismount the tall beast as well, as some unscrupulous vendors demand extra pay for this “service”.
A not so glitzy way to live off Egypt tourism for Sinai Bedouins
An estimated 30,000 Bedouins in the Sinai peninsula are no longer able to make enough milk, butter and cheese off their animals. A severe drought over the past years has dried out available pasture land and is forcing them to eek out a meager existence out of the waste left by the coastal Egypt tourism industry in Sharm-el-Sheikh.
In the tourist resort of Nuweibaa, some 150km north of Sharm el-Sheikh on the Gulf of Aqaba, a nongovernmental organization called Himaya (protection) is helping needy Bedouins. It collects and sorts garbage, selling some of the solid waste to cover costs and making the organic waste available free of charge to Bedouins it deems need help, allowing them to sell it on. Proceeds from the sale of the solid waste also help Himaya fund regional development projects, such as the renovation of classrooms in primary schools in South Sinai. Another is the creation of green spaces in urban areas.
More re Luxor Development Plan
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Jane Akshar of Luxor News has posted an article by Ray Johnson, Director of the Epigraphic Survey Chicago House about the urban renewal program in Luxor and its effects on the local population, tourism, antiquities preservation, and the archaeological community. The following is an excerpt:
Since I started working for the Epigraphic Survey in 1978, I have witnessed the transformation of Luxor from a sleepy, charming, provincial town into a 21st century tourist mecca. In 1978 the horse and carriage and a few battered Mercedes were the main modes of transportation; Peugeots came later, and I remember when the first big tour bus hit town in the 1980s. I have witnessed a series of development programs that were launched largely due to increasing tourism. The most radical until now was the riverbank development project of the late 1980s that transformed the natural, tree-lined riverbank of Luxor into a concrete, terraced mooring and touristic area four kilometers long. In that project the existing infrastructure along the Corniche was respected, the riverbank was extended outward, the Corniche was widened, and a pedestrian walkway with garden areas was created along the edge of the riverbank for the local families and tourists alike which is still tremendously popular with everyone.
This current development program is the most ambitious one to date and is more radical than anything ever seen (even in the pharaonic period, which is saying something). As has been stated, the program has its good and its bad points.
The issues that the new development program address have been of concern to the Government of Egypt (GOE) and the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) for a long, long time, but until now the SCA alone did not have the resources to deal with them properly. The main issues are:
1. The need to enlarge and upgrade Luxor’s infrastructure and antiquities site facilities to accommodate radically expanded tourism, east and west bank.
2. The encroachment of the modern community on antiquities sites, east and west bank.
3. The excavation and development of new antiquities sites (like the sphinx road between Luxor and Karnak temples) for tourism, but which (the thinking goes) will also safeguard the sites from future encroachment.
As most of you know by now, the Chicago House facility and its neighbors along the several kilometers of the Luxor Corniche are being directly affected by a new Corniche widening and development program sponsored by the GOE. Chicago House can live with these changes. But some of our neighbors are not so fortunate. One of the saddest parts of Luxor’s new development program is that rather than encouraging the mingling of the tourists with the local population, which enriches the visitors’ experience (and generates valuable income for the locals), the GOE’s policy promotes segregation of the two groups.
A related issue is the encroachment of the modern community on the antiquities sites. The city’s clearing of the residential area around Karnak and creation of a huge plaza all the way to the river, occurred at the same time the residents of Gurna and Dra Abu El Naga were moved from their homes - which were then torn down - and re-settled in the newly constructed community of New Gurna to the north. This form of site management - clearing away all modern encroachment from the vicinity of antiquities sites - has been the ideal of the GOE and SCA for generations, conceived when there were far, far fewer buildings around Karnak or houses over the Gurna necropolis.
As has been noted, the sad reality for the scientific community and local population in Luxor - and in many cultural heritage sites all over the world - is that the prime motivation for the city’s new development program is increased tourism. The entire GOE is behind Luxor’s program, and the goal is clear: to create the means by which the maximum number of tourists can visit the maximum number of sites in the shortest time possible. The challenge of our community is to continue our conversation with the city, the SCA, and the local population to help Egypt mitigate any potentially negative affects on the antiquities sites that we are all committed to preserve.
Click on Luxor News for the full article.
What is a World Heritage Site, anyway?
The Unesco World Heritage Committee, elected by nation states every four years, meets once a year to choose the world’s natural or human-made wonders in the greatest need of protection. Any country is eligible to send in a list of nominees for protection. Each site must meet at least one of 10 criteria, among them:
• represent a “masterpiece of human creative genius”
• be “an important interchange of human values”
• “bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to civilisation” past or present
• be an outstanding example of a type of building or settlement which illustrates a significant stage in human history
• “contain superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance”
• be outstanding examples of major stages of Earth’s history or ecological and biological processes in evolution
• house threatened species “of outstanding universal value”
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There are currently 878 world heritage sites which include 678 listed for cultural reasons and 174 lauded as wonders of nature. These include the Great Barrier Reef, the Serengeti Desert, the Pyramids of Giza, the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China, Mount Kenya, Edinburgh’s Old and New Towns, Hadrian’s Wall, Stonehenge, Memphis and its Necropolis, Persepolis, the Palace of Westminster, the centre of St Petersburg, the Banaue rice terraces in the Philippines and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station in Mumbai. The country with the biggest number of sites is Italy, which has 43.
EGYPT WORLD HERITAGE SITES
• Abu Mena (1979)
• Cultural site Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis (1979)
• Cultural site Historic Cairo (1979)
• Cultural site Memphis and its Necropolis – the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur (1979)
• Cultural site Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae (1979)
• Cultural site Saint Catherine Area (2002)
• Natural site Wadi Al-Hitan (Whale Valley) (2005)
This year, the committee met in Quebec City, Canada, and added an extra 27 places across the globe to its list of “endangered species”. Among them were more than 100 monumental tombs at Al-Hijr in Saudi Arabia, built by the Nabataean people between the first century BC and AD100. Another was the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, where one billion butterflies overwinter each year. The committee also added the island of Surtsey, which appeared 20 miles south of Iceland as a result of volcanic eruptions between 1963 and 1967, and is a pristine natural laboratory for the study of plant and animal colonisation.
Does it help to have World Heritage status?
Yes…
• It brings extra funds to poor countries to help conserve places of universal value
• It draws attention to the world’s most neglected treasures and places of historic interest or natural beauty
• It can save places from total destruction by natural or human forces
No…
• It brings in floods of extra tourists whose footprint can do more harm than good
• It can have the effect of preserving a living place in aspic and stifling innovation
• It can undermine a country’s right to make decisions about its own heritage
Source: Paul Vallely for The Independent
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The development plan for Luxor
Image by Xavier Fargas via Flickr
The “Comprehensive Development Plan for the City of Luxor, Egypt”, drawn up in 1999, “prepared for the Ministry of Housing Utilities and Urban Communities and the UNDP-sponsored Abt Associates” is to establish and carry out a work plan for environmentally sustainable tourism development that also benefits the local population.”
There is a very real reason why the project is top priority. Tourism is growing. Tens of thousands of visitors arrive in Luxor daily. Groups are bussed in from Hurghada for daily tours, and the Nile Corniche simply cannot accommodate the hundreds of rambling tour busses.
What is historically important unfortunately counts for little in political and economic terms in contemporary Egypt, because tourism is one of the three top foreign-currency earners and weighs too heavily against the protection of archaeological sites. Anyway, it is difficult to differentiate between what appears an unnecessarily ambitious archaeological undertaking, and its part of a comprehensive development plan for the city of Luxor.
I refer to the decision to excavate and restore the Avenue of Sphinxes linking Luxor and Karnak temples with view to “improving the touristic experience, increasing the vitality of the city centre, and forming the centrepiece of an Open Museum”. Back in 1997 no one realised that it was part of a comprehensive plan that would require the demolition of housing, commercial, government and religious buildings intruding on the buried avenue, and include the phased relocation of Luxor residents. Nor did they realise that it would be a pedestrian thoroughfare and that the Nile boulevard would be widened to accommodate tourist buses transporting tens of thousands of tourists to Karnak daily.
Today, 10 years down the line, we finally read the fine print and realise the full extent of what many call a “catastrophe”. As the sandstone sphinxes (some 1,200 of them) continue to be unearthed, we realise that the housing of hundreds of residents are being demolished and they themselves relocated. The project includes “landscaping and enhancing the area with the provision of visitor amenities”, and “modification” of street layout. A clear statement of intention. So why are we surprised?
The plan to increase the size of Luxor ten-fold is frightening. Is it too late to do anything about it?
Excerpted from an article by Jill Kamill for Al-Ahram
French tourists released after Egypt desert safari
Image by enthogenesis via Flickr
Egyptian authorities have released five French tourists and four Egyptians accused of endangering themselves on an unauthorized desert safari.
The tourists, aged between 42 and 85, were arrested on Tuesday in the Red Sea resort of Marsa Alam after a safari to the nearby Wadi el-Ghadir organized by an Egyptian tour operator. Tour companies must get security permits to conduct desert safaris in Egypt.
British couple mistakenly arrested for theft of Egyptian antiquities
Retired policeman Anthony Griffin and his wife Pauline were stopped at St. Lucia airport by an immigration official who told him there was an international warrant for his arrest over the theft of Egyptian artefacts. The couple were planning on spending a three week holiday break in the Caribbean island when Mr. Griffin was mistakenly identified as the man wanted by Egyptian authorities.
Instead of booking in to a plush hotel the couple say they were separated and thrown in filthy, rat-infested police cells for two days.
“We were terrified,” said Mr Griffin. “The treatment was diabolical. I was frightened to death and my wife was shaking with fear. We’ve been to Egypt twice but all we brought back was a cheap souvenir with Nefertiti’s head on it.”
Tony and Pauline Griffin are happy to be back home in the UK after being told there was nothing wrong. Mr Griffin, meanwhile, is seeking redress from the St Lucian authorities but it is unclear what avenues are open to him.
Glorious past and future for Alexandria
Modern Alexandria sits on top of two great civilizations. A battle to reclaim its past and to build according to Alexandria’s rich cultural heritage is led by Dr Mohammed Awad, architect, historian and director of the Alexandria & Mediterranean Research Center.
His campaigning has earned him respect and enmity in about equal measure. His most controversial action was to promote the idea of erecting an equestrian statue of the city’s founder, Alexander the Great. Designed in Greece and presented as a gift by various Greek associations in 2000, the monument enraged many Egyptians who – only 2,331 years on from the event – still viewed the Macedonian as an imperialist conqueror.
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Another of Awad’s notable campaigns was in the mid-1990s when he took a stand against the bulldozing of the site where the city’s new library was to be built without prior archaeological excavation work. The library was the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, intended to revive the spirit of the lost Alexandrian library of classical times. Completed in 2002, it is a giant 160-meter-diameter glazed disc that emerges out of layers of history and tilts its face to the Mediterranean. Its solid granite drum is inscribed with characters from every known alphabet, some 120 scripts, while the great amphitheater of the reading room sits 2,000 readers. The library is only the second in the world to hold a full copy of the Internet Archive, which is a snapshot of every page hosted on the web between 1996 and 2006, or 1.5 petabytes (that is 1 followed by 15 zeroes) of data stored on 880 computers. This July it was host to Wikimania 2008, the annual conference for people involved in web-based Wikimedia projects. Last October the Bibliotheca celebrated placing its 555,555th book on the shelves (Euclid’s Elements, appropriately enough a product of the original Library of Alexandria).
But Bibliotheca Alexandrina is far more than books. The hope is that the library can act as a catalyst for nothing less than an intellectual and cultural rebirth of the city.
At the heart of Alexandria is the Eastern Harbor. At one extreme of the harbor is the library, at the other the 15th-century Fort of Qaitbey, built on the foundations of the Pharos. A recent invitation to submit schemes for the redevelopment of the historic district resulted in proposals from a host of international starchitects including IM Pei (creator of the Louvre Pyramid), Mario Botta (who designed the Church of Santo Volto in Turin, Italy) and the Chicago-based partnership Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, designers of New York’s Freedom Tower.
Right now, however, all attention is on another, equally ambitious headline-grabber: the Underwater Museum. The sea has done a far better job of preserving ancient Alexandria than humanity has. In recent years a team led by French archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur has discovered hundreds of stone blocks lying on the seafloor, subsequently identified as belonging to the Pharos lighthouse. A team headed by fellow underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio has brought to light large numbers of statues, sphinxes and ceramics in an area that he speculates may be the site of the palace of Cleopatra herself. It seems a large area of ancient Alexandria lies underwater just meters off the shore.
New museum or not, there is already significant new investment in the city. The commercial Western Harbor is in the process of being upgraded, while construction has begun on a new Alexandria International Airport. The moribund local hotel and dining scenes also received a shot in the arm with last year’s opening of the Four Seasons Hotel Alexandria.
Following years of pressure on the government a new law was recently ratified that makes it illegal to demolish the city’s listed buildings – a list Awad compiled and which runs to more than 1,000 items.
“The problem,’ says Awad, ‘is going to be what do we do with buildings that we save?” In the case of the Antoniadis Villa, a palatial 19th-century residence set in landscaped gardens, an answer has been found. Currently undergoing restoration, when complete the villa will house the headquarters of the Alexandria & Mediterranean Research Center. There will also be a museum and education center, and accommodation for visiting academics, writers and artists.
“People who are interested in culture are a small, marginal group,” says Awad. Marginal they may be, but with the Antoniadis Villa, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 1,000 protected heritage buildings, a possible underwater museum and, who knows, a city center redesigned by Mario Botta, they may have done enough to open a new chapter in the illustrious history of the city founded by Alexander.
Excerpted from an article by Andrew Humphreys for CNN Traveller
Bus accident in Egypt kills 6, 26 injured
A speeding tourist bus overturned in southern Egypt, killing six Belgian tourists and injuring 26 other Belgian passengers early Friday. The bus crashed en route from Aswan to Abu Simbel, a famous tourist attraction.
Twenty one of the injured had been taken to the Abu Simbel International hospital. Egypt’s state-run news agency MENA said four of the injured were in critical condition and were evacuated by military helicopters to hospitals in Cairo for surgery.
Egypt has a history of serious bus and car crashes because of speeding, careless driving and poor road conditions, with at least 8,000 people killed in accidents in 2006, the most recent statistics available.
