Egypt's King: The Conservation of Art in Political Crises

As Egypt carries into its seventh straight day of protests against the marathon reign of President Hosni Mubarak, as the last Internet provider in the country goes dark, and as a rash of new counter-protesters inject a violent immediacy to this surging revolution, the question of the nation's other power - its vast and incomparable collections of art - becomes a prime concern for the country's future.

     The New York Times included in its stream of online coverage of street battles between protesters and police the reassuring image of Cairo's vast Egyptian Museum lobby being paced by gun-gripping military officers. In that same thread of images was a shot of the Cairo airport, where foreigners packed into lines, all in search of flights out of Egypt - airlines are scrambling to staff planes following this mass exodus of travelers from the country.

     The guards were stationed after looters attacked the Egyptian Museum, home to nearly 120,000 historical objects including the famed gold funerary mask of Tutankhamen. Luckily, though one room away from the Tutankhamen treasures, they only managed to damage the objects they intended to steal, ripping the heads off two mummies, toppling a statue of King Tut and trying to break off gilded wood they apparently mistook for gold. Still, the restoration of these objects will be difficult work.

     Sunday 35 men tried to break into the museum, and finally on Monday a group of 50 men made a third go. This time, however, snipers had been stationed on the roof, and dozens of armed guards were patrolling its halls. The officers had been ordered not to shoot, and the group was arrested in the museum's lobby.

Flanked by special forces, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass 

speaks at Cairo's Egyptian Museum Monday.

  In Memphis, south of Cairo, an open-air museum was ransacked and emptied of its art. Other museums across Egypt have suffered looting, including the Royal Jewelry Museum and the National Museum in Alexandria.

  Zahi Hawass, who has long been the outspoken antiquities chief in Egypt, was recently appointed as Minister of State Antiquities in Mubarak's new government. "If the museum is safe, Egypt is safe," he said. While the military is beginning to protect these important sites, the exigency of preserving Egypt's cultural history escalates.

  The danger of mixing arts and political crisis has been witnessed before in our young century. By the close of the Taliban's reign in 2001, the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul had suffered the worst aspects of that regime. All human depictions had been slashed, shattered, looted, set aflame or bombed. The Taliban was seeking to erase the multicultural, long-historied and complex narrative of Afghanistan. It is a testimony to the museum staff's courage that only two-thirds of its contents were destroyed; in 1988 the staff hid crates of the most precious artifacts in the presidential palace, which were retrieved in 2004. That art had miraculously survived.

  In 2003, the Taliban aimed their energies at another precious national treasure. The sixth century rock sculptures of Bamiyan were detonated. The Taliban strung locals from ropes to plant the bombs into the bodies of these ancient living rock sculptures. One local described the terror at the possibility of being released into free fall by his Taliban captor after he'd stuck the explosives into the 1,500-year-old Buddha.
     That same year, Iraqi looters broke into and ransacked the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. American forces intervened three days later, when the worst damage had already been done.

     It seems that Egypt is aware of these precedents as it stations troops to protect its national treasures. Afghanistan and Iraq are both haunting examples of the unrestrained destruction of art as a result of political fragmentation. In Afghanistan, art was understood as a serious encroachment on a central, exclusive religious and political narrative; in Iraq, desperation and conflict fused to destroy the Baghdad Museum's holdings. In Egypt, art is an esteemed and essential component of personal and national history, yet economic despair and political turbulence combine to make ancient artifacts an easy target. The comparison should not link Egypt's protests to Iraq and Afghanistan's very separate histories, but should rather illustrate what incredible losses have occurred when art vanishes in the upheavals of the nation-state. 

  Protesters have done much to curb the chaos of Egypt while asserting their authority. In Alexandria, a group of young Egyptians barricaded the Library of Alexandria from would-be looters, an act addressed in an official's letter of gratitude to young Alexandrians. Since then, Hawass has claimed that all twenty-four of the country's museums are now being guarded by the army and should even open to the public later this week - a dubious suggestion given the escalating violence in Tahrir Square.

  The world is watching what may be a great shift in power or a mere adjustment to the political regime. Among what is key is that the Egyptians continue to protect what is one of their country's greatest economic and cultural assets: its art. If the Egyptian protesters are successful in achieving the reform and restructuring of power that they seek, they must know that their art and their heritage will play an essential role in ensuring the progress and stability of any future state. This, I suspect, is why, following Friday's initial attack against the Cairo National Museum, a group of young Egyptians armed themselves and formed a human barricade at the museum's doors. The havoc that has so far transpired there through the will of some of the country's careless opportunists has also expressed the forceful wisdom of Egypt's new generation.