Inside the Office of Zahi Hawass

Egyptian archeologist Zahi Hawass, the secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, is part cultural guardian, part Indiana Jones. No television program remotely concerned with the ancient world can resist him. In a fact piece in the November 16 issue of The New Yorker, Ian Parker excavates the man, the myth, the stetson.

“Hawass’s task—in effect to Egyptianize Egyptology by means of a personality cult—is not an easy one,” writes Parker, before going on to demonstrate the complicated mix of archeology, show business, and politics that occurs daily at Hawass’s office in downtown Cairo. It’s a two-part setup, with an outer office staffed by Egyptians and an inner sanctum (the “foreign office”) focused on his English language output, including books, a website, and a newspaper column. It is there where he “likes to take phone calls while simultaneously signing handwritten invoices and rebuking subordinates.”

While I was at the office, a Zahi Hawass Day plaque arrived from Indianapolis, and a European delegation tried to close a deal for a Tutankhamun exhibit. A graphic designer showed Hawass possible jackets for a new book of his, The Lost Tombs of Thebes. (He has published more than a dozen books.) After quickly approving one of the designs, Hawass noted, in the pleasant tone of a person forced to say something crushingly obvious, “I think you have to enlarge the name.”

(Fantastic illustration by Floc’h for The New Yorker)

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