More re Hawass

See previous posts on the subject for a summary of the news to date (yesterday and the day before). There is also a discussion developing on Nora Shalaby's blog, which could be worth watchng for comments from Egyptian as well as other perspectives.

Smithsonian (Andrew Lawler)

Includes a statement in response by Hawass.

Hawass was characteristically blunt in assessing why he was let go after nearly a decade in charge. “All the devils united against me,” he said in an e-mail today. And he said he believed that archaeology will suffer as a result. Mubarak had created the ministry of antiquities in January as part of an effort to salvage his government; it had been a non-cabinet agency called the Supreme Council of Antiquities, which reported to the ministry of culture. Hawass predicted that the antiquities ministry would be abolished within two months.

That worries foreign archaeologists, who say that the ministry upgrade was a good idea. “I’m very concerned about the antiquities,” said Sarah Parcak, an Egyptologist at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. “And these monuments are the lifeblood of the Egyptian economy.”

Who would succeed Hawass was unclear. Sharaf initially nominated Abd El Fattah El-Banna, a University of Cairo professor who is an engineer specializing in stone conservation. El-Banna is a longtime critic of Hawass. “The people say they don’t want Hawass,” he said in an interview last month. “And we need a revolution within the ministry.”

But Egyptian and foreign sources said that protesting archaeologists rejected the appointment of a nonarchaeologist and mobbed the area outside the antiquities ministry’s headquarters in protest.