Egyptian antiquities suffering due to turmoil at the top

Al Masry Al Youm (Fatma Keshk Mohamed Azouz)

A useful look at the current state of the SCA and how it got to its current position.

To paraphrase scholar and geographer Gamal Hemdan's masterpiece "The Personality of Egypt", antiquities from the Ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman through to the Coptic and Islamic eras can be regarded as the country’s living memory.

This morning, Mohamed Abdel Maksood, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, warned that Egyptian antiquities are in a “dire state, deteriorating from bad to worse.”

This “deterioration”, according to Abdel Maksood, is due to the failure of the state to resolve the fate of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, by either keeping it as a governmentally supervised council or transforming it into a ministry with a separate budget.

The recent history of the antiquities authorities is indeed somewhat complicated.