EGYPT’S HELIOPOLIS: EXPERTS FACE MODERN PROBLEMS AT ANCIENT SITE
▶ Digging in one of the most densely populated areas in the world presents unique challenges, writes Jahd Khalil
Excavating the ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis is not your stereotypical dig. At one archaeological site, workers had to remove rubbish 13 metres deep before they could start the dirt. For the archaeologists and antiquities officials, the most pressing challenges are modern, not ancient.
The site is in the north Cairo neighbourhood of Matareya, one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Each square kilometre of space in the district holds an average of 156,712 people.
“It has its own tasks and risks. Working there is much different than other sites,” says Dr Ayman Ashmawy, head of Ancient Egypt at the ministry of antiquities.
“They are so friendly, but also to work inside doesn’t give you a lot of privacy and ability to work freely. It’s a special case, Matareya.”
Dr Ashmawy and Dr Dietrich Raue, of the University of Leipzig, are joint directors of the Egyptian-German expedition that in March found a near 8-metre statue, possibly of Psamtik I who ruled Egypt from 664-610BC.
It was found between half-vacant apartment buildings that could only be reached by unpaved roads. In September, they found two of the statues toes in the mud.
The water table in the area has risen more than a metre since Dr Ashmawy started working on the site, he says.
Self-built housing could be to blame, workers on the site said at the time, but the water table in the areas north of Cairo has also risen as a result of increasing sea levels.
Near by, on a road leading to the site, Eid Megahed has run an appliance repair shop for 13 years. His family moved there 30 years ago, when it was mostly fields.
He remembers Matareya when it was so full of antiquities that it was common for peddlers to wheel around carts with a couple of dozen scavenged artefacts for sale.
The ancient city of Heliopolis had immense religious importance for some Egyptians. Mythology says that the world was created on this site, and it is much larger than Karnak, one of Egypt’s most famous tourist attractions.
The proximity of Heliopolis to Persian and later Arab settlements made it an easy source of quarried stone for their building projects.
Today, most antiquities are small amulets, or shards of stone or pottery. For historians, the material can hold much insight into ancient Egypt.
This is why, before any building work can begin, contractors need to fill out much paperwork to ensure they do not leave anything of historical value under apartment blocks or shopping malls when digging foundations.
To do that, they need the signature of Khaled Abou Elalla, the man who stands between the growth of the city and the trove of antiquities beneath it.
“The next generation, all they’ll see is the history that we are writing now,” says Mr Abou Elalla, whose office is near Matareya’s obelisk, where the city is bustling and the noise of traffic and construction is hard to ignore.
“They’ll see this neighbourhood just as buildings and homes, they won’t see the antiquities.”
Areas without antiquities can get the ministry’s approval in about two months, he says, but if there is an archaeological find, the process can take up to two or three years.
Usually, Mr Abou Elalla says, there is pressure from contractors or government entities to rush through the permits to encourage development, unless there is a government project under way already.
While Matareya is not a typical dig site, it is not unusual for people to live near or on archaeological sites. In fact, it is a defining characteristic of Egyptology, as the areas suitable for habitation today are largely the same as those in ancient Egypt.
“A lot of the sites that we think of as uninhabited, some of them were sites of fairly dense human living,” says Elliot Colla, associate professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University and author of Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity.
“The word I would use is entanglement – entanglement between artefacts from the Pharaonic era and people who live in modern Egypt. They occupy the same land.
“In a place like Egypt, which is densely populated, there’s a conflict. There are the people who live there now, versus an archaeologist who has a legitimate interest in knowing about the artefacts of the past.”
Omnia Khalil, an urban anthropologist, says it is important to balance the need for housing with preserving the past.
“There is confusion between having monuments and the living,” Ms Khalil says. “Why do we want to preserve the dead and kick people out without making any mediation or having some kind of solution? It’s a dilemma everywhere.”
Another issue lies in a lack of local interest in antiquities. Mr Abou Elalla says there is no popular consciousness of their importance beyond the immediate economic value that they attract.
It is hard to imagine that much economic growth will be generated by these artefacts in Matareya.
The statue that was exhumed in March was moved to the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square before it was relocated 30 kilometres away to the Grand Egyptian Museum, which has yet to open.
Mr Abou Elalla says there needs to be more public education on the artefacts. Matareya residents, though, will probably not see any of their neighbourhood’s treasures on display, even if they do decide to make the hour-long trip to the new museum.
“To create the museum object, it has to be beyond monetary value, it has to have historical, artistic or civilisational value and that can’t be reflected in money,” Mr Colla says.
“When the object is in mud in a popular neighbourhood in metropolitan Cairo, that’s not a sacred object yet. To get from there to the museum, all of its ties to modern Matareya need to be severed and decontextualised.”