Zahi Hawass’ intervention at the inauguration of the “Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs” exhibition on April 6 in Paris will not have gone unnoticed. The archaeologist, also a former Minister of Egyptian Antiquities, indeed took the opportunity to throw several cobblestones into the pond. He first reiterated his demand for the return to Cairo of the Zodiac of Dendera, currently kept in the Louvre. “I am not asking for the return of all Egyptian pieces from French museums: just this one, because it is one of our heritage treasures,” he said.
The Egyptologist did not content himself with repeating that this bas-relief has more of its place on the banks of the Nile than on those of the Seine (just like the Rosetta stone and the bust of Nefertiti exhibited respectively at the British Museum and at the Neues Museum in Berlin, which he also calls for the return to his country). He also called for the statue of Champollion, which currently sits in the inner courtyard of the College de France, to be removed from public space.
Boast? The archaeologist precisely publishes a fictionalized biography of this pharaoh who lived nearly thirteen centuries before Ramses. Known for having built the great pyramid of Giza 4,500 years ago, this monarch is little known to the general public. “And for a simple reason… We have very few sources that talk about him,” says Véronique Verneuil, who co-authored this book with Zahi Hawass. “That’s why we have to rely on fiction to talk about it,” she continues.
Very documented, this book in the form of a peplum sets out to describe the journey of the son of the pharaoh Snefrou: from his seizure of power to his death. If it provides information on how the young princes were brought up in “houses of life” where their education combined learning letters, sciences but also things of religion, this work also teaches us a lot about the way in which were built the great monuments of the time.
“We have included in our book all the recent discoveries made by archaeologists, starting with those of the American Mark Lehner who worked extensively with Zahi on the Giza plateau. It was he who notably exhumed the old camp where the workers who worked on the pyramids lived, ”adds Véronique Verneuil.
Borrowing, in the form of winks, a few elements from Pharaonic literature (such as the tale of the rowers or a hippopotamus hunting scene), this entertaining as well as scholarly novel puts forward the hypothesis that Cheops became to bury in a secret chamber so as not to have his tomb suffer the same looting as that of his mother Hetep-Heres I. Zahi Hawass thinks he can soon house this burial chamber with precision.
For six years, a team of Japanese scientists has, in fact, been able to establish a map of large cavities inside the pyramid of Giza. Last month, a borescope camera inspected a nine-meter-long and more than two-meter-wide hallway that featured a succession of intriguing niches. “I am convinced that we will eventually get our hands on the last resting place of Cheops”, promises Zahi Hawass, who likes to recall that having grown up at the foot of his pyramid, he has surveyed every corner since his childhood.
