Human Shield of Civilians Protects Egypt's Museums

Egypt's ancient treasures appear to be safe today, after citizens, and later the military, banded together to stop looters amid an uprising that left some of the world's most prized artifacts perilously vulnerable to common thieves.

Egyptians, desperate to protect their country's heritage from the kind of mass looting that devastated Baghdad's museums in 2003, created a kind of human shield around Cairo's Egyptian Museum this week, linking arms in front of the historic site and chasing down vandals who had managed to enter the building after it was abandoned by the country's police.

Ahmed Ibrahim explained why he was standing guard. The museum, the 26-year-old told The Associated Press, "has 5,000 years of our history. If they steal it, we'll never find it again." Another man begged crowds outside the museum not to loot its archaeological finds. "We are not like Baghdad," the man shouted, according to the AP. Later, the army arrived to help secure the site.

Inside lay priceless treasures, from the golden mask of King Tutankhamun to statues of the pharaohs that are thousands of years old. Looters did inflict some damage -- breaking a statue of King Tutankhamun, for example, and throwing it carelessly to the floor -- but museum officials said they could repair the artifacts and noted that the destruction could have been far worse.

"I am so happy to announce that today everything is safe," antiquities chief Zahi Hawass told the AP today. "If the museum is safe, Egypt is safe."

Hawass said most of the looters bypassed the museum's priceless artifacts and stole jewelry from the gift shop instead. "I'm glad that those people were idiots," he told Time magazine. "They looted the museum shop. Thank God they thought that the museum shop was the museum."

Still, images of shattered mummies and broken statues from inside the museum flooded the Internet today, disturbing archaeologists and historians around the world. On his blog, Hawass said he was grateful Egyptians had worked together to protect their heritage, but said the looting was a tragedy.

"My heart is broken and my blood is boiling," he wrote in a posting he sent by fax to colleagues in Italy so it could be uploaded to the Internet.

"I feel that everything I have done in the last nine years has been destroyed in one day, but all the inspectors, young archaeologists, and administrators, are calling me from sites and museums all over Egypt to tell me that they will give their life to protect our antiquities. Many young Egyptians are in the streets trying to stop the criminals. Due to the circumstances, this behavior is not surprising; criminals and people without a conscience will rob their own country. If the lights went off in New York City, or London, even if only for an hour, criminal behavior will occur. I am very proud that Egyptians want to stop these criminals to protect Egypt and its heritage."

Elsewhere in the country, though, there were reports of looting by vandals. Hawass said on his blog that thieves stole nearly 300 artifacts from a museum storage site on the Sinai Peninsula, but he said most of the treasures had been returned. And though the military is standing guard at the pyramids of Giza, one American archaeological group based in Egypt said some of the artifacts inside the pyramids had been vandalized.

"I've heard that the team lost some equipment and that there was some damage to the antiquities, but I do not know the extend of that at this point," Gerry Scott, the director of the American Research Center in Egypt, told the blog Unreported Heritage News today.

But mostly, Egyptians seemed determined to guard their country's heritage amid swelling protests that have brought chaos to the streets and threatened to end the 30-year rule of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Ismail Serageldin, the director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, thanked Egypt's young people for protecting the library's historic collection. "The library is safe thanks to Egypt's youth, whether they be the staff of the Library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building from potential vandals and looters," Serageldin wrote on the library's website.