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"The time has come

A fact's a fact

It belongs to them

Lets give it back."

“Beds Are Burning” from their album Diesel & Dust was a smash hit single by Aussie rock band Midnight Oil in 1987/88.

Which leads me to note with some satisfaction that Zahi Hawass, Minister of State for Antiquities under the Mubarak regime has been fired. I have to admit I never liked this self styled “original Indiana Jones,” (his words), very much.

To me there was always something very un-archaeologist like about this Egyptologist. From his fake “opening of a secret chamber” flighted ” amid a real “hoopla” of publicity by National Geographic, who apparently had him on a $200,000 retainer as an “explorer,” to his clothing line named after himself at Harrods, there was just something about him that I didn’t like.

Hawass dogmatically maintained that the pyramids were built by loyal and grateful workers using the “heave ho” method entirely without any outside assistance. Just like the past and current crop of archaeologists who insist that every unexplained Ancient Egyptian mystery was for “religious purposes relating to the afterlife!”

Perhaps if the zealots, criminals and assassins of the church (I can think of no other way to describe them without causing offence), had not committed the most heinous crime ever against the intellectual development of humanity – the destruction of the famous library of Alexandria, we might well have known who, when and also why the pyramids were built. But that’s another story.

To his credit, Hawass has long campaigned to bring home ancient artifacts spirited out of the country during colonial times. He once claimed that since he became top archaeologist, he managed to recover 5,000 artifacts. Given what we know about the man now, one can most likely take this with a pinch of salt. In January, just before anti-government protests erupted, he formally requested the return of the 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti that has been in a Berlin museum.

So isn’t it time for the western world in particular to put up their collective hands and say:

“The time has come

A fact's a fact

It belongs to them

Lets give it back.”

jones jones;1365332 wrote: "The time has come

A fact's a fact

It belongs to them

Lets give it back."

“Beds Are Burning” from their album Diesel & Dust was a smash hit single by Aussie rock band Midnight Oil in 1987/88.

Which leads me to note with some satisfaction that Zahi Hawass, Minister of State for Antiquities under the Mubarak regime has been fired. I have to admit I never liked this self styled “original Indiana Jones,” (his words), very much.

To me there was always something very un-archaeologist like about this Egyptologist. From his fake “opening of a secret chamber” flighted ” amid a real “hoopla” of publicity by National Geographic, who apparently had him on a $200,000 retainer as an “explorer,” to his clothing line named after himself at Harrods, there was just something about him that I didn’t like.

Hawass dogmatically maintained that the pyramids were built by loyal and grateful workers using the “heave ho” method entirely without any outside assistance. Just like the past and current crop of archaeologists who insist that every unexplained Ancient Egyptian mystery was for “religious purposes relating to the afterlife!”

Perhaps if the zealots, criminals and assassins of the church (I can think of no other way to describe them without causing offence), had not committed the most heinous crime ever against the intellectual development of humanity – the destruction of the famous library of Alexandria, we might well have known who, when and also why the pyramids were built. But that’s another story.

To his credit, Hawass has long campaigned to bring home ancient artifacts spirited out of the country during colonial times. He once claimed that since he became top archaeologist, he managed to recover 5,000 artifacts. Given what we know about the man now, one can most likely take this with a pinch of salt. In January, just before anti-government protests erupted, he formally requested the return of the 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti that has been in a Berlin museum.

So isn’t it time for the western world in particular to put up their collective hands and say:

“The time has come

A fact's a fact

It belongs to them

Lets give it back.”


Actually the library of Alexandria was destroyed in Roman times before he birth of christ. Mind you the church did deliberately destroy an awful lot.

Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the partial or complete destruction of the Library of Alexandria:

1. Julius Caesar's Fire in The Alexandrian War, in 48 BC

2. The attack of Aurelian in the 3rd century AD;

3. The decree of Coptic Pope Theophilus in AD 391 ;

4. The Muslim conquest in AD 642 or thereafter.

Maybe I'm biased but I tend to want to put my tick next to #3.