Egyptian looters strip pyramids of valuable artifacts during tourism lull
Photo Credit: The Red Pyramid in Dashour is one of five pyramids looted for antiques. Flickr / Arian Zwegers
Skift Take
One of Egypt’s biggest tourism draws is diminishing as criminals remove artifacts and the antiquities ministry, left with few funds from tourism, can do little to remedy the asset drain.
From a distance, it looks as though an animal has burrowed around the 4,000-year-old Black Pyramid of Amenemhat III.
But thieves dug these holes. And Egyptian archaeologist Monica Hanna calls that "a catastrophe."
"See the ancient mud bricks?" says Hanna, 29, peering into a pit. "It is very well structured."
She walks to another, followed by three pyramid custodians, and points into the 25-foot hole with a tunnel to one side. Here, she says, looters exposed what might be a burial shaft.
One custodian, Said Hussein, 32, tells her that as many as 30 armed men come nightly to dig for antiquities. They beat two custodians, broke an arm of one and "attacked the armed guards on the gate."
"Do they find anything?" she asks.
"They only find pottery, stuff like that," he replies. "A wooden coffin, that's what they take."
These "massive looting pits," Hanna says, have made "Swiss cheese" of a 2-mile-long field of five pyramids listed as a United Nations World Heritage Site.
