Excavating the Egyptian Revolution.
4th November 2014
In February of 2011, as the revolution gathered strength in Tahrir Square, all across the country the police disappeared, and in the Buried teams of looters opened more than two hundred pits. It wasn’t until the end of March, after President Hosni Mubarak resigned and the national situation had stabilized somewhat, that village police resumed patrols of the site.
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The evidence was clear: looters had mistakenly targeted a modern structure. Adams speculated that it might have been a shepherd’s hut from the nineteen-fifties, or even a field house from an early archeological dig. Around the turn of the last century, large-scale excavations dramatically reshaped the landscape, leaving mounds of backfill all across the Buried. Adams told me that looters often targeted these mounds, which they assumed were situated above buried tombs. “It’s a mistake,” he said. “But we don’t want them to know that.”
Presumably it’s safe to assume that none of the Egyptian looters read The New Yorker.