Nevine El-Aref burrows into the corridors of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and discovers the newly-established antiquities documentation system t was celebration time on 16 June when 73 Ijunior archaeologists gathered to mark the completion of their six-week-long IT training course. The event was held in the Ahmed Pasha Kamal Hall on the first floor of the Supreme Council of Antiquities' (SCA) premises in Zamalek, where Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the SCA, told the archaeologists that they were now the core of a technical, scientific and archaeological unit which would carry out one of the SCA's most important tasks. The mega project aims at documenting Egypt's antiquities, both movable and immobile. It will also provide a technological database that will record and track every artefact in the storage facilities of every archaeological site in Egypt and will follow the object's movements inside and outside the facility. The archaeologists were selected for special training from the SCA inspectorates of Giza, Fayoum, Beni Sweif, Saqqara, Qalioubiya, Menoufiya and Matariya. A second group will be selected from inspectorates in Middle and Upper Egypt, while a third will be recruited from Lower Egypt and Alexandria. In a year's time, Hawass said, all archaeologists working in storage museums would be IT-trained. Hawass told Al-Ahram Weekly that the training courses were being conducted in collaboration with the Integrated Care Society within the framework of the SCA's planned investment in the capabilities of its junior archaeologists. Nevertheless, past schemes to document all the nation's antiquities have not been successful. The history of professional archaeological documentation in Egypt began as early as the 1960s when the imminent construction of the Aswan High Dam put pressure on the antiquities sector to study the threatened monuments. Under the patronage of UNESCO, the Antiquities Documentation Centre (ADC) was set up to document all the Nubian temples that were due to sink under Lake Nasser. At the time, regretfully, the centre only documented Nubian temples, whether they sank or were rescued and relocated. The centre remained under the supervision of the French until the end of the 1970s, when its supervision was transferred to the Egyptians. In 1980 the centre focussed its efforts on Luxor's west bank and the documentation of its necropolis. But the mission it conducted lasted for only four months, and after that the centre's activities were put on hold. Ramadan Badri Hussein, supervisor of the National Project of Documentation of Egypt's Antiquities, told the Weekly that in 2005 the documentation programme was revived and a new strategy was drawn up aimed at putting into effect the original role of the ADC, while widening its mandate and protecting monuments to serve archaeology as a science and confirm Egypt's possession of every artefact on its territory. "Documenting the objects is a very important certificate from the legal point of view," Hussein said. This is because it acts as proof of possession by the nation in case of any future international legal dispute. According to previous archaeological documentation, Hussein continued, Egypt over the last eight years had succeeded in securing the return of several genuine items that had been stolen and smuggled out of the country. Hussein told the Weekly that excavation is a destructive process. "In discovering an object, a tomb or a temple, it is suddenly exposed to a number of destructive factors after being buried in the sand for thousands of years. It is a really harmful shock as it is now subject to human and environmental factors," Hussein said. "Look at the painting of a tomb, for example, on the day when it was discovered, and then examine it two months later. You will easily observe the changes in the colours, which are more faded than before. This fact puts a huge responsibility on the archaeologist's shoulders to document all information attested on the monument or artefact quickly and carefully," Hussein asserted. Case in point, he explained, the documentation carried out by a German team on some clay stamps unearthed at the First-Dynasty necropolis in Sohag has secured a very important piece of historical evidence that has helped Egyptologists correctly to classify the king list of that dynasty and the relationship of each king to the others. The information was printed on a fragment of a very fragile dried mud, which has now crumbled away. "If the excavators had not documented the engravings printed on the piece immediately after its discovery, the facts would not have been available." On the other hand, excavation is a very beneficial way of understanding our history and learning more about the life of our ancestors. "A monument is a concrete witness to a special era at a specific time," Hussein said. "So how can we solve such a riddle? The only way out is documentation." Between 2005 and 2009 the ADC, headed by Abdel-Hamid Marrouf, documented the tombs at Beni Hassan and the Tel Al-Amarna site in Minya; the tombs on the Western Mountain and at Mere in Assiut; the Kubbet Al-Hawa archaeological area at Aswan; and all archaeological sites in Alexandria. Last year, Hussein said, a new system was set up based on the decentralisation of documentation and building bridges of collaboration between all the SCA departments concerned. It was intended to spruce up procedures and make documentation "a living process" which guaranteed its rapidity and continuation. The departments involved were the storage museums, the Geographical Information System (GIS), the Information Centre, and the SCA general archive. To implement the decentralisation system, a documentation unit will be established at every site. So far five units have been formed as a trial at five archaeological sites in Saqqara and Assiut. These units will document immobile monuments, such as tombs and temples. Collected data will be submitted to the ADC for revision and archiving. Plans for scientific publication of the data are also in place. The SCA new system also entails the creation of a database for all the artefacts stored in the newly constructed storage facilities, which are highly secured and well organised. Such database programme will establish a unified registration system of objects in all magazines. "The progamme also allows conservators to put in the necessary information on the object's condition and preservation requirements," Hussein said. He added that the programme provides a unified spelling of the names of kings and site names, as well as the identification and material terms. Lists of archaeological missions and excavators are also provided. The magazines database helps the archaeologist to manage the collection of objects in his custody, by providing a detailed information of the object's movement within and outside of the magazine minute by minute, since being one of the magazine items, thus further tightening security. The new documentation system encourages the application of modern techniques and technologies in documentation. Digital epigraphy, which aims at providing copies of scenes and texts from digital photographs, has been widely implemented in the recent documentation projects. "This technique is indeed a non-destructive process," Hussein confirmed. He continued that laser scanning of archaeological sites and artefacts has also been used in documentation in collaboration with the Remote Sensing Authority and the Information Research Institute at Mubarak City for Technology. Among the archaeological sites that have been documented with the laser technology are the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx at Giza and the colossi of Memnon at Luxor. The second phase of the project, Hussein said, would be to establish a laboratory to analyse and archive the data provided through laser scanning.
