By Zahi Hawass These days it would seem that most of my time is spent denying rumours about the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and Egypt's Pharaonic, Coptic, and Islamic monuments. I do not know why some people create this misinformation and give it to newspaper reporters to publish without them even trying to find out the veracity of the statement. Most of the things published in a small number of newspapers are not true at all. It is quite amazing to my mind how they make up these stories. I once gave a talk at the Smithsonian Institute about the Sphinx. There was a reporter there from The Washington Post listening to the lecture. After the lecture, he came to me saying that he was very interested in what I had said about the Sphinx but that he would first like to read all the written information about the monument and then he could come and talk to me. I respected this man very much. This is how news reporters should do their jobs. A few weeks ago, we decided to move the pillar of Merenptah, the son of Ramses II, who ruled Egypt during his father's old age. He was a very important king because we found a stela in his mortuary temple on the West Bank, reused in the Temple of Amenhotep III, of which only the Colossi of Memnon remains standing today. The stela of Merenptah has an inscription about the people of Israel. Many scholars tried to describe and translate this inscription. We must stress the fact that a poet wrote this inscription concerning the reign of Merenptah, his king. The most important passage of this inscription emphasises the greatness of the Pharaoh making peace with the Hittites, and states that the people of Israel were no longer in Egypt. Some translations even go as far as to say that they were destroyed. Since its discovery, the stela has been stored in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The pillar of Merenptah at Heliopolis was part of a temple built by this Pharaoh dedicated to the local sun god. While performing an inspection at Heliopolis, I saw this pillar between some houses. It was surrounded by water and garbage was everywhere. The inscription written on the pillar only tells us the nsw-bity (Pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt) name of the Pharaoh. We have decided to build a museum to explain the history of Cairo. The museum will be built in the Aga Khan garden in cooperation with Karim Aga khan. Visitors can not only learn about the 1,000-year period of Jewish, Coptic, and Islamic history of Cairo as well as the Mohamed Ali era, but the museum will also inform them about the ancient history of this city, which goes back 5,000 years. The Pharaonic era will be seen through Heliopolis or, as the ancient Egyptians called it, On, now known as Matariya. This site had the first known university where the biblical Joseph studied and later married the daughter of the high priest. It was Heliopolis that spawned the first ideas about creating a university. We also think that the pillar should be the most important piece in this museum. We need to save it from its surroundings, because if it stays where it is for another year it could be destroyed for ever. I decided that Egyptian archaeologists and restorers should carefully move the pillar to the Citadel for restoration, and I asked Eduardo, the Spanish restorer who is working with us through the help of the Aga Khan, to restore the objects in the Islamic Museum. And so the hallucinations began -- a newspaper reported that a Zionist from Israel had removed the pillar of Merenptah, after which people began to wonder where it had been moved to? The newspaper even said that the pillar had been moved without the permission of any authority personnel. Others stated that the pillar was moved because it carried an inscription saying that Merenptah was the Pharaoh of the Exodus. Rumours abounded and so much misinformation is written that sometimes all one can answer is, "that's what we call suspense and hallucinations." But these can only hold us back. We will never move forward into the future if these people stay with us. After all this, I found out that these hallucinations come from corrupted officials working for the SCA, who gave this false information to reporters, who, in return, never bothered to verify it.
