Egypt's chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass has urged the ruling military council to “urgently interfere” to stop “blatant encroachments on antiquities”. Hawass Monday toured the Sakkara and Abu Sir antiquity sites, where encroachments targeted them. Following the inspection visit, he made the urgent call to Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the military council, to step in to salvage the nation's ancient treasures. Hawass stresses that he made the appeal as an archaeologist in the first place. “People have built houses on areas of land that contained Pharaonic temples and tombs dating back to thousands of years and built houses”, Hawass said. Hawass, an ex-minister of antiquities, said that a UNESCO team had taken note of that “horrible crime” during a visit to Egypt last week. Officials at the governmental Supreme Council of Antiquities contacted the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, managing Egypt's affairs, to “immediately move” to stop encroachments on antiquity sites in Sakkara, Abu Sir and Mit Rahina (or Memphis). The antiquities council on Sunday said that the Army troops and police had recovered five artefacts stolen from the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo during a popular revolt that toppled the long-standing President Hosni Mubarak. The council added that four bronze statues of ancient Egyptian deities and a bronze sceptre stolen on January 28 had been restored to the museum. Thirty-seven artefacts are still missing. "Four of the recovered pieces were in good condition," the statement said, but one statue of a deity in the form of a ram was broken into pieces. Robbers raided several warehouses around the country, including one in the Egyptian Museum, after the anti-Mubarak uprising gave way to looting and insecurity. An antiquities official said last week that 800 relics stolen by armed robbers from a warehouse east of Cairo were still missing.
