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The effects of global warming on the country’s monuments are already striking. And the changing climate amplifies centuries of destructive human impact.
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By Viviane Ye
LUXOR, Egypt — When Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s gleaming tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings a hundred years ago, he lived in an adobe space surrounded by a desert so dry that he had preserved towering tombs, mummies and temples for more than 3,000 years.
In the following century, Mr. Carter’s space was turned into a museum with a green lawn of palm trees, thanks to water brought from the Nile. The annual flooding of the river was stopped through the Egyptian structure in 1970. Upper dam of Aswan, upstream and south of Luxor, which allowed more common plantations. Increasingly, farmers flooded sprawling fields with alfalfa, sugar cane and vegetables that fed the country’s developing population.
All this water seeped into the stone foundations of the epic temples of Luxor and into the dust bricks of Carter House, mixing with the salt on the floor and stones as they absorbed water like straws. The sandstone turned into sand and cracked limestone, crumbling the very old and the very old altogether.
Carter House reopened last week, from its own water-hungry lawn across a new desert circle, after a two-year recovery that stabilized the foundation and provided Carter-era furniture and artwork. The prominent temples of Karnak and Medinet Habu are now guarded through giant pumps that suck up groundwater.
But the danger comes from above and below: Local citizens and archaeologists say thunderstorms have come more frequently as the weather changes, corroding stones and washing away the ancient color of sculptures. Some stones of the temple were split in two; humidity reduced pieces of others to little more than dusty ochre sand; and still others are devoured.
“Maybe other people here won’t go to school, but they know that if we treat the earth badly, evil will come back,” said Abdu Ghaba, 42, who grew up in New Gourna, across the Nile from Luxor.
When the annual United Nations climate summit began last week at Egypt’s Sharm el Sheikh hotel, its host was in dire straits.
Egypt is warming almost twice as fast as the rest of the world and the Nile, the country’s main water source, is drying up. Rising seawater is wiping out crops in Egypt’s breadbasket, the fertile delta region north of Cairo, where the Nile flows into the Mediterranean. The ancient city of Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast of northern Egypt, is about to sink.
The effects of warming on Egypt’s outstanding antiquities are already striking.
In Luxor, climate change amplifies the destructive effects of human progression around monuments over the centuries. The tombs in the Valley of the Kings will “disappear completely” within a century if not for mass tourism or other man-made stressors. warned the country’s top Egyptologist and former antiquities minister, Zahi Hawass.
Archaeologists say some Egyptian monuments are already visibly damaged and others, such as the fifteenth-century Qaitbay citadel in Alexandria, are threatened by emerging seas.
In the southern city of Aswan, temperatures exceeding one hundred degrees Fahrenheit have put ancient granite monuments to the test. Expanding under the scorching sun and cooling with the evening air, the granite finally cracks, erasing the inscriptions.
Ghaba recalled that when the first strong storm of his life terrorized Luxor in the 1990s, the older villagers were convinced that the sky was crying because of pollutants from nearby factories, taking revenge on the humans below.
He now works for an organization committed to documenting ancient tombs in the Valley of the Kings with infinitesimal details and complicated three-dimensional scanners.
“I wish that the tombs and temples remain alive, to keep them,” he said. “We want to create anything long-term for them. “
Long preserved through dry air and low population density, the slow deterioration of Egyptian antiquities accelerated under Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Egyptian ruler of the early part of the nineteenth century. The beginning of modernity at that time brought more people, more agriculture, which required more water and more commercial activity in Luxor.
The Egyptian government and foreign archaeologists believe they were doing Karnak temples a favor in the 1870s by removing centuries of debris that had accumulated there. .
However, until the upper dam stopped the annual flooding of the Nile, excavation also allowed salt- and mineral-rich waters to enter the temple complex every year for a century, eroding the stones. Only the bombs installed in 2006 stopped the further damage. .
Agricultural drainage and irrigation systems in villages near the Great Pyramids of Giza also led to increased groundwater, requiring pumps to save the Sphinx from groundwater that had accumulated near its legs.
The biggest of Karnak is his geriatric age.
“It’s in danger because it’s old,” said Luc Gabolde, who co-directs the Franco-Egyptian Center for the Study of the Temples of Karnak.
Rain, still rare, is a developing threat.
The Gabolde team works to keep the damaged stone fragments by reassembling them, like a jigsaw puzzle, into lime and sand structures, protecting them from rain on 4 sides and showing visitors how they were placed. This still leaves them vulnerable to moisture on both sides, and The limitations of investment and time mean that many fragments remain in sight, and other parts of the temple threaten to collapse.
Across the Nile at Medinet Habu, a mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramses III built around an even older temple dedicated to Amun-Ra, the ancient Egyptian sun god, a team of American archaeologists, and mostly Egyptian masons, have been battling water damage since the 1990s. .
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