Word: tombs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Throughout Egypt, the story is much the same. The walls of the Temple of Luxor, some 400 miles upriver from Cairo, are cracking so badly that President Hosni Mubarak, visiting the site in February, called for a thorough restoration. Nearly a fifth of the wall paintings at the tomb of Nefertari, across the Nile from Luxor in the Valley of the Queens, have been destroyed by salt deposits. In fact, says Zahi Hawass, who supervises the Giza Plateau for the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, "all the monuments are endangered. If we don't do something soon, in 100 years the paintings...
...only monuments in the world where you can drive up and park your car. Even in Disneyland you have to park a mile away." Last year alone 1,969,493 visitors came to look at -- and touch and breathe on -- Egypt's treasures. Just six people breathing inside a tomb for an hour can raise the humidity by 5 percentage points. And higher humidity provides a hospitable environment for bacteria, algae and fungi that grow on paintings. Sighs Hassan: "Three thousand people a day visit King Tut's tomb. They sweat. I can't prevent that, but it is destroying...
Deir al-Bahri. A 3,400-year-old tomb-and-temple complex near Luxor, it is threatened by landslides from a nearby mountain. The most likely remedy is a + chain-link fence to protect the monument from falling rocks. Meanwhile, the Polish Center of Archaeology in Cairo has been doing restoration work on parts of the temple. One project: using gypsum to patch up and refinish a statue of the god Osiris...
...even if major salvage projects could be launched immediately for all these sites, many more are in urgent need of attention. In the tomb of Seti I, dating from about 1300 B.C., paintings and reliefs are falling off the walls and ceilings. At the Greco-Roman Temple of Sobek and Horus at Kom Ombo, salt buildup has eroded reliefs and inscriptions carved into the temple's walls and pillars. Even in the Temple of Horus at Edfu (3rd century B.C. to 2nd century B.C.), one of the best-preserved temples, inscriptions are endangered by dampness...
...have been spirited away by scholars and souvenir hunters. Such removals have become rare, but most visitors still have little interest in preservation. A few foreign groups, however, have made major contributions. The University of Chicago's Oriental Institute has been documenting and helping to preserve the temples and tombs at Luxor since the late 1920s. And perhaps the model project is the spectacular effort to restore Nefertari's tomb. The 32-century-old mausoleum, discovered in 1904, has been officially closed since the early 1950s because of its fragile condition. Beginning in 1986, the Getty Institute, in partnership with...