From UNESCO to GEM, Egypt hides a dark side to grand archaeology

[Glenn Meyer]

https://www.newarab.com/opinion/unesco-gem-egypt-hides-dark-side-grand-archaeology

From UNESCO to GEM, Egypt hides a dark side to grand archaeology

By appointing Khaled El-Enany as head, UNESCO proves heritage has become spectacle & soft power for the institution, argues Mohamed Elshahed.

Unfiltered

9 min read

Mohamed Elshahed

18 Nov, 2025

The [Grand Egyptian] museum is indeed an accomplishment; its scale is impressive & its displays are fitting for the antiquities they house. However, beneath the spectacle, a more troubling arithmetic hides in plain sight, writes Mohamed Elshahed. [GETTY]

Egypt’s one-billion-dollar Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) opened beside the Pyramids of Giza this month with an air of triumph: drone light shows, televised dignitaries, and costumed performers re-enacting antiquity. The staging felt closer to a masquerade—ancient Egypt rendered as costume drama, scored to a European-style orchestra with little to do with either the ancient or the contemporary nation.

The museum is indeed an accomplishment; its scale is impressive and its displays are fitting for the antiquities they house. However, beneath the spectacle, a more troubling arithmetic hides in plain sight.

The state boasts of exhibiting “over 100,000 artifacts,” as though the number itself were proof of abundance. Yet no public inventory exists of how many antiquities Egypt actually holds after two centuries of systemic excavation and export. To build the new museum’s collection some 50,000 objects were removed from the displays of the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, now with empty shelves and displays, in addition to objects pulled from regional museums around the country.

The Tahrir Museum’s basement alone stores some 100,000 objects in addition to those on display.

While the museum’s collection makes it the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single civilization, that number should be read against the global distribution of Egypt’s material heritage. The British Museum’s Department of Egypt and Sudan alone holds more than 100,000 objects; the Museo Egizio in Turin houses over 40,000; the Louvre’s Egyptian department keeps more than 50,000; and leading museums in the United States—Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum—together exceed 150,000.

In other words, a significant portion of Egypt’s excavated past remains dispersed across Western institutions, a historical legacy of colonial archaeology that renders Egypt’s own “largest museum” both a triumph and an indictment.

When more than half a million Egyptian objects are known to sit in major Western museums—excluding vast private holdings—it follows that Egypt should possess several times that number, likely in the millions. Yet the country has no unified catalogue, no public inventory, and no transparency about where these millions of artifacts reside. Against this backdrop, the GEM’s objects are dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of what has never been counted at all.

The new museum’s headline figure obscures rather than clarifies the scale of Egypt’s possession of its own antiquities—how much is lost, miscatalogued, duplicated, or quietly missing.

It is a monument built atop an accounting void—one that extends far beyond museum storage rooms to the nation’s built environment, where even monuments, houses, and entire districts vanish without ever having been counted, catalogued or listed.

During the opening ceremony Khaled El-Enany appeared in a pre-recorded message to celebrate the achievement, a symbolic gesture that precedes his appointment to head UNESCO—the same institution meant to safeguard the very heritage whose disappearance accelerated under his watch as Egypt’s former minister of antiquities, and later minister of tourism and antiquities.

The announcement that El-Enany would take up the new position landed in Cairo with disbelief among citizens and specialists concerned with heritage. Between 2016 and 2022, while El-Enany was in office, Egypt experienced one of the most far-reaching waves of demolition and dispossession in its modern history.

Historic cemeteries, modern factories and villas that once signified Egypt’s modernity, and working-class districts disappeared; ancient minarets that gave Cairo its aptronym “the city of a thousand minarets” were disassembled with unfulfilled promises to be reconstructed elsewhere—all in the name of “development.”

Heritage as theatre

Over the past decade the Egyptian government has perfected the aesthetics and performance of continuity. Giant lotus-flower shapes legible only from drone views adorn the grounds of the new capital. In 2021 the Pharaohs' Parade rolled mummified kings through central Cairo in an event televised to the world.

Drone shots of flood-lit avenues suggested a civilization renewing itself. At that very moment, bulldozers were cutting highways through the City of the Dead—a millennium-old necropolis lying inside UNESCO’s Historic Cairo zone.

Families were told to move graves, and several architecturally significant Ottoman-era tombs, as well as modern ones holding the remains of national figures, notables, and ordinary Egyptians, all vanished rapidly without documentation or removal of historically significant parts for preservation or potential display.

Even citizens seeking to take pictures of the sites before their destruction were arrested or harassed for being present to mourn the death of the once-cohesive necropolis.

Officials insisted that “no registered monuments” were affected. Egypt’s registry of protected sites and buildings has hardly been updated since the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art Arabe compiled its lists in the early twentieth century.

Everything unlisted—Ottoman, Khedival, modern—is legally unprotected. If a building is not listed on paper it might as well not exist in built reality. The failure to update heritage lists becomes reason for erasure.

If only the monuments and sites on state heritage lists remain, Egypt would be a much more impoverished place in terms of patrimony.

A city like Alexandria, despite its rich layered history, is home to only a handful of listed sites. A UNESCO monitoring mission noted that the deterioration of Historic Cairo—a process taking place for decades—had “accelerated,” a notable example of the unfolding heritage disaster in Egypt.

The cult of development

The destruction has not been confined to the distant past. In Heliopolis, one of Cairo’s most coherent early-twentieth-century suburbs, the historic tramway was dismantled in 2019 and six-lane bridges carved through residential streets. A century-old public transport system was erased rather than modernised, and thousands of trees were felled.

Nearby stood the IDEAL Factory, a 1950s modernist complex built for a self-reliant national industry; closed and quietly demolished, it would have been a ready-made design museum. Nothing marks its place today.

Wekālat al-Anbariyyīn—originally a twelfth-century prison later adapted into an Ottoman caravanserai—stood on al-Muʿizz li-Dīn Allāh Street in UNESCO-listed Historic Cairo until its demolition in 2019.

From unlisted medieval structures to modern ones, the bulldozers had no limits during El-Enany’s tenure. In 2022 the government impounded and destroyed the last Nile houseboats—floating homes immortalised in cinema—under the banner of “beautification.” Each erasure carried the same logic: unlisted, therefore expendable.

El-Enany’s tenure coincided with an infrastructural transformation that recast Cairo as a network of asphalt. Flyovers now skirt domes and minarets; the Maspero Triangle in Bulaq was flattened for speculative towers. A centuries-old settlement at the base of the Citadel, long neglected and then labelled a “slum,” was razed; its street pattern lingers only on Google Maps. Nearby, the Mastabat al-Mahmal of 1864, built for the Kiswa, sits in ruins.

Helwan’s nineteenth-century springs and bathhouses—later joined by major twentieth-century industrial complexes—were left unlisted and then liquidated. None were documented before abandonment or demolition, erasing Egypt’s therapeutic and industrial histories.

In Luxor, the 2021 reconstruction of the Avenue of the Sphinxes followed the clearance of entire vernacular neighbourhoods.

Alexandria likewise lost early-modern buildings—villa Ambron, villa Cicurel, El-Salam Theatre—and Perret’s 1920s Villa Aghion, once a rare example of his reinforced-concrete modernism outside France.

Meanwhile, nearly the entire heritage of Egypt’s own modernist architects—notably Sayed Karim—remains absent from the heritage register, a consequence of a narrow official view of what constitutes “Egyptian” heritage.

The global marketplace of the past

While the state erased its own modern heritage, its ancient one continued to vanish abroad. Egyptian antiquities resurfaced internationally throughout El-Enany’s tenure. In 2018 Kuwaiti customs officers discovered coffin fragments and figurines hidden in furniture arriving from Egypt, and similar consignments have passed through Gulf logistics hubs whose free-trade systems allow art shipments to circulate with limited scrutiny.

Research shows that the United Arab Emirates has been functioning as a regional redistribution centre: objects imported from source countries are re-exported with rewritten paperwork and declared as “private collections.”

Sharjah has meanwhile fashioned itself as a cultural custodian, accumulating modern Arab art—including works that should remain in Egyptian museums—and returning stolen antiquities only when exposed. The selective restitution of 425 Egyptian artifacts in 2020 (and again in 2017) was celebrated as generosity, though it underscored the same networks that enable the illicit trade: the line between preservation and possession grows thin.

An investigation into Louvre Abu Dhabi’s acquisitions exposed a similar underbelly. French authorities charged advisers and dealers over Egyptian objects of doubtful provenance, including a pink-granite Tutankhamun stele acquired in 2016 despite gaps in documentation.

The inquiry implicates Agence France-Muséums and the dealer network behind the looted Nedjemankh coffin. Louvre Abu Dhabi joined the case as a civil party; former AFM scientific director Jean-François Charnier was indicted. While the Grand Egyptian Museum displays the full Tutankhamun collection, the stele bearing his name remains listed in Abu Dhabi.

The same financial circuits that launder artifacts also finance acquisitions of Egyptian land and resources. Over the past decade Emirati sovereign funds have secured strategic stretches of coastline, farmland, ports, and urban assets under the guise of investment.

UNESCO’s paradox

Half a century ago, UNESCO had rallied the world to save the temples of Abu Simbel from submersion under Lake Nasser, dismantling and reassembling them block by block—a moment that symbolised the organisation’s moral and technical commitment to global heritage. Today, that same institution appears paralysed as entire historic districts in Cairo and beyond are bulldozed in plain sight, its once-heroic mission reduced to issuing reports and expressions of “concern.”

Egypt was among UNESCO’s founders and one of the first to secure World Heritage inscriptions. Half a century later, it still has only seven sites—six cultural and one natural.

By contrast, younger Gulf states have multiplied their listings—Saudi Arabia now counts eight, and the UAE two.

UNESCO’s 2021 report on Cairo notes that national legislation “does not preclude demolition of unprotected buildings,” effectively legitimising the mechanism of loss. The organisation continues to commend Egypt’s “efforts” even as the evidence of destruction mounts, and now prepares to welcome as its leader the minister who presided over that very period.

UNESCO relies on the funding and goodwill of the same states it is meant to monitor. Its language has become a euphemism for paralysis. Heritage has become diplomatic messaging, and a few spectacular events and new museums are offered as proof of progress.

Since the 2019 merger of Egypt’s antiquities and tourism portfolios, heritage management has merged fully with public relations. Parades, light shows, and news of astonishing discoveries dominate the calendar; maintenance budgets and research institutions shrink. National patrimony is now held hostage to touristic investment rather than safeguarded as national evidence of a rich history.

This conflation of heritage conservation and touristic promotion is not uniquely Egyptian; it reflects a global model in which heritage functions as soft-power infrastructure rather than history, inherited to be passed along intact to future generations.

From Cairo’s parade routes to Louvre Abu Dhabi’s exhibition halls, the Egyptian past is staged as an investment asset or negotiating chip in diplomatic relations. The real cost—displacement, demolition, and historical loss—is treated as collateral.

El-Enany’s ascent to the top of UNESCO completes the circle. The minister who presided over a period of demolition and was unable to contain the illicit movement of antiquities, nor achieve their comprehensive registration and cataloguing, now becomes custodian of global preservation.

As other United Nations institutions have shown their ineffectiveness to carry out the work for which they were created, UNESCO’s new leader, given his record in Egypt, promises more paralysis and blindness to destruction.

Mohamed Elshahed is a writer, curator, and critic of architecture, his work extends to design and material culture. He is the author of Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide (AUC Press, 2020) and of Rebellious Things: A History of Modern Egypt in Objects (forthcoming). Mohamed was a 2023 Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington DC. In 2023-2024 he was a fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination in Paris.

Follow Mohamed on Instagram: @rebellious_things_book

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