The
Sphinx stands out imposingly at the feet of Gizah's plain and with its
mysterious smile it has been charming visitors who frightened have been
going before it since the beginning of time. But “Abu el-Hol (“The father
of the terror”, as the Great Sphinx is called in Arabic) is now sick and
suffering from chronic ailments that centuries of restoration have somehow
checked and limited but not managed to eliminate. First of all it must
be underlined that the huge statue was often covered with sand up to its
head allowing humidity to rise through the sand and damage the body: a
granite stele, located between the front legs, tells that Pharaoh Thutmosis
IV dreamed Chefren as a God ordering him to free the Sphinx from the sand.
Such an operation has been repeated more than once during history until
1925 when the sand was removed from the animal with the human head for
the last time (some eye witnesses still exist among the Cairo's elderly).
The
Sphinx was built around 2600 B.C. by order of Pharaoh Chefren to protect
Gizah's huge necropolis, thus also the three Pyramids, as well as all the
ditches and the tombs of the notables and of the common people. The old
Egyptians, and the Egyptians of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, used to
place sphinxes or statues of lions as the keepers of graveyards or holy
areas.
The
Father of the Terror's disease then has grown worse over the last few decades.
In 1988, after a part of its shoulder broke up, the Mubarak's government
decided to set up a panel of experts to tackle the problem. All sorts of
proposals and projects came from the around the world (the Sphinx, in fact,
belongs to the world's culture, it has an absolute and international value).
The Egyptians, headed by Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, decided to carry
out the restoration themselves by using the most modern techniques they
learnt after decades of collaboration with western countries. The Egyptian
experts attempted to hold in check the parts of the statue that mostly
risked breaking up. They used about 100,000 blocks and placed them on the
sides and the legs of the colossal statue to control the fall of tottering
pieces: it was some sort of stone sling that could protect the statue and
fight external agents that were damaging, and still do, the Sphinx. The
Egyptian team acted in this way believing that the Sphinx' ailments were
due to Cairo's pollution (16 million inhabitants) and to the corrosive
action of the wind and the sand; yet an Italian expert claimed that the
worse enemy for the human-faced animal's health was humidity filtering
from the earth.
This
expert is Professor Giuseppe Fanfoni, Director of the prestigious Italo-Egyptian
Centre for restoration and archaeology located in Cairo's Islamic area
at the feet of the citadel. Fanfoni, who has been restoring Egyptian monuments
(especially in the capital) for over 30 years, is famous for his impeccable
restructuring of the Sama' Khana, the Mevlevi dervishes Theatre, that they
built (for their geometrical dances) in the sixteenth century after they
arrived in Egypt from their city of origin Konya, Turkey. In his ten-year
work, the Professor had to cope with the humidity that continued to damage
and eat away the supporting walls of the imposing structure; against such
a disaster only one operation, despite being rather drastic, seemed to
help: cutting the walls to insert insulating material. With a powerful
hydraulic saw (that did not cause vibrations) Ansaldo gave him, Fanfoni
carried out his project impeccably, creating spaces a few centimetres thick
progressively filled with resins, special cements and other substances
to obstruct the passage of that devastating and highly corrosive enemy.
A laminated sheet was inserted in the cut to complete the operation in
the most effective way.
Fanfoni
is convinced (and many experts agree with him) that the same restoration
project could be repeated on all the monuments (and Cairo has so many!)
attacked by humidity, including the Sphinx. It is clear then that the Professor,
who thought that the Egyptian team's work was well carried out but insufficient,
developed his own project and presented it to Mubarak's technicians who
at first approved it and then invented several impediments to block it.
Fanfoni, however, does not give in and, despite the countless problems
(many of which caused by the Co-operation for Development, the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs' body that boycotted the Professors' several projects
as they aimed at training experts in loco and were scarcely interested
to carry out spectacular projects that could maybe herald exceptional discoveries
but had no didactic value for the Egyptians), is busy for 6/7 months of
the year in Cairo's chaos trying to prevent well-known and otherwise monuments
from breaking up.
His
systematic work, aimed at setting up a restoration school that would collaborate
with prestigious Egyptian universities, unquestionably represents a unique
example of how the experts should conceive their operations in the world's
most famous country as far as archaeology is concerned, a country that,
unfortunately, often becomes the land of conquest for unprepared money-grubbers
rather than the object of research of competent scholars.
And
the Italians certainly do not stand out for their attention or cares: near
Fanfoni (and I have been working for ten years with Cairo's Institut Français
d'Archéologie Orientale and I can guarantee that the transalpine
excavations are a far different thing) I would save the Egyptologists of
the University of Pisa (in particular Paolo Gallo who has been working
in the Fayum for over ten years and is now at Alexandria). I am sure I
am forgetting only a few exceptions in this makeshift way of working in
the world of Archaeology. |
|
Uno
dei due leoni posti a guardia
della
via sacra di Tebtynis (Egitto)
Interno
del teatro dei Dervisci prima del restauro del Prof. Fanfoni
(Cairo
- Egitto)
Mausoleo
di Hasam Sadaga,
accanto
al teatro dei Dervisci, anch'esso oggetto di restauro da parte del Prof.
Fanfoni
|
Italian
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