Sitting impassively on the sunbaked Giza Plateau on Cairo's outskirts, the pyramids look from a distance as though they have hardly aged in the more than 4 1/2 millenniums since they were built. But up close they look anything but eternal. Rubble and rock dust crumbling from the pyramid of Chephren have accumulated in piles on its lower levels. In the pyramid of Cheops, encrustations of salt, left by the evaporation of brackish groundwater, have eaten away at the walls of the burial chamber. The Sphinx, a few hundred feet away from the pyramids, has lost a 600-lb. chunk from its right shoulder, and the neck is so weak that the statue's massive head is in danger of falling off.
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 will be gone, and in 200 years the architecture will be gone."
Such a tragedy would be felt far beyond Egypt's borders. The country boasts an estimated 10,000 antiquities sites, and, notes British Egyptologist Michael Jones, "these monuments are a non-renewable resource." The tombs, temples, paintings and inscriptions add up to an incomparable record of the lives and beliefs of people in one of humanity's most ancient civilizations, which influenced the development of modern cultures throughout the world. "We are the guardians of a unique heritage," says the EAO's Ali Hassan. Such guardianship is expensive, though, and calls for far more expertise than any one nation -- especially a developing one -- can hope to muster. Saving ancient sites that are revered around the globe requires global cooperation.
The age of the Egyptian antiquities makes their preservation difficult enough. The pyramids were ancient when the Romans invaded Egypt, and the Sphinx, made of soft, easily eroded limestone, already had a 2,000-year history of deterioration and attempted repairs. But the ravages of time pale next to the destruction wrought by man. The burgeoning Egyptian population, which today tops 53 million, has combined with the hordes of tourists arriving each year to wreak more havoc in the past few decades than the effects of thousands of years of erosion.
As the number of Egyptians increases, people have spilled out of the cities in search of housing. The Giza Plateau, once far from urban sprawl, now lies almost in the shadow of modern apartment buildings. Nearby factories and old vehicles spew forth noxious clouds of particulate-laden exhaust, which becomes corrosive when dissolved by rain. Vibrations from traffic produce cracks in the monuments. More serious still is the damage caused by water. An estimated 80% of Cairo's incoming water supply escapes from leaking pipes into the ground. And the aging sewerage system, built 75 years ago to serve a population of half a million, is choking on the wastes of 13 million. Much of the wastewater overflows into the soil.