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Babylon & Beyond

EGYPT: Save the Sphinx

By Jeffrey FleishmanStaff Writer 
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Stark and red, the letters bleed through the website as if promoting a horror film from the 1930s: ‘Save The Sphinx.’ But there are no desert villains, no howling sandstorms, no lurking, murderous mummies. Bassam El Shammaa, an Egyptologist who types in breathless passion punctuated by CAPITAL letters and !!!!!!!, reports on his website www.sossphinx.bassam.itgo.com that underground water levels among other things are endangering the Sphinx.

‘While I was walking around the Sphinx area on Saturday, September, 22nd, 2007,’ he writes, ‘I was shocked by what I saw there! As you can see below in the pictures I took, the UNDERGROUND WATER, ELECTRICITY CABLES, LOUDSPEAKERS, SALTY STAGNANT WATER, CABLES, HUMAN FEET SHACKING THE MONUMENTS, GARBAGE and finally OLD AGE all definitely lead to destruction!!

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The Egyptian press reported that the water problem is being studied but that it is not as alarming as Shammaa’s capital letters suggest. It could be a change in the groundwater table, or overflow from irrigation. Shammaa would rather be BOLD now than sorry later. He told the Daily News Egypt: ‘I am driven by a sense of responsibility.’

— Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo

Babylon & Beyond
Jeffrey Fleishman

Jeffrey Fleishman is a senior writer at the Los Angeles Times. Previously, he was the foreign and national editor. A 2002 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, Fleishman was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing. A longtime foreign correspondent, he served as bureau chief for The Times in Cairo and Berlin, and was previously based in Rome for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He also was a writer on film, art and culture. Fleishman has been a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and a finalist for the Center for Public Integrity’s Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. He is the author of five novels, including “Good Night, Forever” and “Last Dance.”

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