Bulldozers clear houses from ancient Egyptian tombs
Source: Reuters
By Jonathan Wright GURNA, Egypt, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Drowning out grumbles from tourist touts and descendants of tomb robbers, bulldozers moved into an Egyptian village near the Valley of the Kings on Saturday at the start of a plan to resettle 3,200 households for the sake of archaeology. Some 3,500 years since thieves first broke into the nearby tombs of Egypt's most powerful ancient rulers, the bulldozers picked away at four uninhabited mudbrick houses, apparently to show that the government is serious about moving out the people. But with a handful of exceptions, the inhabitants of the village of Gurna said they strongly opposed the resettlement plan, which will cut them off from access to the tourists on whom most depend for a living. Gurna is the village closest to the Valley of the Kings, where Tutankhamun and other pharaohs were buried. It lies on top of a vast necropolis where wealthy and powerful commoners built their painted tombs in the 2nd millennium BC. The Egyptian government, with advice from architect and intellectual Hassan Fathi, tried to move them in 1948 by building the model village of New Gurna on the banks of the Nile, but most of them trickled back to their old homes. Villagers said on Saturday only force would move them this time, even if their new houses, built at a cost of 180 million Egyptian pounds ($31 million) about three km (two miles) away, do have sewerage and running water. "Over my dead body," said one young man, who declined to give his name because of the large police presence for a ceremony attended by dignitaries from Cairo. "If they try to move in here, then we will meet them with our rifles," he added. A middle-aged man who complained in detail about the house allocation system said: "There is a complete lack of trust. The government people are all liars. They promise things in public and yet we see nothing." But the governor of nearby Luxor, the centre of the tourist trade in the area, said all but five or six people had signed up for the resettlement programme, which will enable archaeologists to reach more than 50 tombs in the area and meet recommendations by the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO. The governor, Samir Farag, told Reuters the authorities had demolished 120 houses in the last week and would complete the job within a month and a half. Every household would receive a house about the same size as their old one, he added. The most common complaints from villagers were that the new houses, with about 80 square metres (800 square feet) of room space, were too small for people with big families, and that people would lose their livelihoods in the tourist business. "The new houses are pretty nice but there are no khawagas (foreigners) there, so there is no work," said Shoeib Mohamed Youssef, 17, who makes a living showing tourists around and selling them knick-knacks. Dawi Mohamed Ahmed, who owns a workshop making alabaster vases and statues in Gurna, said if he moved he would lose his customers. The governor said the workshops would have to move but the shops could stay. The authorities had said they would move many families on Saturday but in the end no more than four moved. Officials said this was because of the commotion caused by the official ceremony.
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