THIS SPRING, GRAND Mufti Ali Gomaa sent shivers down the spines of archaeologists and tour operators worldwide as he issued a fatwa calling the statuary haram.

Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, prominent Muslim Brotherhood member and current dean of Islamic Studies at the University of Qatar, quickly came out in defense of the fatwa. “Islam prohibits statues and three-dimensional figures of living things,” he told reporters, concluding that “the statues of ancient Egypt are prohibited.”

The Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) was also quick to respond. Its spokesman, Mohsen Said, countered in a statement, “We display statues so they can be studied and so people can get to know their heritage. This is Egypt’s national heritage. We don’t display them for worship.”

Immediately, people voiced fears that an extremist group would interpret the fatwa as a call to destroy the ancient monuments. Countless news articles and blogs began drawing parallels to the fatwa and the fate of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001. (For more on this story, see “On Islam and Intellect,” page 44.)

The furor was such that Gomaa later came out and clarified that while it isn’t permitted to worship statues, the mere display of them isn’t necessarily haram.

The tourist industry is Egypt’s largest source of private employment and is one of the country’s largest sources of revenue. Terrorist attacks, fluctuations in the world economy and general unrest in parts of the Middle East all affect the industry to some extent. But the greatest threat to many of Egypt’s antiquities and the industry built around them may not be from misinterpreted fatwas or extremist’s bombs, but from an icon as Egyptian as the Great Pyramids of Giza: the Nile.

Cache Seel Ray Johnson of the Chicago House project

Visitors to the Temple of Ramses III are greeted by larger-than-life reliefs that depict the Pharaoh as a victor in his many wars. The sometimes grisly scenes are all the more magnificent in the areas shielded from the sun, where the original colors have survived the millennia. A closer inspection, however, reveals that water marks have climbed the walls. Near the base of the walls are bubbles and cracks lined with white dust where the smallest of breezes or the accidental brushing of a tourist can erase the work of the ancient craftsmen.

The Chicago House, a conservation group based in Luxor under the auspices of the University of Chicago, has been collecting and creating photographs and prints of antiquities dating back to the late nineteenth century. Their unique collection of nearly 40,000 images allows them to track the deterioration and help pinpoint the causes.

“What took centuries in antiquity is now only taking a few years,” says the project’s Dr. Raymond Johnson. Johnson goes on to tell how even during his tenure here in Luxor, reliefs in photographs from the late 1800s, which were just as clear when he first arrived close to a decade ago as they were back then, are now completely gone.

Many archaeologists believe that if the present situation continues, the columns in the Luxor and Karnak temples will be so eroded that the entire structures will be in danger of total collapse in a few short years.

“There has been a huge change in the water table since ancient times,” Johnson says. “These temples never settled, and the only reason they’re still standing is because of the genius of the ancients’ building techniques.” He compares the process of the water leeching up into the stones to dipping the edge of a paper towel into a glass of water — the water will eventually climb all the way to the top of the paper towel.

Groundwater has always seeped into the base of the column, carrying with it salts that can break down the sandstone, turning it back into sand. Before the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the water would seep into the columns during the Nile’s flood season. When the river receded, the water would leech back into the soft sand foundation, leaving behind little or no damage. The dam ended not only the seasonal fluctuations of the river water, but that of the groundwater as well, putting a stop to the seasonal drying out process which had preserved the temples for thousands of years.

Much of the groundwater and its greatly increased salinity levels come from an unexpected side effect of regulating the flow of the Nile. Even though the river maintains a constant high level, the end of the traditional flood season means that man-made irrigation is now necessary even on the flood-plain. In addition to the new irrigation systems, chemical fertilizers have contributed to the erosion of the ancient columns.

The groundwater will also affect future research. Countless monuments and statues still lie in pieces on the ground awaiting reconstruction. To preserve the stones, waterproof ‘hospital’ platforms have been constructed behind the temples. Deterioration doesn’t end when the stones are lifted off the ground, according to Johnson. “We found that if we have a salt-infected stone on the platforms and it is too close to another stone, it will actually infect the nearby stones.”

Michael Jones, an associate director with the American Research Center for Egypt, says local farmers are the cause of the problems. “They’re growing sugarcane right next to the temples. Sugarcane has a very heavy water demand and, basically, they’re recreating the Nile flood several times a year. On top of that, studies have shown that they’re using twice as much water as they need to.”

The problem is not limited to the temples of Luxor and Karnak, but to all of the monuments in the Nile Valley. Nigel Hawthorn, conservation manager of the Theban Mapping Project, echoed Johnson when he recently addressed the Egyptian Cultural Heritage Organization. “Photographs taken ten years ago show beautiful reliefs,” he says. “Today, when we return to the same reliefs to further document them, they are simply not there.”

Efforts by the Egyptian government to convince farmers to switch from traditional flood irrigation to less water-intensive methods like drip-irrigation have all failed. Finally, they were left with no alternative but to move them.

Until last year, the Colossi of Memnon, one of which is the world’s largest statue carved from a single stone, sat in the middle of a cane field. The 20-meter-high statues once guarded the entrance of the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III. The monument survived more than three thousand years of assault by the weather and man. What’s left of their windblown faces still show pockmarks where Napoleon’s army had used them for target practice. After surviving more than three millennia, one of the Colossi of Memnon was almost brought down by a humble farmer.

In 1989 the Colossus began leaning sharply to the south. The following winter, the Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III made it onto UNESCO’s (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) list of the world’s 100 most endangered monuments. After years of trying to change the farmers’ habits, the government came to the conclusion that the only possible solution was to move them.

Dr. Samir Farag, president the SCA in Luxor, is four years into an ambitious plan to reshape the city into a “living museum.” Of his 30 projects, all but one are either underway or completed. One of his successes was to negotiate the move of farmers away from Memnon. “We got about 85 feddans surrounding the statues,” he says. “We [the SCA] gave them comparable land far away from the antiquities.”

The trouble with relocating the farmers, he says, is that population growth has put any arable land at a premium. Apart from tourism, farming is the only work there is around Luxor. “We’re trying to attract private investors to create an industrial area north of the city,” says Farag. Not only would the jobs created help the local economy but [they would] also drive down the cost of living in Luxor. “Right now almost everything in Luxor is imported from Cairo,” he explains. “Even our juices and food are being shipped in.”

It’s still too soon to tell whether or not clearing the immediate area around the Colossus will be enough to save the statues. Across the river at the temples of Luxor and Karnak, more drastic measures are being pursued. In 1999 a team sponsored by the Swedish government began surveying the area around the temples to create a technical solution for the groundwater problem.

In 2005, the USAID (United States Agency for International Development) donated the funds to implement their plan. Scheduled for completion in September 2006, the project hopes to lower the groundwater level by as much as three meters. Twenty drain wells are being connected to six kilometers of pipe all leading to two pumping stations. When the stations reach full capacity they will remove 40,000 cubic meters of water every day.

Showing the pumps at the Luxor temple to visitors, Johnson says that despite operating at below full capacity, they’re already helping. But, he says, “What we have here is a temporary solution to a permanent problem. Someone needs to convince the farmers to grow other crops than sugarcane,” which could potentially be more lucrative.

Failing that, however, they may have to follow the example of Memnon and somehow convince the farmers to move.  et