I received a message on my phone from a French journalist requesting a meeting at my office in Mohandessin.
He specified the day and time, mentioning that his granddaughter would be accompanying him. Initially, I assumed he wanted to conduct an interview, so I replied in the affirmative and shared my office location via a GPS app.
On the appointed day, the French journalist arrived with a little angel—a girl barely fourteen years old. The moment she entered, she began wandering through the office, flipping through books on the shelves and examining my medals and commemorative plaques. Since the beautiful girl knew no English beyond the word “beautiful,” everything in my office suddenly became “beautiful!”
She didn’t sit down for a single moment; she seemed to possess a boundless, restless energy.
Turning back to the girl’s grandfather—the French journalist—he looked far younger than the eighty-year-old man he claimed to be. He preempted our conversation by introducing himself, saying, “I haven’t come to interview you. I retired five years ago and am now simply enjoying life with my family.”
“This time, I’ve come to Egypt with my granddaughter to visit the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) following its opening. It is truly magnificent; its sheer scale is a stirring of the imagination. My granddaughter says it is the greatest and most beautiful museum she has ever seen—and this is coming from someone who has explored most of Europe’s great museums; she has a real soul for history.”
The gentleman continued, “I don’t expect you to remember me. It was twenty-eight years ago, when you came to Paris to lecture on your pyramid discoveries and the unearthing of the tombs of the pyramid builders.”
I searched my memory, trying in vain to place his face. “I must apologize,” I replied. “I’ve lectured in so many French cities over the years that I’m afraid the details have blurred.” I asked, “Did we do an interview back then?”
“No,” he answered. “But you taught me a lesson I have carried with me ever since—one that fundamentally changed me, both as a person and as a journalist.”
I sat there, captivated by the words of the distinguished man before me, while his granddaughter was busy “excavating” the corners of my office.
“Please,” I urged, “tell me the story.”
“That day,” he began, “I was just one face in the crowd at your lecture. I had come filled with Western arrogance, convinced that we Europeans held the monopoly on humanitarian ideals and civil liberties. I had even prepared a ‘surprise’ specifically designed to embarrass you—a way to manufacture a story that would discredit your work.”
When the floor opened for questions, you called on me. Instead of asking a question, I stood up and, with utter conceit, said: “Thank you for the lecture, but I believe you forgot to mention that those you call “builders” were actually slaves. The Pharaohs forced them to haul stone and build the monuments you boast about today. Rather than pride, you should feel only shame for the atrocities your ancestors committed.”
“A heavy silence fell over the hall,” the journalist recalled. “Everyone waited for your response. When it came, it struck with the force of ice hitting a searing hot plate.”
With a startling, almost preternatural calm, you looked at me and said: “Yes, I couldn’t agree with you more. In fact, I am overcome with a profound sense of shame. But surely France—the cradle of liberty and human rights—must share this burden of disgrace. After all, it continues to house thousands of Pharaonic treasures that, by your logic, were forged through the agony of forced labor and the torment of slaves.”
You continued: “I am prepared to return to Egypt at this very moment, provided I take with me the Obelisk of Ramses II from the Place de la Concorde and the ceiling of the Dendera Temple from the Louvre. I would also reclaim the Seated Scribe and the more than 58,000 artifacts currently in France—including those twenty massive crates of antiquities built by slaves that Muhammad Ali Pasha gifted to Jean-François Champollion, the first man to decipher our ancient tongue.”
Then, you delivered the final blow: “Once I have returned home with every artifact currently in your country—treasures France should be ashamed to display if they are indeed the product of such misery—I will invite over a thousand French Egyptologists to offer you a formal apology. I will ask them to explain why they hid the “truth” of this slave-built civilization, and I will demand they join you in your shame for lying in their scholarly works, for not a single one of them ever mentioned that this civilization was built on the backs of the oppressed, as you so boldly claim.”
The journalist continued: “When you finished, a few seconds of stunned silence hung in the air before the hall suddenly erupted in a roar of applause and laughter. I stood there, drenched in sweat, feeling like a trivial, arrogant man who had just been taught a life-altering lesson by an Egyptian sage. Dr. Zahi, I have come today simply to thank you for that lesson.”
He paused, then added: “From that day on, I found humility. I read, I interviewed French Egyptologists, and I scoured museums and libraries in search of the truth. It was a journey that eventually led me to a place of absolute certainty: that such sublime beauty could never be the product of forced labor.”
