Science Quote by Zahi Hawass

“The sphinx will always have to be looked after” lands with the deceptively plain cadence of a maintenance note, which is exactly why it works. Zahi Hawass isn’t offering mysticism; he’s puncturing it. The Sphinx is marketed as eternal, an icon that seems to predate history itself, but Hawass frames it as vulnerable infrastructure: stone, sand, salt, groundwater, tourism, bureaucracy. The magic survives only through unglamorous labor.

The intent is managerial and political at once. As Egypt’s most visible archaeologist-administrator, Hawass spent years translating heritage into a public mandate. “Always” is the pressure word: it asserts permanence not in the monument’s body but in the obligation surrounding it. There’s a quiet rebuke here to the fantasy that archaeology is a one-time heroic discovery. Preservation is an ongoing negotiation with erosion, pollution, and the human appetite to touch, climb, photograph, and profit.

Subtextually, Hawass is also staking jurisdiction. “Looked after” implies stewardship, expertise, and gatekeeping. In a field shadowed by colonial collecting and international meddling, the line doubles as a claim that Egypt’s heritage cannot be treated as a static global trophy. It requires continuous, locally accountable care.

Context matters: the Sphinx has undergone repeated interventions, from ancient repairs to modern restorations, amid debates over methods and motives. Hawass’s sentence compresses all of that into a pragmatic truth: monuments don’t endure because they’re legendary; they endure because someone keeps showing up.