Zahi Hawass, the archaeologist who convinced the world pharaohs still have secrets

Zahi Hawass

Photo: Dr Yasser El Laithy / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 28, 1947 Damietta, Egypt
Occupation	Egyptologist and archaeologist
Known for	Unknown: The Lost Pyramid
Awards	Time 100 Most Influential People · American Academy of Achievement, Golden Plate Award · Order of the Rising Sun

Somewhere inside the Pyramid of Khufu, at the end of a thirty-meter corridor that robots spent years cleaning and mapping, there is a sealed door. Zahi Hawass knows what he thinks lies behind it. He has been careful not to say — careful in a way that is unusual for him — because the announcement, when it comes, is the kind that rewrites textbooks rather than adds footnotes. That restraint from the world’s most relentless self-publicist says more about the scale of what has been found than any preliminary statement ever could.

He was born in Damietta in 1947 and arrived at archaeology through what he later described as the wrong door. Law school lasted one semester before he concluded that abstract principles bored him and switched to Greek and Roman archaeology at Alexandria University. The path from there to Egyptology took two decades and two continents: a diploma at Cairo University, a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Pennsylvania, a PhD in 1987 under David Silverman — making him the first Egyptian to earn a doctorate in Egyptology from a major American research university. He has mentioned that distinction more than once.

By the time he returned to Egypt he was past forty, but the trajectory accelerated. He became Director General of the Giza Plateau, the youngest person ever to hold that position, and in 2002 was appointed Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities — making him the most powerful administrator in Egyptian archaeology, the person who controlled institutional access to every ancient site in the country. He used that access with the same energy he brought to excavation.

The discoveries under his oversight were real. The tombs of the pyramid builders at Giza, excavated in the early 1990s, settled a millennia-old argument: the workers who built the pyramids were compensated employees with titles and organized teams, not an anonymous enslaved labor force. The Valley of the Golden Mummies at Bahariya Oasis, found in 1999, produced more than two hundred gilded mummies that had been waiting for twenty-first-century imaging technology. In 2005, he led the CT scanning of Tutankhamun’s mummy, generating data that researchers are still analyzing. In 2007, he announced the identification of Hatshepsut’s mummy from a neglected canopic jar in KV60. Each discovery was significant. Each was also a production.

What colleagues found harder to accept was the commercial and media infrastructure Hawass constructed around those finds. He understood earlier than most that television was not a distraction from archaeological work but an instrument of it — one that shaped public funding, national support, and the terms on which the world understood what Egyptian archaeology was doing. The National Geographic specials, the Discovery Channel documentaries, the History Channel reality series Chasing Mummies that broadcast in 2010: all were his design as much as the excavations themselves. Time magazine named him one of its hundred most influential people in 2006. His books — from Valley of the Golden Mummies to Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs — reached readers across a dozen languages. He became the franchise of Egyptian archaeology. And when the franchise became controversial, the collapse was personal.

The fractures arrived in 2011. His close association with President Hosni Mubarak — who had promoted Hawass to Vice Minister of Culture in 2009 and then to Minister of Antiquities as protesters filled Tahrir Square — left him directly exposed when the regime fell. Demonstrators called him “the Mubarak of antiquities.” A court sentenced him to a year in prison over a disputed gift shop contract at the Egyptian Museum; the sentence was suspended on appeal, but the reputational damage was not reversed. The man who had spent decades arguing that Egypt’s ancient heritage belonged to the Egyptian people had become, for a season, a symbol of the system that had failed them.

He has continued working since then, outside official structures but without anything resembling withdrawal. The campaign for the return of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum, the Nefertiti bust from Berlin, the Dendera zodiac from Paris — Hawass has prosecuted these causes through lectures, diplomatic channels, and legal filings with the same persistence he brought to excavation. His 2024 book, Pyramids: Treasures, Mysteries, and New Discoveries in Egypt, updates the record of what is known about the structures that have anchored his career. In January 2026, a documentary about that career — The Man with the Hat, directed by Jeffrey Roth — premiered at the Newport Beach Film Festival, making the argument that the fedora, the finds, and the combativeness constitute something that survives any particular official position.

The Khufu corridor may decide whether that argument holds. Hawass has not disclosed what lies behind the sealed door. He has said only that it will rewrite a chapter of pharaoh history. At 79, sitting on the most significant undisclosed find in modern pyramid archaeology, he has discovered something he spent decades avoiding: the discipline of waiting.

Tags: actors, ancient Egypt, archaeologists, Chasing Mummies, Egyptology, pyramids

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