If someone were to ask me what I thought was one of the best things I had done during my term as Secretary General of the SCA, I would say the building of storage magazines all over Egypt. Over the last eight years I’ve supervised the construction of 36 new storage facilities. All of them are equipped with conservation rooms and photography labs, and the objects are stored in a secure and environmentally protected space.

When I became the head of antiquities I was very discouraged by the poor condition of many storage magazines throughout Egypt. For example, there were sixty-five magazines at Saqqara built of mudbrick. They were all very primitive and the antiquities were in danger of being damaged or stolen. Sadly, I found that this was the case all over Egypt. Sometimes when we opened storage magazines on a site, we found that they had not been opened for over 80 years! I found so many objects that were severely damaged, especially wooden pieces that had completely deteriorated. It was the worst thing I had ever seen in my life. For all of these reasons I decided that it was of great importance that we build new storage magazines.

 We commissioned the national service of our military that has a large construction company, and we designed the storage magazines. They all have the same design and are located in thirty-six cities in Egypt. We have now begun to move the objects from the old magazines to the new ones. As we relocate them all the objects are being cleaned, restored, photographed and entered into a database. Nearly sixty percent of the objects inside these magazines had never been registered anywhere. I recently toured one of the new magazines when I was in Luxor. The conservators and archaeologists there are making excellent progress on conserving many of the objects. We have begun to name all of the storage magazines by after Egyptian archaeologists who have dedicated their lives to archaeology. The one located in Qurna on thewest bank of Luxor is named after Ali Hassan, who was the director of the SCA from 1996-1997.