WATANI International
12 December 2010
Luxor lights
Tourists to Luxor can now be treated to the stunningly beautiful sight of the West Bank illuminated in the evening. The lighting system project of the West Bank was completed by the Egypt Sound and Light Company and the French Architecture Lumière as commissioned by the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) at the cost of some EGP56 million.
The lighting system covers all the mountains of the West Bank, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, Assasif, North Qurna and Hatshepsut’s Deir al-Bahari temple.
General Essam Abdel-Hady, Chairman of Egypt Sound and Light company, said that 992 lighting units especially fitted to accommodate the rough nature of the area were installed in specific locations on the West Bank. The cables used are heat and rust-resistant, he said. The palms near Qurna were also illuminated, in co-operation with the local residents.
Secretary-general of the SCA Zahi Hawass said that the lighting allows the huge number of daily visitors to the tombs to be stretched across the longer hours of the day from 7am till 8pm.
From bank to museum
Earlier this month the SCA received 200 artefacts from al-Bank al-Ahly al-Misry, the National Bank of Egypt, and moved them to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo for restoration and documentation Hawass said that the collection, which had remained in the bank vault since the early 20th century, included objects from the ancient Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Coptic and Islamic eras. Among the objects are limestone statue heads of ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman deities such as Horus, Hathor and Ptah, as well as Roman terracotta statues and twenty coins from the Islamic and Modern periods. Hawass said that the objects’ authenticity was confirmed by the museum, and that they were very well preserved.
Chairman of the Ahly Bank Tarek Amer said the antiquity collection had been in the possession of foreigners who lived in Egypt during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The foreigners were obviously antique collectors and had stored their collection in two treasury boxes at the bank. It has been almost 100 years now that the treasury boxes had never been claimed or opened, so the executive board of the bank decided to hand over their contents to the SCA.