Egyptian special forces in the National Museum in Cairo.
"There has been some attempted vandalism, and, frankly, it makes no sense," said Bill Petty, who, with his wife, Linda, leads American tour groups to Egypt's great archeological sites. "They didn't go for any gold, they broke some statues. It's mindless."
"It's not the people with a political agenda who are doing the damage, it's criminals," he said. "The army has done a great job of protecting the major things, but there aren't enough of them."
"If the museum is safe, Egypt is safe," Zahi Hawass said to an Associated Press reporter following him.
The country depends heavily on the tourists who crowd here in calmer times, marveling at the mummies and their tombs.
Hawass said about 50 looters had broken into the National Museum on Friday and damaged two mummies -- but he assured reporters that little of historical value was damaged.
Robert Brier, an Egyptologist at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University and a contributing editor to Archeology magazine, was hearing differently. "Almost all the things they went after were gilded," he said. "Perhaps they thought they were gold, and smashed them." He said the artifacts were not, in fact, made of gold, just painted to look that way. The mummy of Tuya, the great-grandmother of King Tutankhamen, appeared in one news photo with its breast plate removed.
"I'm not worried about the pyramids," Brier said. "But the network of treasures there is so vast.""The bad news is that there is antiquities damage at the Giza Pyramids," reported archeologist Gerry Scott, director of the American Research Center in Egypt, on a blog called Unreported Heritage News. Giza is the site of the Great Sphinx, as well as Egypt's grandest pyramids.
He added that the Egyptian army was now guarding the pyramids and access has been restricted.
Nancy Al Hakegh, who has been a tour guide in Egypt for 25 years. "I know tourism is going to stop for some time. God only knows how long."Whenever anything happens to a country, tourism is the first thing to be affected," she said in an interview with ABC News. "But we don't know how much it'll be affected because we don't know what is going to happen. If everything calms down soon, the tourism industry will not be back and running normally until Christmas."
One archeologist who asked not to be named said he hoped the army and the Egyptian police would protect the antiquities."These aren't just Egypt's," he said. "These are the world's heritage, and they're important."
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