“Civilization is not just stones,” says the Karnak guard known as Uncle Abdo, who has been sitting in the same spot in front of the temple for fifty years.  At a time when some people in today’s Egypt, due to certain fatwas, are calling for these ancient statutes to be shrouded or demolished, Uncle Abdo is an example of how the love of ancient Egyptian civilization is relevant in today’s world.

“Civilization is not just stones,” says the Karnak guard known as Uncle Abdo, who has been sitting in the same spot in front of the temple for fifty years.  At a time when some people in today’s Egypt, due to certain fatwas, are calling for these ancient statutes to be shrouded or demolished, Uncle Abdo is an example of how the love of ancient Egyptian civilization is relevant in today’s world.  He ignores the current trend of those calling on the nation to distance itself from the values of this civilization, under the notion that they are nothing but a show window to laugh at and there to empty the pockets of foreigners.

Uncle Abdo lives a few metres from the Karnak Temple and his relationship to antiquities dates back to 1959 when he was only 12 years old. His father’s death was a turning point in his life and in those days the only paying job available was to work as an assistant restorer at the nearby Egyptian and foreign archeological expeditions.

“Work was underway to restore the Avenue of Sphinxes and some relatives of mine managed to get work in excavation,” said Uncle Abdo.  “Back then, I had a family to feed and I was more than happy with my huge salary of 2.75 Egyptian pounds.”

The 66 year-old Uncle Abdo, formally known as Abdullah Ahmad Taha, is the “Karnak guard” and he sits here to prevent visitors from damaging the antiquities.  Driven by his love for his profession and its long history, he walks through the temple touching certain spots, in whose restoration he had personally taken part.

“Today, as a pensioner, I remember my childhood memories in the temple. Supervised by foreign excavators, I had to know the type of stone we were working on; whether it was sandstone or limestone. I learned from experienced workers how to remove the accumulated dirt very carefully, prepare the restoration material, calculate the correct rates to compensate the stone with nearby dirt and fill up cavities.”

“We used to work non-stop from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. with no education or qualification, which came later under the eyes of experts. We were a generation of natural born experts and we learned how to feel the sensitivity of the stone and the pickax as if we had been surgeons working on a human body; any error could kill our patient who had been waiting for thousands of years”.

In his daily gathering, Uncle Abdo sits among his family of grandsons and sons who inherited this profession and work as restorers and tour guides.

He speaks seven European languages without being able to write a single letter and sits with a quill pen in his hand and a couple sheets of papyrus to write in the language he understands and adores; hieroglyphic.

“We learned our profession at the hands of classical school pioneers,” he rememebers. “We learned how to fill up cavities with a material resembling that of the original stone after cleaning it and isolating it from climatic effects and groundwater. Later on came Eastern school pioneers who managed to compensate whole parts with new materials, marking the introduction of concrete in our profession for the first time, which caused the restored parts to wear away and ruin again by the same factors.”

Uncle Abdo opens an old leather holder and shows us letters he exchanged with European heads of states, like former Italian President Sandro Pertini. After working fifty years in Luxor many of them know Uncle Abdo personally.

His friendship with former French president Jacques Chirac, however, is the longest and most profound. Uncle Abdo met Chirac for the first time when he was the mayor of Paris in the early 1980s and they exchanged letters during the long journey toward Chirac becoming the leader of modern France. These were personal letters that gave updates on their health and their children.

 “Mr. Levrai, the director of Karnack Antiquities, used to call me “my son”, just as we call our own. We came to know the Egyptian archeological pioneers, such as Mohammed Abdulqader, Labeeb Habashi, Jamal Mukhtar and Ahmad Qadri and we never felt animosity or contempt toward foreigners as is the case nowadays”, said Uncle Abdo.

“I feel that my name is engraved on the Temple walls,” Uncle Abdo says.   He hopes the tourism industry in Luxor will recover because Egypt, throughout history, as he put it, has never been isolated from the outside world.