Securing cultural heritage is no longer a regional matter or the duty of any single state, however a shared human obligation that needs global cooperation in between cultural, scholastic, and innovation organizations, Ashraf El-Ezaby, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture, mentioned. On 9 September, he spoke before an audience of more than 300 professionals and institutional agents from over 30 nations at the International Symposium on Cultural Heritage Conservation by Digitization (CHCD) at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
El-Ezaby mentioned that Egypt, through its Ministry of Culture and the Supreme Council of Culture, is focusing on digitizing its heritage.
Egypt’s push to utilize innovation to safeguard its heritage has actually remained in the works because the early 2000s
Since 18 July of this year, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities is constructing what authorities refer to as an incorporated, Artificial Intelligence (AI) supported system to assist recuperate robbed Egyptian artifacts and maintain the nation’s heritage for future generations.
Utilizing AI, the system supports continuous tracking of Egypt’s approximately 1,100 recognized historical locations, of which scientists approximate more than a quarter have currently continual significant looting-related damage A lot of those websites sit far from museum guards or protective fences, leaving them susceptible to disintegration, urban spread, uncontrolled building and construction, and robbery, according to a 2015 research study on El Minya archeological websites.
Accuracy tracking, website by website
Current research study released in May 2026 by Microsoft AI for Good Research in cooperation with an earth imaging business called Planet Labs PBC has focused on automationconsisting of training machine-learning designs to flag most likely robbery activity in satellite images gradually, instead of depending on sluggish, manual contrast– a technique meant to make across the country tracking practical at scale.
On the ground, accuracy scanning is providing for private monoliths what satellites provide for the landscape. Study groups running under authorizations from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority now usage terrestrial laser scanners and drones to develop millimeter-accurate digital designs of websites consisting of the Giza Plateau and Islamic Cairo, producing standard records that can expose wear and tear undetectable to the eye.
At Saqqara, Egyptian scientists integrated laser scanning with satellite navigation in 2026 to catch more than 2.1 billion information points throughout 4 pyramids, finding a 4.2-centimeter structural shift at the Pyramid of Teti that conservationists credit to ecological and human tension.
Seeing below the surface area
Ground-penetrating radar has actually likewise been utilized to examine the earth below Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque and along the path utilized to move an enormous Ramses II statue into the Grand Egyptian Museum, evaluating for subsurface dangers before building starts, according to a 2018 research study by Port Said University.
A few of the most striking applications restore what time has actually eliminated. Maktabat al-Iskandariyya Bibliotheca Alexandrinaestablished in 2002, constructed a virtual library in 2009 of hieroglyphic engravings utilizing multispectral imaging, a method efficient in identifying pigment and text on temple walls that have actually faded past the point of showing up to the naked eye, according to the library’s own account of a current conference on ancient Egypt and contemporary innovation.
For the majority of the last century, Cairo’s Egyptian Museum tape-recorded its more than 160,000 items in handwritten journals that needed to be browsed by hand.
A government-led digitization effort constructed a searchable database in 2011 and, to date, has logged 166,377 private things That very same push now extends to the Grand Egyptian Museum, where digital documents is dealt with as main to handling a collection suggested to represent almost 5,000 years of history.
Throughout the seminar, El-Ezaby stressed that innovation has actually moved beyond just recording the past, ending up being an active tool for safeguarding heritage from disappearance, securing both its physical and intangible aspects, and making it available to brand-new generations.
The Secretary-General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture bewared to frame the limitations of that shift too, firmly insisting that brand-new innovations should protect a website’s credibility and identity instead of alternative to it, functioning as a bridge that lets more youthful generations engage with heritage in a modern language without modifying its essence.
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