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Comment by eth0up | Hacker News Reader

Screw the tourists, bring in the archeologists, maybe start by resuming excavations at Eridu. 99% of our history is buried or looted. And the one or two Assyriologists in the world need new material to study.

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After several years, Iraqi Hezbollah recently released their Princeton researcher hostage (granted, she is a dual Israeli citizen). Maybe that will encourage more archeologists to visit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Tsurkov

Lovely place to be kidnapped

Thanks for the info and please pardon my previous ignorance of it. I'm grateful for her release.

no worries. There's a whole lot of news happening. No need to be up to date with everything.

That is so sad. Iraq, Uruk, Mesopotamia, Babylon... The birthplace of so many nations and cultures in the region. The cultural and commercial hub for centuries.

https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/C...

Tourism is such a wasteful tax on society. I met an Egyptologist who had been leading tours for two years so he could feed his family but he longed to go back to Egyptology and go and study the ruins even though it didn’t pay well

And after meeting that person you thought, "wow I wish this person didn't have an alternative income stream that allows them to feed their family"?

Many people in this world wish they could do something different with their lives, but to blame the activity they're currently doing is shortsighted.

lol. Sure I felt happy that he had something else to keep his family fed. But I as a tourist with more valuable cash come into this country with an artificially low value cash, take up the very resources of that country to … give me a tour! This guy is probably a skilled archeologist who made a huge effort to learn history of an ancient civilization and was actually able to translate whatever we asked him to translate.

And here he is could be doing something so much more valuable … than giving this idiot (me) a “tour”.

I am appreciative that I met him. And that he was my guide. But my money didn’t give him an income. It took away the finite resources of his country.

People generally become tour guides because alternative jobs don't exist. It's extremely common for the local workers who help with excavation to become tour guides for the areas they've helped excavate. Many of these people are more knowledgeable (in certain respects) than the archaeologists they're helping.

I'm fairly certain you weren't taking him away from something more valuable that he would have been doing in your absence.

Nothing stops you from giving the guy a donation.

What stopped him from doing his work? A more lucrative alternative field. Only one of the works is more worthwhile.

If there was less tourism there would be even less demand for archeologists and the guy would have likely been forced into an even lower skilled job

In Egypt, archaeology is funded by foreign governments and universities who use the discoveries to write papers. Before they would also extract the treasures until a law was made that prohibited that.

You can fund a full time Egyptologist for the amount of money a turned receives in a year.

Hate to break it to you, but every other tour guide in Egypt will tell you that they actually are an "Egyptologist". It's a common scam. Of course I don't know the situation of your specific tour guide though, they might have been genuine.

He could read hieroglyphics. And we asked him much more technical questions which he was able to answer.

We had a second tour guide for a different area. He was not an archaeologist. But he was like one of those nerdy guys who study the subject really well and then explain it. His passion and tour guiding was very different than the first, more academic in nature.

> He could read hieroglyphics. And we asked him much more technical questions which he was able to answer

He took the mandated guide courses. They call themselves Egyptologists after that. That doesn’t make it a scam. Just that he wasn’t equipped for academia.

It is notorious that almost all the well-paid and serious positions in Egyptology are with the government in Cairo or at a foreign universities and museums.

Tourism is one of the best “products” a country can produce. It’s almost all a service industry which doesn’t strain natural resources, doesn’t cause physical health issues for its employees, incentivizes a higher level of education, and brings in large amounts of foreign currencies, helping to stabilize their own currency. The positives FAR outweigh the negatives. Countries like Saudi Arabia have embraced tourism as a great way to diversify. A country like Thailand is able to “thrive” relative to its neighbors because it derives far more economic power from its tourist trade.(20% of GDP compared to Cambodia’s 9%, Malaysia’s 15% and Myanmar’s 3%)

whatever economic power it gets from tourism is used up on stuff like smartphones for the rich. Not food. Not resources. Their health clinic shelves were empty.

In effect, tourism just absorbs talented manpower. Thailand has a huge dearth of educated people doing world shattering stuff because so many went the tourist route. Sure it stops the other braindrain with ex-migration.

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