Protecting cultural heritage is no longer a local matter or the responsibility of any single state, but a shared human responsibility that requires international cooperation between cultural, academic, and technology institutions, Ashraf El-Ezaby, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture, stated. On 9 September, he spoke before an audience of more than 300 experts and institutional representatives from over 30 countries at the International Symposium on Cultural Heritage Conservation by Digitization (CHCD) at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
El-Ezaby stated that Egypt, through its Ministry of Culture and the Supreme Council of Culture, is prioritizing digitizing its heritage.
Egypt’s push to use technology to protect its heritage has been in the works since the early 2000s.
As of 18 July of this year, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities is building what officials describe as an integrated, Artificial Intelligence (AI) supported system to help recover looted Egyptian artifacts and preserve the country’s heritage for future generations.
Using AI, the system supports ongoing monitoring of Egypt’s roughly 1,100 known archaeological areas, of which researchers estimate more than a quarter have already sustained major looting-related damage. Many of those sites sit far from museum guards or protective fences, leaving them vulnerable to erosion, urban sprawl, unregulated construction, and looting, according to a 2015 study on El Minya archeological sites.
Precision monitoring, site by site
Recent research published in May 2026 by Microsoft AI for Good Research in collaboration with an earth imaging company called Planet Labs PBC has aimed at automation, including training machine-learning models to flag likely looting activity in satellite imagery over time, rather than relying on slow, manual comparison — an approach intended to make nationwide monitoring feasible at scale.
On the ground, precision scanning is doing for individual monuments what satellites do for the landscape. Survey teams operating under permits from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority now use terrestrial laser scanners and drones to build millimeter-accurate digital models of sites including the Giza Plateau and Islamic Cairo, creating baseline records that can reveal deterioration invisible to the eye.
At Saqqara, Egyptian researchers combined laser scanning with satellite navigation in 2026 to capture more than 2.1 billion data points across four pyramids, detecting a 4.2-centimeter structural shift at the Pyramid of Teti that conservationists attribute to environmental and human stress.
Seeing beneath the surface
Ground-penetrating radar has also been used to check the earth beneath Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque and along the route used to move a colossal Ramses II statue into the Grand Egyptian Museum, screening for subsurface risks before construction begins, according to a 2018 study by Port Said University.
Some of the most striking applications restore what time has erased. Maktabat al-Iskandariyya, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, founded in 2002, built a digital library in 2009 of hieroglyphic inscriptions using multispectral imaging, a technique capable of detecting pigment and text on temple walls that have faded past the point of being visible to the naked eye, according to the library’s own account of a recent conference on ancient Egypt and modern technology.
For most of the last century, Cairo’s Egyptian Museum recorded its more than 160,000 objects in handwritten ledgers that had to be searched manually.
A government-led digitization effort built a searchable database in 2011 and, to date, has logged 166,377 individual objects. That same push now extends to the Grand Egyptian Museum, where digital documentation is treated as central to managing a collection meant to represent nearly 5,000 years of history.
During the symposium, El-Ezaby emphasized that technology has moved beyond simply documenting the past, becoming an active tool for protecting heritage from disappearance, safeguarding both its physical and intangible elements, and making it accessible to new generations.
The Secretary-General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture was careful to frame the limits of that shift as well, insisting that new technologies must preserve a site’s authenticity and identity rather than substitute for it, acting as a bridge that lets younger generations engage with heritage in a contemporary language without altering its essence.
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