Egypt has one of the world's richest archaeological estates — roughly 1,100 known sites spanning some 5,000 years — and it is now leaning hard on technology to keep them from disappearing. At the International Symposium on Cultural Heritage Conservation by Digitization, held at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Egypt's Supreme Council of Culture secretary-general Ashraf El-Ezaby told an audience of more than 300 experts from over 30 countries that digitising heritage has become a national priority, and a shared global responsibility.
The effort is not new — it began in the early 2000s — but it has accelerated into something genuinely ambitious. Since July this year, the Supreme Council of Antiquities has been building an AI-supported system to monitor archaeological sites and recover looted artefacts. The scale of the problem is real: researchers estimate that more than a quarter of Egypt's known sites have already suffered major looting damage, and many sit far from any guards or fences, exposed to urban sprawl and unregulated construction. A partnership between Microsoft's AI for Good Research Lab and satellite imaging firm Planet Labs is training machine-learning models to automatically flag looting activity in satellite imagery, replacing slow manual comparisons of aerial photos.
Closer to the ground, laser scanners and drones are building millimetre-accurate digital models of landmarks including the Giza Plateau and Islamic Cairo. At Saqqara, researchers combined laser scanning with satellite positioning in 2026 to capture more than 2.1 billion data points across four pyramids — and detected a 4.2-centimetre structural shift at the Pyramid of Teti that conservators link to environmental and human stress. Ground-penetrating radar has been used to check the ground beneath Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo and along the route used to move a colossal Ramses II statue to the Grand Egyptian Museum.
Some applications bring back what has faded. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina built a digital library of hieroglyphic inscriptions using multispectral imaging, which can pick up pigment and text on temple walls no longer visible to the naked eye. Meanwhile, the Egyptian Museum's 160,000-plus objects — recorded in handwritten ledgers for a century — now sit in a searchable database logging 166,377 items, with the Grand Egyptian Museum treating digital documentation as central to managing its collection.
For travellers, this matters more than it might seem. The scanning and radar work feeds directly into conservation decisions at the sites visitors come for — Giza, Saqqara, Islamic Cairo — and digitised collections mean you can preview or revisit objects in detail. The Grand Egyptian Museum, where digital records sit at the heart of collection management, is fast becoming the essential first stop for any Cairo itinerary. El-Ezaby's caveat is worth noting too: the technology is framed as a bridge to younger audiences, not a replacement for the real thing. The stones, in other words, are not going anywhere — and these tools make it likelier they never will. For anyone planning a trip built around ancient Egypt, that promise of sites being watched, measured and protected in real time is good news worth knowing about.
Credit: Egyptian Streets
