Jimmy Corsetti Releases Video Accusing Zahi Hawass of Crimes and Cover-Ups

On Sunday, Corsetti released his promised video attacking Zahi Hawass. During his appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored on Friday, Hawass had stated that nothing had been found in the Osiris Shaft sarcophagus, which was empty when it was opened in 1999. Corsetti correctly notes that when Hawass published his site report in 2007, he stated that a skeleton (more properly, the remains of human bones) had been found in the sarcophagus along with some amulets.

​Corsetti calls this an “enormous lie” (though, more likely, a lapse in memory from a discovery nearly 30 years ago) but omits the description Hawass gave ascribing the skeleton, the amulets, and the sarcophagus to the Late Period, specifically to the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (c. 600 BCE), added long after the oldest artifacts found in the shaft, from the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2200 BCE). (As Paul notes in the comments below, these may be intrusive and cannot be used to date the shaft.) Instead, Corsetti relies on Herodotus, who described the tomb of Khufu in his Histories, a description Hawass believes to be a secondhand account of the Osiris Shaft cenotaph of Osiris. Herodotus had briefly described “the underground chambers on the hill upon which the pyramids stand, which he [i.e. Khufu] caused to be made as sepulchral chambers for himself in an island, having conducted thither a channel from the Nile” (2.124, trans. Macaulay). Corsetti takes this account, made in the fifth century BCE, to be proof that the tomb dates from the reign of Khufu, which is of course as absurd as taking at face value the claim Herodotus made that the pyramids were financed through the prostitution of Khufu’s daughter (2.126).

Corsetti's social media accusation that Hawass was complicit in black market antiquities sales turned out to be a reference to a long-dismissed charge from the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions that Hawass “exposed” antiquities to potential theft by sending them for international exhibitions without proper authority under Egypt’s Antiquities Protection Law. The charges were retribution for his close relationship with the country's deposed president, Hosni Mubarak. The charges, widely seen as groundless, were later dropped.

Corsetti interpreted this to mean that artifacts from the tomb had been looted for sale on the black market and Hawass covered up both the looting and the discovery of what he speculates might have been “body parts of an extraterrestrial,” or else he found the body of Khufu and sold it for cash. “It’s extremely suspicious to say the least,” Corsetti said, again ignoring the stylistic and other evidence that the materials in the shaft date from around 600 BCE, some two millennia after Khufu.