The decision by the Egyptian government to move four large pharaonic sculptures from Luxor, in Upper Egypt, to iconic Tahrir Square, in downtown Cairo, has sparked controversy. During a Dec. 26 visit to redevelopment work on Tahrir, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouli revealed the government's intention to transfer the huge sphinxes with ram heads from the Karnak Temple complex to stand alongside an obelisk from the time of King Ramses II, which is currently in the nearby Egyptian Museum off Tahrir Square.

A number of archaeologists and social media activists in Egypt and beyond expressed their objection to the move, urging the government to leave the sphinxes in Luxor and to instead install replicas in Cairo. Monica Hanna, head of the Heritage and Archeology Unit at the Arab Academy for Science and Technology in Aswan, circulated a petition to stop the transfer. Addressed to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the petition garnered the signatures of 1,500 professors, archaeologists and well-known personalities, Hanna told Al-Monitor.

The petition lambasted the planned transfer as a violation of international norms regulating the preservation of monuments and historical buildings, citing Article 7 of the Venice Charter (1964), a set of international guidelines for the conservation and restoration of historic structures. The charter is non-binding but served as the basis for the UNESCO World Heritage Convention (1972), to which Egypt is a signatory. The article states that the moving of a monument or its parts cannot be allowed with the exception of efforts to safeguard it.

Hanna stands among those who believe it would be better to make copies of the rams for Tahrir Square rather than jeopardizing the original statues by moving them and also by exposing them to Cairo's air pollution, which can be particularly damaging to the statues' sandstone. The parliamentarian Haitham el-Hariri sent a memorandum to the speaker asserting that moving the statues violates international law and calling for the production of replicas.