My name is El-Tayeb Maataany. I'm from Luxor, from Qorna near to Hatshepsut temple
All our products are handmade.
We based our work on temples' drawings
We sit beside the temples and see what the pharaohs used to do
and we try to imitate what they did
We love tourists and we love tourists to visit Egypt and enjoy their stay
I need help from people, like officials, I need them to come see us, or big companies to market our products
We need a lot of support,
there are other craftsmen even more experienced, and there are some in rural areas,
in Luxor, in Aswan, Manshiet Nasser and the Citadel district,
all these people have ideas and good work and they need raw materials, machines, and techniques,
and they need people to know about them
Any tourist coming knows that our work is handmade,
Chinese industry is based on plastic molding technology, all their products are made of plastic,
but our products are made of stone
This product that you see was initially a big piece of rubble but it was sawed, lathed, dyed and all this was written by the hand
All the handmade Egyptian products, and especially Qorna's products,
I recommend that we do brochures about these products and we distribute them to tourism companies in Egypt and all over the world,
little brochures with the names of craftsmen who make handmade products,
and their addresses, and a short video to show our work
Anyone who wants to write his name on a vase in English and Hieroglyphic letters, we can do it for him
And if he doubts that we can do this, I invite him to come and stay with me just an hour
and he'll have his product with his name in hieroglyphic, Arabic and English letters,
and all our products are made of stone never from plastic, and our work is handmade
He can bring a picture from his city or something special in his city,
or he just takes a photo of it and brings it with him and we can carve it on this vase or an obelisk or a pyramid, and we carve his name beside it and even his face if he wants
And if he wants us to make a statue like this one, a statue for himself,
a stone statue with his facial features, we can do it!
