Film-star good looks, elegant greying hair and broad-brimmed hat: Dr Zahi Hawass could readily be mistaken for the Indiana Jones of Egyptian archaeology. But make no mistake. He admits that he loves the camera, but behind his smile is much more than a seeker of buried treasures: he is driven by a hard-nosed concern for Ancient Egypt and all its monuments, large and small. The past is under constant threat, and he is on his guard to maintain and preserve every element of his forefathers’ world.

If that involves demanding that the great museums and institutions of the world return beautiful objects exported by foreign archaeologists in the past two centuries, so be it. With help from Unesco, he has had some successes. But at the same time there is a quiet diplomacy behind the fanfares and Hawass, since 2002 Secretary General of the Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA), is a past master at playing both hands.

That is why he went before the Egyptian Parliament and argued to overturn the ban on monuments going on international exhibition, which was imposed after damage in Germany to one object from the 1972 Tutankhamun exhibition. He won the argument and the result is the London spectacular: “We told the Parliament we need to send King Tut so we can make money for the restoration of the monuments. If we are making $9 million a city [in America], I can use that to do a lot of good work in Egypt.”

What he has in mind is an extensive programme of museum-building, including especially the massive Grand Museum, covering 50ha. Sited near where Hawass had his first important post as Director of the Giza Pyramids plateau, it is at last under way thanks to a Japanese loan.

But the Museum of Civilisation in Fustat is also planned, together with a series of others all over the country. “We’re changing from more storage-orientated to more beautiful displays,” Hawass says. “If you go to Luxor and see the extension that we did to the museum, it is incredible. We are also making more protection for the sites, more site management.”

That involves doing away with the 500 “primitive” – as he describes them – on-site storerooms and replacing them with up to 50 state of the art storage and conservation facilities so that newly found objects can be secure and restored to their original state.

It is several years since I descended into the bowels of the storerooms under the Egyptian Museum to be met by a maelstrom of objects of all periods, in all materials, in all stages of disarray and decay. Doubtless things have changed now, especially under the museum’s new and active director, Dr Wafaa el-Sadeek and Dr Gamal Mahgoub, head of the Central Directory for Conservation of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. But the stored objects are only a part of the problem: ancient sites throughout the country are suffering from exposure to baking sun at one extreme and a rising water table at the other.

Among the most spectacular successes in recent years has been the restoration of the 3,200-year-old tomb of Nefertari, in the Valley of the Queens, where 520sq m of wall paintings were carefully conserved by Italian and American experts, salts removed and the original plaster restored.

Even more eye-catching, perhaps, was the massive jigsaw puzzle represented by the Solar Boat of Cheops, painstakingly put together over 14 years from 1,223 buried pieces of cedar and local timber. But the museum in which it is housed – though strikingly beautiful – has never been totally satisfactory, and its replacement is one of the projects in Hawass’s mind.

Now 60, he has been secretary-general for five years after a series of highly publicised archaeological successes in the wake of a Fulbright scholarship and a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He has a string of honorary degrees – and a reputation for controversy. One British archaeologist has been barred from Egypt for announcing a theoretical discovery before clearing it with the SCA; two French scientists were refused permission to work because they were considered “amateurs”.

It is conservation that is at the forefront. Though the SCA has some 300 conservators throughout the country, 20 of them in the Egyptian Museum itself, they are sent to museums and international organisations the world over for specialist training and those costs must be met on top of updating their facilities and equipment.

“The money we gain from Tutankhamun goes to the benefit of objects in the field, storerooms and museums,” Mahgoub says. “We are in very great need of enormous amounts of money to cover the needs of protection of this national heritage.”

Hawass has recently introduced a vast research, documentation and training programme to prepare Egyptian fieldwork experts. “The excavation schools have 250 young people. In the future, when they excavate, they will do good work, as wrong excavation can destroy history.”

He is well known as an excavator, and is still involved with the village of the pyramid builders at Giza, as well as working in the Valley of the Golden Mummies in Bahriya Oasis. Important conservation projects include Islamic, Coptic and Jewish monuments in Old Cairo, the Temple of Hibis in Kharga Oasis, and churches and mosques outside Cairo.

“All archaeology is destruction” – that was the great adage that the late Mortimer Wheeler used to shock his students. There is much truth in it: what is revealed lies below later remains that have to be removed, and what is revealed loses its protective cocoon of perhaps thousands of years of surrounding soil or sand.

Zahi Hawass and his colleagues in Egypt are battling hard to overcome the adage. This exhibition is designed to help them.

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