Word: cleopatras
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...That is about to change, according to the world's most flamboyant Egyptologist. Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, announced earlier this week that his team of archaeologists was readying for the final approach toward what could be the tomb of Cleopatra. The site is at Abusir, some 30 miles from the port city of Alexandria, among the ruins of an ancient temple to the Egyptian god Osiris. Nearly two dozen coins unearthed there bear Cleopatra's profile and inscription, and carvings in the temple enclosure show two lovers in an embrace. A ceramic fragment...
...take place without his agency's sanction (and more than a few foreign Egyptologists have been frozen out of work as a result); any sensational discovery is invariably announced by him. "In Egypt," Hawass writes on his personal website, "archaeologists are bigger than movie stars!" His quest for Cleopatra's grave is spawning comparisons with the 1922 discovery of King Tutenkhamen. (See pictures of treasure hunting in Afghanistan...
...countries in the world sit upon as many layers of history and civilization as Egypt, from the pyramids of the Pharaohs to the archives of medieval Jewish merchants. But the specter of Cleopatra has loomed above it all. "Cleopatra has come to symbolize Egypt for a lot of people," says Joyce Tyldesley, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool and author of Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, published last year. It's a symbol that has not always been flattering. Centuries of Western literature evoked Cleopatra as a lustful seductress, corrupting the stoic Roman men who strayed into her orbit...
...Kathleen Martinez, an archaeologist from the Dominican Republic who has conducted the digs at Abusir for the past three years, told reporters that she wants "to be Cleopatra's lawyer," and prove there is much more to the ancient potentate than the work of two thousands years of Western male imagination. Debates still rage over everything from Cleopatra's identity - cranial scans of her half-sister's skull this year suggested she may be African, though her known lineage was Greek - to her looks. Close scrutiny of coin portraits have led some to believe that she was rather plain...
...many wait for further developments over the coming weeks, thrilled by the possibility of seeing a legend turn real. It's hard to divine what could be buried by Cleopatra's side, let alone how the storied queen's body itself may be preserved. Could there be treasures? The coiled skin of a snake? "A diary," offers Tyldesley, "would be fantastic." But Hawass and his team must hurry. The dig abuts the summer residence of President Hosni Mubarak, which may force the dozens-strong team of archaeologists to abandon work from May to November. The security concerns of Egypt...