Word: hawass
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...hard to be superstitious when you spend your life excavating Egyptian tombs. But even Zahi Hawass, one of Egypt's leading archaeologists, was not prepared for the apparition that visited him one night last spring, shortly before he entered the tomb of Zed-Khonsu-efankh, the most powerful governor of the Bahariya Oasis during the 26th dynasty. In the dream, Hawass was trapped in a large room filled with dense smoke. He tried to call for help, but no one heard him. Suddenly, a man's face--looking for all the world like a carving from a sarcophagus--came swimming...
...Hawass is not the only explorer haunted by the tombs of Bahariya. The sleepy backwater 230 miles southwest of Cairo was largely overlooked by archaeologists before 1996. That's when a donkey belonging to an antiquities guard fell into a hole that led directly to an undiscovered tomb filled with gold-covered mummies. Since then, Hawass and his team have been digging extensively in Bahariya, turning up hundreds of mummies and treasures beyond imagination. Some of their findings appear in Hawass's Valley of the Golden Mummies (Abrams; $49.50; 224 pages), a richly illustrated text due in bookstores this month...
...kites, that doesn't prove the Egyptians could have built a pyramid that way," says Edward Brovarski, an Egyptologist at Brown University. Mark Lehner, a Harvard archaeologist widely regarded as the leading U.S. expert on the pyramids, was so appalled at the kite theory that he declined comment. Zahi Hawass, Under Secretary of State for Egypt's Giza plateau, explained that "Egyptologists call people with these kinds of theories 'pyramidiots...
...surprising, given their dating, that the mummies and their accoutrements have both Egyptian and Roman characteristics: the hairstyles on the anthropoid coffins are Roman, but the style of decoration is Egyptian. The richness of the tomb decorations, Hawass notes, indicates that the inhabitants of Bahariya were prosperous. Indeed, the city flourished on its renowned wine, made from dates and grapes, which it exported throughout the Nile Valley...
Impressive as the discoveries have been, they are just the beginning. Hawass estimates that the cemetery covers several square miles and may contain up to 10,000 mummies. The section now being excavated, he believes, belonged to the middle class; eventually, tombs of wealthier people may turn up. And once this huge and pristine site is fully explored, Hawass and his colleagues expect to have an unprecedented window into Egyptian life in a provincial town under Roman rule...