Blocks from the sprawling, majestic Mohamed Ali’s Citadel at the heart of Cairo lies one yet-unknown tourist complex sprawling at record pace in the midst of an impoverished town – you would have not known it had ever existed unless you stumble upon it on an unintended detour from the Citadel.  Either that or you have serious interest in the Aga Khan.

Amidst the decrepit villages of the Egyptian capital unfamiliar to visitors, one extremely ambitious project has recently been undertaken with the creation of a vast, green open space in a once run-down area of Cairo...

[More]  TravelVideo.TV, Canada, Jan 04, 2005.

cf. Al-Azhar Park in Cairo, TourEgypt, Texas, USA.

Kids and adults can dig into the past this Sunday at a "Hands-On Family Fair" hosted by the Archaeological Institute of America.

Meet a mummy and learn to write your name in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Discover a 2,000 year-old shipwreck. Excavate Red Sox nation.

More than two dozen interactive events and exhibits will be available at "Digging into Archaeology" Sunday, Jan. 9 at the Sheraton Boston Hotel in the Prudential Center...

[More]  MetroWest Daily News, Massachusetts, January 6, 2005.

A Supreme Council of Antiquity (SCA) mission in northern Sinai said on Friday that paths used by Egyptian army soldiers during the Islamic era, a weaving workshop, a mill and water tanks were unearthed in Al-Farma fortress.

The find dates back to the Abbasid reign, said SCA Secretary General Zahi Hawass.

Hawass added the find was made during restoration work in the Islamic site...

[More], Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, January 08, 2005 .

Egyptian expert recounts his troubles with King Tut.

Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, who supervised the first CT scan of the mummy of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun this week, said the experience suggested it might be unwise to write off the legendary “curse of the pharaohs.”

The CT, or computed tomography, scan produced three-dimensional images X-ray of the boy pharaoh’s remains.

“I cannot dismiss the legend of the curse because today many things happened. We almost had an accident in a car, the wind blew up in the Valley of the Kings and the computer of the CT scan was completely stopped for two hours,” Hawass said in videotaped remarks released by his office Friday...

[More]  Reuters via MSNBC, USA, Jan. 7, 2005.

Also Pharaohs’ Curse Released During Tutankhamun Scan?, Arab News, Saudi Arabia, 8 January 2005.

Also Pharaohs’ Curse Released During Tutankhamun Scan?, Yahoo! News, India, January 7, 2005.