An old article from the Harvard Magazine, definitely worth a read if you haven't seen it before.

Not slaves.   Archaeologist Mark Lehner digging deeper, discovers a city of privileged workers.   By Jonathan Shaw.

... The question of who labored to build them, and why, has long been part of their fascination.   Rooted firmly in the popular imagination is the idea that the pyramids were built by slaves serving a merciless pharaoh.   This notion of a vast slave class in Egypt originated in Judeo-Christian tradition and has been popularized by Hollywood productions like Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments, in which a captive people labor in the scorching sun beneath the whips of pharaoh's overseers.   But graffiti from inside the Giza monuments themselves have long suggested something very different...

[More]   Harvard Magazine, Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA, Volume 105, Number 6, July-August 2003, pp. 42 - 49, 99.

The United Nations Postal Administration. are issuing, on the 4th of August 2005, a set of six stamps to commemorate World Heritage in Egypt.

World Heritage - Egypt

An eight page article can be found in Fascination the Philatelic Journal for Collectors, no. 306, 3/2005, pp. 14 - 21.

Thanks to Peter Grey for this one.

Tour Egypt have published an exclusive interview with Dr. Zahi Hawass by Adel Murad in Cairo.

[More]   TourEgypt.net, Texas, USA, May 24, 2005.

Action Products International, Inc. ... announced that the company is shipping two of its I DIG(R) items to art museums for the next seven years as the acclaimed Tutankhamen exhibit tours art museums across the United States...

Our research department continues to create outstanding toys that enhance a child's learning experience and our total sales to museums...

[More]   BusinessWire, USA, May 26, 2005.

Thus spoke the Sphinx -- to Fatemah Farag.

No one took me seriously when I suggested going to the Sound and Light Show at the Giza Pyramids.   "Get a life," friends and family would scoff, notwithstanding my insistence that "a healthy interest in ancient heritage" should be commended as a rule.   And dragging a resigned hubby to the village of Nazlet Al-Semman, adjacent to which the said show is held in the vicinity of no other than the Sphinx was the only way I could feel vindicated.   There are few road signs to guide you through the ill paved streets leading up to this world-class spectacle, but stopping to ask directions on the way is hardly frowned on, in the end.   It was precisely three stops after the Nazlet Al-Semman turning -- right beneath the Giza Plateau, as if to refute every legal and archaeological argument against it, the neighbourhood bubbles with life -- that a bunch of policemen appeared, followed by several busloads of tourists.   You are only expected to come in a group, it seems, with a driver who knows his way about...

[More]   Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 744, 26 May - 1 June 2005.

Rasha Sadek sinks into the depths of Alexandria's Mediterranean in search of the city's submerged archaeology.

Shakespeare's writings are immortal and so, too, are the settings of his plays.   Cleopatra's Palace that once saw the most thrilling drama of Mark Anthony, Cleopatra and Octavius, has survived time and nature, standing haughtily underneath the waters of the Mediterranean Sea of Alexandria.

Thanks to the earthquake that rocked Alexandria in 1323 the Mediterranean has preserved to divers one of the seven wonders of the world -- Alexandria's Lighthouse, the remnants of which now lie nine metres on the sea bed.

A new tourist attraction has found its way to historical Alexandria.   Wreckdiving is a dive into history where entire cities, palaces and ships from Pharaonic and Graeco- Roman times -- dating as far back as 300 BC -- lie beneath the Alexandrian shore...

[Source]   Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 744, 26 May - 1 June 2005.

Astrology centre or suburbia?   Nevine El-Aref visits another Heliopolis.

The word Heliopolis brings to mind a chic suburb built in 1905 by Baron Empain.   What the name originally refers to is in fact an area 10km away; today it covers the lower middle- class quarters of Ain Shams, Matariya and Tel Al-Hisn.   A city of antiquity, it was more or less completely obliterated in modern times.   Connected to the Nile by a canal, Heliopolis (the Ancient Egyptian Iunu and Biblical On) was always a place of eminence.   As early as pre-dynastic times it was considered a holy site -- a fact to which the discovery, in the 1950s, of a large cemetery containing 145 human and 14 goat and dog mummies testified.   Simple graves set into round or oval pits of various sizes and depths -- a few of them were lined with reed or wood -- they contained only the most basic items.   Subsequent studies by the archaeologist credited with the discovery, Fernand Debono, and the Desert Institute point to the performance of ritual activities in these burial chambers, with hearths suggesting funerary meals...

[Source]   Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 744, 26 May - 1 June 2005.