The CSIRO has teamed up with the National Gallery of Victoria to reconstruct and conserve the last resting place of a teenage Egyptian priestess who died around 700BC.

The coffin lid, one of the first major Egyptian antiquities to arrive in Australia, is in a fragile state.

About 60 per cent of the wood, and even more of its painted surface, are lost, but the original bright colours on the remaining pieces survive under layers of dirt — gallery officials think...

Microprobe makeover for museum's mummy, Australian IT News, Australia, June 28, 2005.

Those folks in L.A. just don't have the celebrity-handling expertise of us desert dwellers.   They've been fighting traffic, long lines, parking and other indignities just to get a glimpse of the nation's hottest new celebrity show: King Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Conversely, here's how 50 art-loving members of desert society handled it:

They waited until the third day of the exhibit and then, at the civilized hour of 2 p.m. Saturday, they boarded a luxury Cardiff Coach in Rancho Mirage at the offices of Northern Trust Bank, one of the national sponsors of the exhibition...

Road trip to Tutankhamun, The Desert Sun, California, USA, June 26, 2005.

A transcript is available of the 60 minutes, Channel Nine Australia, programme ‘Who Killed King Tut’ mentioned on this blog the other day.

TARA BROWN: Early morning and you can see why the River Nile is considered Egypt's life blood.   It's a fertile strip of cool green in a hot, desert country.   Half an hour's drive away and the landscape turns lunar, desolate, unearthly.   But this is the Valley of the Kings, and here, the treasures are out of sight.   And like always, everything exciting happens underground here, doesn't it?

DR ZAHI HAWASS: Yes. This is a very mysterious place...

And so it goes on.

Transcript - Who killed King Tut?, 60 Minutes, Channel Nine MSN, Australia, June 27, 2005.

Popular traveling exhibit, currently in Los Angeles, expected to bring in king's ransom for artifact preservation...

What is it about Tut that makes hard-core museum-goers and the arts- indifferent alike shell out a mini king's ransom to see his stash?

Theories abound.

There's the mystery of the boy king (born around 1350 B.C., lived to be 19 years old), the history, curses and legends — some of it true, much of it simply a great yarn (or the subject of a Steve Martin ditty)...

TUT, TUT, TUT, Monterey Herald, California, USA, June 26, 2005.

Titled "Jesus in Egypt," the film is based on a book of the same name by Arizona author Paul Perry...

The meeting will be held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, according to Hawass.

...the film focuses on the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt from Israel after King Herod threatened to "destroy" the boy Jesus, as St. Matthew wrote in the New Testament (2:13).

It was prepared by a team led by Perry that includes Indialantic archaeologist John de Bry, 61...

Film chronicles Jesus in Egypt, Florida Today, Florida, USA, June 27, 2005.

The Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) Secretary-General Zahi Hawass heads to Paris today to attend the meeting of 15th session of the executive committee for Nubia museum in Aswan and the civilization museum in Fustat "ancient Cairo".

The meeting will be held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, according to Hawass.

Hawass pointed out that the committee will discuss what have been implemented of construction works for setting up the civilization museum.

Hawass attends Nubia museum committee meeting in Paris, State Information Service, Egypt, June 27, 2005.

The Los Angeles leg of the King Tut exhibition, "Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs," will be open 24 hours a day for the last two months of its run at the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, an organizer said.   Andres Numhauser, vice president of Arts and Exhibitions International, said that to accommodate the demand for tickets, the galleries would be open all night before the exhibition closes on Nov. 15. A spokeswoman for the museum said that while night time viewing was under consideration, no decision had been made.

Round-the-Clock Tut?, New York Times, USA, June 22, 2005.

A newly found poem by Sappho, acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of Greek classical antiquity and seen by some as the finest of any era, is published for the first time today.

The poem which is now her fourth to survive had a tortuous and not unromantic discovery. It was found in the cartonnage of an Egyptian mummy, the flexible layer of fibre or papyrus which was moulded while wet into a plaster- like surface around the irregular parts of a mummified wrapped body, so that motifs could be painted on...

After 2,600 years, the world gains a fourth poem by Sappho, The Guardian, UK, June 24, 2005, via David Nishimura'sCronaca.

cf. A new Sappho poem, Times Literary Supplement, UK, June 21, 2005.

cf. Fourth work of Sappho is revealed to the world, The Telegraph, UK, June 25, 2005.

To most people, Egyptian mummies are a handful of dead pharaohs wrapped in linen bandages and buried in pyramids outside Cairo.   In reality, virtually everyone in ancient Egypt who could afford it — as many as 70 million people over 3,000 years — wound up going through the elaborate two-month mummification process.

Additionally, millions of animals were mummified and buried alongside their owners.   They were, says Richard Sabin, curator at the Natural History Museum of London, something of a send-off status symbol, much like large bouquets of flowers at funerals today.   “In the 1800s there were literally tons of them dug up from old and new dynasty burial sites,” says Sabin. So many, in fact, that Sabin began to suspect some may have been mass-produced for sale.   “They were wrapping anything they could get their hands on,” says Sabin, including cats, birds, antelopes, and even livestock...

Ancient Egyptians Loved Their Dead Animals, Discover Magazine, USA, Vol. 26, No. 07, July 2005, via Explorator.

Pesed has called a western Pennsylvania college home for about 120 years, but her caretakers don't know what she looks like.

But that might change now that researchers have a CT scan of the 2,300- year-old Egyptian mummy.   Officials believe the scan will provide enough information to allow a forensic artist to construct a bust of Pesed, a mummy from the Nile River town of Akhmim, about 350 miles south of Cairo.

Pesed has been the property of Westminster College, located about 40 miles north of Pittsburgh, since the Rev.   John Griffin, an Egyptian missionary and a Westminster alumnus, gave the mummy to the school in 1885...

Scientists may soon get glimpse of mummy's face, Patriot News, Pennsylvania, USA, June 26, 2005.