Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni yesterday tendered his resignation to President Hosni Mubarak, Al-Gomhuria newspaper reported Farouk has recently been under fire after a blaze at a theatre in the Upper Egyptian city of Beni Sueif had claimed 46 lives.

Egyptian minister quits, The Egyptian Gazette, Egypt, September 15, 2005.

...In Beijing, an international joint research group from the Catholic University in Leuven and Beijing University discovered a collection of Egypt art that was believed lost for many years already...

The find consists of over 50 stelae and 60 rubbings made with coal on paper.   A special find is a stela which depicts Cleopatra as a male pharaoh.   This is the second known example of such a depiction.   Majority of the retrieved collection are items belonging to the Greek-Roman epoch...

Stela depicting Cleopatra as male pharaoh discovered in China, Pravda, Russia, September 06, 2005.

cf. Leuvense research workers retrieve Egyptian artefacts in China.

More than 3,000 years [after Tutankhamun's death] the king remains a fashion icon, inspiring a new jewellery collection by Tamarac designer Ruth Hirtz that is the official jewellery line of the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibit...

Tut inspires Tamarac jewellery collection, MSNBC, USA, September 11, 2005.

The discovery of boy king Tutankhamen's tomb hit the headlines in 1923 as the most sensational find of its time.   But the discovery of several olive branches buried along with the pharaoh to help him in the after life is a much lesser known fact.

At the time a mystery surrounded what type of plant the branches were, so a professor took a sample and sent it to the Botanical Gardens at Kew to be named.

Botanists at the herbarium at Kew identified the plant as an olive branch, which still remains neatly pressed in the collection centre to this day...

Glimpse king Tut's olive branch at Kew, This is Local London, UK, September 12, 2005.

A piece about the upcoming exhibition The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A doctor is called to the house of a young man with a severe wound on his cheek. The flesh is split open, red and inflamed.

After assessing the damage, the doctor applies a special enzymatic cleanser to the affected area, then covers it in a bandage soaked in an antibacterial compound, to reduce the risk of infection. Chances are, the man will make a complete recovery.

While this course of treatment may sound modern, the doctor in question lived and practiced almost 4,000 years ago, in an ancient Egypt where skilled medicine worked hand-in-hand with magic potions and incantations to the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet...

Secrets of the Pharaohs' Physicians Revealed, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Texas, USA, September 08, 2005.

In 1885, a Presbyterian missionary in Egypt, the Rev. John Giffen bought four mummies still in their sarcophagi for the grand sum of $8 each.   The mummies had been looted from their tombs near the Egyptian city of Akhmim, on the east bank of the Nile about 290 miles south of Cairo.

One mummy went to the Asyut College Museum in Egypt, where it still resides, and the rest returned to the United States with the Rev. John R. Alexander and were distributed among three Presbyterian-founded colleges: Erskine College in Due West, [South Carolina], Westminster College in New Wilmington, [Pennsylvania], and the College of Wooster [in Wooster, Ohio].

Through Oct. 16 [2005], the College of Wooster Art Museum Ebert Art Center is presenting Ancient Ohio/Ancient Egypt, an exhibit that highlights artifacts and materials from two cultures that existed contemporaneously on different continents...

Mummies and more, Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio, USA, September 04, 2005.

The Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale has selected Edd Helms Air Conditioning & Electric, one of South Florida's top mechanical and electrical contracting firms, to perform the air conditioning improvements needed to host the King Tut exhibition, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, opening later this year...

Cool Improvements for the Coolest Exhibition of the Season, PR Newswire, USA, September 01, 2005.

A review of an exhibition of early writing at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Australia.

...18 pieces from the Australian Institute of Archaeology, Melbourne ... Compiled by its director Christopher Davey, these pieces illustrate different scripts and early uses of writing (the doings of kings, records of produce, official expenditure, names of troops, a land transaction, property titles) in a variety of materials (stone and ceramic tablets, linen, vellum and papyrus fragments)...

Early Writing in Egypt and Mesopotamia, The Age, Australia, September 06, 2005.

...Take the library in Alexandria. If any place might have had justifiable pretensions of permanence it would have been the library, founded sometime around 300 B.C., which grew under the early Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt into an enduring symbol of culture and knowledge before disappearing into the sand and sea less than 1,000 years later.

"This was the library," said Roger Bagnall, a historian at Columbia. "It influenced everybody who ever thought about building a library."

Nobody, Bagnall complains, knows how large it was — estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 scrolls — or what was actually in it...

What is lost, archaeologists try to find, International Herald Tribune, France, September 08, 2005.

In November 1984, 136 kilometres south of Cairo, a young Egyptian archaeologist discovered what may well be the oldest book in the world.

Dating back to the second half of the 4th century, it was found in the tomb of an 11-year-old girl, placed underneath her head.   Hailed as the earliest complete book of Psalms ever found, it was hand-written in a dialect once used by Egypt’s first Christians Coptic Oxyrhynchus in Greek letters.

It took six months to separate the 252 papyrus leaves of the book, which were bound between two polished wooden covers with a leather spine, and years to restore.   It was finally put on display at Cairo’s Coptic Museum in 1992.

World's oldest book?, Egypt Today, Egypt, Volume 26, Issue 09, September 2005.