... This was hardly a Seabourn cruise. We'd met Ali in a dusty Nubian village on Elephantine Island, near the river's First Cataract at Aswan, and hired him to sail us down the Nile to Luxor on his felucca.

These graceful, lateen-rigged boats have been scudding up and down the river since the days of the pharaohs, and their technology hasn't evolved a whole lot over the millennia. Ali's felucca, the Reiko — named for his Japanese girlfriend — was 22 feet long, and what little space there was below deck was used for storage.

The six of us — Ali, my wife, Jeri, and me, plus Gayle and two British backpackers we'd met in Aswan — slept beneath the stars on the wooden deck and dined on boiled eggs and rice prepared on a smoky little Primus stove. In four days on the river we never bathed, and whenever we wanted to use the facilities we had to ask Ali to pull over to the bank...

Travel misers love company more than just travel misery, San Francisco Chronicle, California, December 11, 2005, via Nigel Hetherington at Archaeologist at Large.

The first ever virtual museum on Islamic art and architecture in the Mediterranean, launched last week, gives navigators an opportunity to explore the splendid Islamic monuments of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Nevine El-Aref navigates.

The second phase of Museum with no Frontiers project (MWNF) — aimed at developing cultural relations between countries north and south of the Mediterranean by enhancing the landmarks of a shared history — has been a year in the making. It finally saw the light last Friday.

"The Discover Islamic Art Virtual Museum" gives instant access to 850 artefacts and 385 monuments, linking every Islamic item exhibited to sites on the MWNF itineraries, which was created between 1999 and 2004.

The electronic display was achieved through the installation of a special network through 17 European and Mediterranean museums in 14 countries — Algeria, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and the United Kingdom — as a gateway to a veritable museum-with-no-frontiers on Islamic art and architecture in the Mediterranean.

www.discoverislamicart.org, which is available in English, French and Arabic in addition to the local language of each participating country, creates an innovative exhibition style showing the Islamic heritage of the Mediterranean basin, alongside the collections of Islamic art held by the participating museums...

Surfing Islamic art, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 773, December 15 - 21, 2005.

Aten the Egyptian sun god had just painted the skyline gold when Jack and Beverly McDermott arrived at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale. They were astounded to be first in line to see the new, highly hyped show "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs."

"I can't believe there aren't more people," said Jack McDermott, looking around as if to make sure he was in the right place. It was 7:30 a.m. and the McDermotts, who live in Hollywood, were entitled as museum members to enter the first day of the Tut show at 8 a.m.

Above them, not obelisks but a thicket of transmission towers on television trucks reached for the sun. Inside the trucks, cameramen dozed.

The Tutankhamun show, which will stay in Fort Lauderdale until April 16, will move on to Chicago, Philadelphia and London.

That the show began in January in Los Angeles, home of artful ballyhoo, is highly appropriate. Tut has been preceded by wave upon wave of pre-publicity, as skilfully choreographed as a Rolling Stones tour, if somewhat more dignified in style...

Crowd awed as King Tut show opens, Palm Beach Post, Florida, USA, December 15, 2005.

cf. Museum-goers flock to King Tut exhibit, Times Leader, Pennsylvania, USA, December 15, 2005.

cf. An audience with King Tut, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Florida, USA, December 15, 2005.

cf. King Tut exhibit opens to fanfare in Florida, The Mercury News, California, USA, December 15, 2005.

cf. Museum-goers flock to King Tut exhibit, Contra Costa Times, California, USA, December 15, 2005.

cf. King Tut reigns, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Florida, USA, December 16, 2005.

cf. Show resurrects Tut fans' passion, Palm Beach Post, Florida, USA, December 16, 2005.

cf. The return of King Tut, The Southwest Florida News-Press, Florida, USA, December 16, 2005.

cf. King Tut exhibition brings treasures of the pharaohs to the U.S., The Winston-Salem Journal, North Carolina, USA, December 16, 2005.

cf. Mummy Dearest, The Miami Herald, Florida, USA, December 16, 2005.

cf. Mummy Dearest, The Miami Herald, Florida, USA, December 16, 2005.

The hair is of biblical proportions, long and silvery, straight out of The Ten Commandments; the famous eyes scanning the script are Dr. Zhivago's. But the voice, softly evoking Egypt in a Beverly Hills hotel lobby, is unmistakably Omar Sharif's, and his new role is entirely off-screen.

Sharif lent his voice to a countryman, recording the English-language version of the exhibit audio guide for "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs."

But first: Does Mr. Sharif know that when Tut's treasures last came to the U.S., in the 1970s, the now-deceased Orson Welles recorded an audio guide for that show? ...

'Tut' is a feast for the ears as well, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, December 14, 2005.

When Howard Carter cracked open that "condo made of stone-a," Tutankhamun's tomb, in November 1922 and started bringing out the boy king's fabulous funerary relics, he launched a craze that has waxed and waned but lasted in some form to this day. Schooled on revivals of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, the West got its first long look at the real interior splendour of ancient Egypt with Carter's discovery, and the impression of all that royal afterlife expenditure would stick: Tut-mania has inspired novelty songs, horror movies, delusional architecture and a few blockbuster museum exhibitions. So thanks, Howard, for turning Tut loose. It's been pharaoh a go go ever since...

Tut unplugged, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Florida, USA, December 15, 2005.

We landed in Cairo, Egypt's capital, which has 17 million inhabitants. At once we were awed by the Giza pyramids of [Khufu], [Khafre] and [Menkaure]. For truly awesome scenes with pyramids and temples, this surely is the place. Get it on your to-do travel list.

The scale of pyramids is amazing — each block of stone is taller than a person, and the largest pyramid is more than 40 stories tall and occupies 13 acres.

To carry [Khufu's] body into the afterlife, a 142-foot wooden "solar boat" was buried beside his pyramid. This ornate boat has recently been reassembled in a nearby grand museum. Of the several sound-and-light shows presented at temples and monuments, none are better than the one at Giza, which has the giant sphinx glowing right in front of you...

Awed and inspired in Egypt, Newport Beach and Costa Mesa Daily Pilot, California, USA, December 15, 2005.

For all the hype about Tutankhamun, his tomb is quite a letdown. It's another hole in the scrabbly hill peppered with the burial places of ancient Egypt's pharaohs, the Valley of the Kings. Somehow I expected more.

If the exterior wasn't disappointing enough, the guide tells us it's really not worth the extra admission to go inside. There are better tombs, he says, with much more lavishly decorated wall frescoes, some still resplendent in their original blue and ochre pigments. The boy pharaoh's grave, it turns out, is one of the more ordinary.

What really caused the sensation back in 1922, when American archaeologist Howard Carter at last stumbled across Tutankhamun's final resting place, wasn't the tomb but the treasure trove inside it.

The elaborately worked artefacts still cause a stir today, whether among throngs who flock to view them at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, or the thousands who are seeing some of the priceless items on their second U.S. tour. South Floridians get their turn starting Thursday, when a portion of the treasure arrives at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art for a five-month exhibit...

World of the Pharaohs, The Miami Herald, Florida, USA, December 11, 2005.