Mrs Suzanne Mubarak attended Tuesday 06/06/2006 a ceremony organized by the Ministry of Culture and the Central Bank of Egypt to launch a fund- raising campaign for establishing the Grand National Museum on Cairo-Alexandria desert road.

Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni has said that ceremony encourages the Egyptians to donate for the museum to bring this great project to the light. The Union of Egyptian Banks donated $7.5 million , the minister added.

The Museum will cost a total of $550 million according to feasibility studies, of which Japan has provided $300 million , the minister added. Names of the donors will be inscribed on a museum wall. Donors can also buy one brick used in the construction work for $500 and will have his/her name inscribed on it.

Mrs. Mubarak raises funds for Grand National museum, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, June 07, 2006.

The program begins with the usual for television archaeology: portentous language ("a time of darkness and violence") and a flurry of questions ("Who or what lies inside?" "Is this the final resting place of his lost queen?"). Fortunately this dies down to a great extent after the opening, and the re-creations that Discovery favours (and which I find distracting) are kept to a minimum. Instead, Ken Nystrom arrives on scene. A biological anthropologist, he was one of the team that appeared in the Discovery Channel series "Mummy Autopsy." His job here is to prompt Schaden and his colleagues with questions and periodically summarize the evidence for the viewers, and this works pretty well (though I wish he hadn't said on entering the tomb, "An honest to goodness Egyptian find!").

Some effort was made to highlight stress in the unfolding story of the investigation: the project blows through its budget for workmen simply clearing the entrance shaft; once opened, the tomb is vulnerable to the occasional flashfloods that hit the valley of the Kings. Then there's the removal of the 90-100 pound storage jars, encased in bubble wrap and wafted up using a basket-rope-pulley mechanism. (More stress there when, later in the show, fragile wooden coffins are lifted up.)

A brief interlude (narrator plus re-creation) introduces mummy caches and the efforts later priests made to protect the royal dead ("archaeologists call these simple chambers cache tombs"). That had been one possible explanation of KV 63. But soon we get back to the investigation, with Salima Ikram opening one of the storage jars. She removes a large plug of mud and plaster, then reaches in and brings out things, such as a carved wooden cobra head and sherds, on two of which are inscriptions. One of these has "year five" (a regnal year) and "wine" but lacks the name of the pharaoh...

Valley of the Kings Cliffhanger, Mark Rose, Archaeology Magazine, New York, USA, May 31, 2006.

"An Egyptian-French project to develop the Karnak Temple area in Luxor aims at protecting the priceless monuments", said Zahi Hawass, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The project will include specific lanes for tourists to head off any damage to the monuments, Hawass told reporters after a meeting of an Egyptian-French committee implementing the project.

He added that bazaars, parking lots and cafeterias will be built a distance form the temple to serve tourists without affecting the temple. Hawass said part of the 50 million-pound budget will be paid in compensation for affected families...

French-Egyptian development project to protect monuments, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, June 05, 2006.

The most beautiful piece of work in the garden museum of legendary sculptor Hassan Heshmat is The Victory Leap, the artist’s testament to the heroism of Egyptian troops in the 1973 War. In this isolated venue, Egyptians from all walks of life can visit and walk among the masterpieces bequeathed to the nation in the late artist’s will.

Or at least they could until last month, when a monaqqaba (women dressed in full niqab) broke into the Heshmat Museum and destroyed a number of statues including The Victory Leap. Promptly arrested, the woman declared she was merely doing her duty as a good Muslim by adhering to a fatwa recently issued by Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa in which he said it was forbidden for Muslims to use statuary representing living beings, particularly humans, as home decorations.

Though Gomaa did nothing to place his fatwa in context or make clear why he was issuing it, the fatwa was strictly limited to statues of human beings in homes and did not mention works or art in museums or Pharaonic statuary on display at antiquity sites around the nation.

In fact, the fatwa seemed to confuse just about everyone. Even as they attacked Gomaa’s declaration, liberals noted that Gomaa had been the senior-most Islamic cleric to speak out against the Taliban’s destruction of the famed statues of Buddha in Bamiyan.

“When Amr ibn Al-Aas invaded Egypt, he left every single [Ancient] Egyptian statue intact,” Gomaa said in early 2001 when the Taliban destroyed the Buddha figures, one of which was believed to be the largest statue of its kind in the world...

On Islam and Intellect, Egypt Today, Egypt, Volume 27, Issue 06, June 2006.

In Rome's central Piazza del Popolo, the landmark obelisk that Emperor Augustus brought from Egypt in 10 BC was recently covered in metal caging topped with a huge ad for a Ford sports car. A sign says the obelisk is being covered "for observations." And above the famous Spanish Steps, central meeting point for Romans and tourists alike, the 16th century Trinita dei Monti Church has been encased in ad-swathed scaffolding for years, ruining what should be a spectacular view. At another corner of the Piazza di Spagna, a building designed by Bernini has ads for cellphones, Dolce & Gabbana and lots more.

Defenders of the practice say getting advertisers to pay for much-needed renovations is smart, especially because the government is strapped for cash and can't pay the upkeep on Italy's vast cultural heritage.

"This has been a brilliant initiative that has dramatically helped clean up the city," said Jonathan Doria Pamphili, scion of an aristocratic family with important real estate holdings, including a 17th century mansion on Piazza Navona...

Need a Place for an Ad? Then Adopt an Obelisk, Los Angeles Times, California, USA, June 05, 2006.

Bosnia's mystery pyramid will now be probed and inspected by a team of experts from the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

"We shall send a UNESCO expert team to Visoko to determine exactly what it is all about," UNESCO Secretary General Koichiro Matsuura said in an interview published on Monday in Dnevni Avaz newspaper.

Amateur archaeologist Semir Osmanagic has caused a stir with his find, although local and European archaeologists denounce it as nonsense.

Geologist Aly Abd Barakat, an Egyptian researcher sent by Cairo to assist Osmanagic's team last month, has said that the Visocica hill did appear to be a primitive man-made pyramid of uncertain age...

UNESCO team to probe Bosnia's "ancient pyramid", Reuters, UK, June 05, 2006.

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts presents the exhibit Africa: Arts of a Continent. After several years of rest, African art from the permanent collection returns for public viewing at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA). The exhibition, Africa: Arts of a Continent, is a permanent rotating exhibition, and includes several new acquisitions never seen before by the public. The forms and meanings of traditional African art are strikingly diverse. To illustrate this diversity, Africa: Arts of a Continent focuses on four cultures: the Dogon of Mali, the Baulé of the Ivory Coast, the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Kuba Kingdom of the Congo. This organization makes evident the patterns of form and meaning that are unique to a region as well as the differences in works from other areas. Africa: Arts of a Continent also incorporates several ancient Egyptian burial objects from various dynasties and explores the importance of the Nile.

"The UMFA is pleased to see the return of African art to our galleries," states UMFA Director David Dee. "Each work has a unique story behind its creation and utilization. Visitors to the exhibition are taken on a journey through regions of Africa to experience the rites and rituals of its native cultures..."

African Art at Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Arts Daily, USA, June 06, 2006.

... once a region such as the Sahara becomes dry and brown it requires exceptional rains to trigger a regreening. Beyond a certain point — such as that reached 5,500 years ago — virtually no amount of extra rain is likely to be enough. Lack of vegetation "acts to lock in and reinforce the drought".

The people of the Sahara couldn't have known if the droughts were permanent. But as the desert asserted control, and waterways dried up, they had to leave. Lakeside settlements near the Sudanese border in Egypt were all abandoned at about the same time.

One was Nabta, famous as the site of the world's earliest known stone structures with an astronomical purpose. They predate Stonehenge by 1,000 years. The key stones point to where the sun would have set at the summer solstice 6,000 years ago. Nobody can be sure what the structures' precise purpose was, but it is intriguing to suppose that they were used in an attempt to track the celestial changes that were disrupting the rains.

It may have been from such places that the myths of past golden ages, and of the Garden of Eden, emerged. The people who departed from the Sahara would have taken their memories of a golden past. Biblical scholars have calculated mankind's expulsion from Eden at around 6,000 years ago, when kingdoms across the Sahara would have been collapsing...

Why deserts will inherit the Earth, The Independent, UK, June 05, 2006.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, doesn't mind standing up for the rights of the dead. He may not have the same enthusiasm to stand up for the rights of the living.

Hawass is a Pharaoh when it comes to Egyptian antiquities. And, he has the courage of a Third World tyrant to confront the injustices committed by others, even if not in his own country.

In Chicago for the opening of the exhibit of King Tut, the Egyptian boy king who symbolized an era of ancient tyrants, Hawass threatened to end his association with the exhibit's host, Chicago's prestigious Field Museum, and to remove Exelon, one of the American Midwest's largest energy giants, as an exhibit sponsor...

King Tut brings old, new issues to fore, Ray Hanania, The Arab American, USA, June 03, 2006.