Amidst the mountains in the heart of divinity it is believed to be one of the oldest continuously functioning monasteries in the world, Mohamed El-Hebeishy sets out to establish the facts. Located at the foot of Mount Sinai, where it is said that Moses received the Ten Commandments, the Monastery of St Catherine was built to the order of Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I in 527 AD, with construction coming to completion 38 years later.

Though it is known as the Monastery of St Catherine, the original name was the Monastery of Transfiguration. The site is associated at large with St Catherine of Alexandria, who at the age of 18 is said to have attempted to persuade the pagan Roman emperor at the time to halt the Christian persecution; she only succeeded in converting his wife. St Catherine was condemned to death; 25 November marks her feast...

Snap Shots, Mohamed El-Hebeishy, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 815, October 05 - 11, 2006.

There are few who would endure a nine-hour bus ride to see an oasis. A closer look at Kharga and then Dakhla, however, might prove worth the journey. Pierre Loza enjoys two of the most interesting desert spots in Egypt.

"The desert has endowed me abundantly and now it is over," said prominent Egyptologist Mohamed Fakhri to his companions in the Kharga oasis before he left for France where his life ended less than a month later. Fakhry's statement exemplifies the enigmatic nature of the Egyptian oases as a perpetual haunt for all those that come in contact with it. The oases however have never fulfilled their potential on the Egyptian tourism map due to longstanding neglect.

The greatest problem facing the New Valley oases is the scarcity of flexible transportation options. In other words, if you don't catch the petroleum services plane to Kharga which makes the round trip from Cairo about once a week and is not always consistent, then you're pretty sure you will probably be taking the bus. A suggestion to take the train to Assiut and from there head to Kharga by bus is also a bit risky because you stand the chance of missing the bus. What I opted for to make the nine-hour trip a bit more bearable was to buy two tickets, allowing me the luxury of spreading my feet across a few extra centimetres of space for LE80 . My response to queries about why I had taken two seats for myself was of course "leg problems"...

Desert magic, Pierre Loza, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 815, October 05 - 11, 2006.

Early this week the Upper Egyptian city of Esna was peacefully going about its usual business. Farmers were busy in the fields, merchants were trading in the market and weavers sat in front of their looms. Housewives were cooking Ramadan's iftar meals. Yet on Monday the city woke up to breaking news: a Ptolemaic obelisk dating from the reign of the famous Queen Cleopatra VII, found half-buried under the house of an Esna resident named Sayed Mahmoud, was up for sale with an asking price of $100 million.

The obelisk was said to be six metres high, carved of schist and decorated with hieroglyphic texts, lotus flowers and cartouches featuring Queen Cleopatra's face and profile. The news appeared on the Internet as well as in several Egyptian and foreign newspapers.

Intensive investigations carried out by the Esna police and antiquities inspectors, however, revealed the story to be a hoax and an attempt by Mahmoud, a well-known local crook, to defraud tourists by spreading a rumour that antiquities lay buried under his house...

A tall tale, Nevine El-Aref, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 815, October 05 - 11, 2006.

In Bosnia's Valley of the Pyramids, only one man is king. Semir Osmanagic, new-age philosopher and amateur archaeologist, splits his time between Texas and Sarajevo, but these days is mostly to be found scraping away at a hillside 40 minutes north of the Bosnian capital.

It is here that he claims to have made the most extraordinary discovery of the millennium: Europe's only pyramids, dating back to the late Ice Age, exceeding in scale and perfection those of ancient Egypt or Latin America. "This is the most magnificent construction complex built on the face of the planet," he said. "These pyramids are so old and so unique, it's hard to compare them to anything else in the world."

The experts strongly dispute his claims. Mr Osmanagic, 46, says they are jealous. And at Visoko, an army of amateurs is busy digging up the hillsides to uncover traces of man-made structures that the Houston Bosnian insists date from a prehistoric cycle of civilisation rich in its sophistication and washed away "in the flood"...

Tourists flock to Bosnian hills but experts mock amateur archaeologist's pyramid claims, Ian Traynor, The Guardian, UK, October 05, 2006.