American-Egyptologist Dr David B. O'Connor was honoured, on Saturday by the Supreme Council of Antiquities in recognition of his continued dedication and contributions to the science of Egyptology.

A former student of O'Connor and Head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawass highlighted to an audience of Egyptology specialists and enthusiasts how his research was influenced by O'Connor, who has worked in Egypt since 1960.

Hawass spoke of the impact O'Connor had on his first years in the field after having met O'Connor in Luxor at age 21.

"After I got to know O'Connor and worked with him, I could not part company with the man who has taught me a lot not only in terms of archaeology, but also in terms of team work and running an archaeological organization," said Hawass...

Zahi Hawass pays tribute to leading American Egyptologist, Ahmed Maged, The Daily Star, Egypt, March 21, 2007.

When King Adikhalamani [Tabriqo] started erecting a sanctuary for the divinities Amun and Isis more than two millennia ago, he could scarcely have imagined that the building would one day leave the hot and dry climate of southern Egypt.

Today, however, the temple where Egyptian priests once attended to a statuette of the high god Amun stands in a faraway city, where the cold bites, and winds blow for part of the year.

Since it was brought to the Spanish capital Madrid in the early 1970s, one of the most important Egyptian temples of the Western world is said to have deteriorated more than during the previous two millennia in Egypt.

Concerned about its state, experts are proposing solutions, including covering it with a glass dome...

Temple of Debod, Madrid, Spain.

Ancient Egyptian temple under threat in Spain, Sinikka Tarvainen, dpa via Jurnalo, Spain, March 23, 2007.

cf. Ancient Egyptian temple under threat in Spain, Sinikka Tarvainen, dpa via EUX.TV, The Netherlands, March 23, 2007.

Egypt — You really haven't seen Egypt if you haven't seen this part of Egypt," our guide said.

I usually wince at such comments, for many times I have been to places that were overhyped.

I had been to Egypt twice before — to Cairo, where each time I had stood in awe before the Pyramids and delighted in the splendours of the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities. For years, I told friends that was pretty much what there was to see in Egypt — see the Pyramids and that magnificent museum and then move on to another destination.

How wrong I was, and how right was that Abercrombie & Kent Egyptologist guide.

"How could I have been so foolish to miss this until now?" I asked myself one day...

Egypt Rediscovered, Fred J. Eckert, The Washington Times, District of Columbia, USA, March 24, 2007.

The struggle with her teenage brother over the throne of Egypt was not going as well as Cleopatra VII had hoped. In 49 B.C., Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII-also her husband and, by the terms of their father's will, her co-ruler-had driven his sister from the palace at Alexandria after Cleopatra attempted to make herself the sole sovereign. The queen, then in her early twenties, fled to Syria and returned with a mercenary army, setting up camp just outside the capital.

Meanwhile, pursuing a military rival who had fled to Egypt, the Roman general Julius Caesar arrived at Alexandria in the summer of 48 B.C., and found himself drawn into the Egyptian family feud. For decades Egypt had been a subservient ally to Rome, and preserving the stability of the Nile Valley, with its great agricultural wealth, was in Rome's economic interest. Caesar took up residence at Alexandria's royal palace and summoned the warring siblings for a peace conference, which he planned to arbitrate. But Ptolemy XIII's forces barred the return of the king's sister to Alexandria. Aware that Caesar's diplomatic intervention could help her regain the throne, Cleopatra hatched a scheme to sneak herself into the palace for an audience with Caesar. She persuaded her servant Apollodoros to wrap her in a carpet (or, according to some sources, a sack used for storing bedclothes), which he then presented to the 52-year old Roman.

The image of young Cleopatra tumbling out of an unfurled carpet has been dramatized in nearly every film about her, from the silent era to a 1999 TV miniseries, but it was also a key scene in the real Cleopatra's staging of her own life. "She was clearly using all her talents from the moment she arrived on the world stage before Caesar," says Egyptologist , author of a forthcoming biography, ...

Who Was Cleopatra?, Amy Crawford, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Smithsonian Institute, District of Columbia, USA, April 2007.

You say that Jean Yves Empereur looks like a literary figure from Forster's day. In your last story for us you described Egyptologist Otto Schaden as a neo-Victorian. Does archaeology draw these characters, or are you drawn to them as a writer?

Both. But archaeology doesn't draw people who want to live comfortable lives in suburbs and stay home and commute to work every day. These are people who do tend to be eccentrics. Or mavericks.

It also sounds as if they'd like to live in the past.

Yes, although with Empereur it was interesting. Many archaeologists come across as 21st century scientists who are completely focused on getting data. But Empereur is not only a good modern archaeologist, he also had an amazing feel for the cultural history. That's what struck me: he's somebody who feels very passionate not just about ancient Alexandria and the glory that it once was, but he also appreciates the more recent past and the way the city has transformed over the millennia.

In his book , he writes not just about ancient Alexandria but also about the literary figures and the role that they played in the last century in making Alexandria the kind of city it is...

City of the Imagination, Amy Crawford, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Smithsonian Institute, District of Columbia, USA, April 2007.

There's no sign of the grand marbled metropolis founded by Alexander the Great on the busy streets of this congested Egyptian city of five million, where honking cars spouting exhaust whiz by shabby concrete buildings. But climb down a rickety ladder a few blocks from Alexandria's harbour, and the legendary city suddenly swims into view.

Down here, standing on wooden planks stretching across a vast underground chamber, the French archaeologist points out Corinthian capitals, Egyptian lotus-shaped columns and solid Roman bases holding up elegant stone arches. He picks his way across the planks in this ancient cistern, which is three stories deep and so elaborately constructed that it seems more like a cathedral than a water supply system. The cistern was built more than a thousand years ago with pieces of already-ancient temples and churches. Beneath him, one French and one Egyptian worker are examining the stonework with flashlights. Water drips, echoing. "We supposed old Alexandria was destroyed," Empereur says, his voice bouncing off the damp smooth walls, "only to realize that when you walk on the sidewalks, it is just below your feet."

With all its lost grandeur, Alexandria has long held poets and writers in thrall, from E. M. Forster, author of a 1922 guide to the city's vanished charms, to the British novelist Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet, published in the late 1950s, is a bittersweet paean to the haunted city. But archaeologists have tended to give Alexandria the cold shoulder, preferring the more accessible temples of Greece and the rich tombs along the Nile. "There is nothing to hope for at Alexandria," the English excavator D. G. Hogarth cautioned after a fruitless dig in the 1890s. "You classical archaeologists, who have found so much in Greece or in Asia Minor, forget this city..."

Raising Alexandria, Andrew Lawler, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Smithsonian Institute, District of Columbia, USA, April 2007.

Previously:

Ancient Alexandria Emerges, By Land and By Sea, February 25, 2005.

Professor Kenneth Lindsay was presented with the University Medal on Monday.

Lindsay was one of the so-called "Monuments Men" during the World War Two era. They were a group of art historians who saved works stolen by the Nazis.

He recalled the first time he ever saw his most memorable piece of art, the statue of Queen Nefertiti.

"It was heavy, heavy as a dickens and put it up in a pedestal in the middle of the room. And like that, every man in that room fell in love with her. Never seen a face like that before or since. And there she stood. That was the great and wonderful moment of the whole thing," said Lindsay...

Monumental honour for “Monuments Man”, Karen Lee, News 10 Now Syracuse, New York, USA, March 27, 2007.

Previously:

Binghamton University professor helped save stolen art, March 19, 2007.

The King Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute is dull, dark and disappointing. But at least the lines are long.

More than 600,000 people viewed "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" in the show's first six weeks in Philadelphia. Rarely have so many paid so much to see an itty, bitty liver casket.

That was my sucker moment. I stood there, beholding the box that once stored Tut's bile, and began to feel rather poorly myself. Thirty-two bucks per ticket, plus parking and numbingly long lines, for this? Oy, I thought. His liver.

Call me a low-brow, a whiner, a Philistine. No offence taken: The original Philistines thought Pharaoh Rameses III was tedious, too. So he smote them...

... the exhibit has flaws, too. First, there is no mummy, nor even the famous golden mummy's mask. Tut is elsewhere. This is just wrong...

Not a happy bunny.

I paid $32 to see a royal liver box?, Dave Boyer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pennsylvania, USA, March 23, 2007.