Meanwhile in Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen (Discovery) the ebullient Dr Zahi Hawass was trying to identify Queen Hatshepsut from four finalists in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. You've heard of the Old Bazaar At Cairo? Then you will love Cairo museum. It has an ample sufficiency of mummies and sarcophagi but very little idea of where any of them are. The dust of dead kings dances in the sunlight. Which is why a Cat scan and sterile lab, on loan from Germany, arrived like a spaceship...

The film, rather American in tone, treated the search like CSI: Cairo. One by one, possible mummies were eliminated. A skull, when the covering was removed, was so clearly screaming, that museum attendants drew back with their hands to their mouths. Hatshepsut's relatives were scanned and fused to find the family face. DNA, nuclear and mitochondrial, was taken from them. Two mummies remained, but which was the queen and which the servant? In dusty death you could not tell.

Germany would soon be wanting its Cat scan back. As a last resort, Hatshepsut's sealed funerary box was scanned and showed a molar with one root. One mummy had an identical molar missing and one root remaining in her jaw. It fitted like a slipper. The Cat scan had shown a serious abscess and, if it had burst when the molar was pulled to ease Hatshepsut's pain, the infection would have killed her...

Last night's TV, Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian, UK, July 18, 2007.

Dr. Mohammad Argon, Director of the Egyptian Space Program said that a composite satellite photo was taken by the MisrSat-1 launched on April, 17, 2007.

The photo presents the colours of the desert areas around Cairo, indicating their geology and the urban communities surrounding the ring road.

The MisrSat-1 will photograph a strip of the Earth equal to its imaging swath with each orbit. As the satellite revolves around the Earth on one axis the Earth rotates on another, shifting the scanned strip with each orbit. This eventually allows the satellite to photograph the entire planet as it circles around it, and the software at the ground station works to fit these images together to create the complete picture.

Egyptian remote sensing satellite unveils Cairo secrets, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, July 24, 2007.

Egypt announced Sunday the discovery of the largest-ever military city from the pharaonic period on the edge of the Sinai desert, part of a series of forts that stretched to the Gaza border. "The three forts are part of a string of 11 castles that made up the Horus military road that went from Suez all the way to the city of Rafah on the Egyptian-Palestinian border and dates to the 18th and 19th dynasties (1560-1081 BC)," antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said in a statement.

Teams have been digging in the area for the past decade, but the Egyptian discovery of the massive Fort Tharo and the discovery of two other fortresses by French and American teams confirmed the existence of the Horus fortifications described in ancient texts.

Fort Tharo, the military headquarters for the eastern defence of Egypt, had 13-meter thick mud brick walls running 500 meters by 250 meters and punctuated by 24 huge towers, said a statement from the Supreme Council of Antiquities...

Mammoth mud brick fort dating from the pharaonic period unearthed in Egypt, AFP via The Daily Star Lebanon, Lebanon, July 24, 2007.

cf. Pharaonic-era fort discovered, News 24, South Africa, July 22, 2007.

cf. Egypt's oldest fortress discovered, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, July 23, 2007.