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Change Your Life! |
The Mummy King: Live on Fox! |
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August 8, 2000
CAIRO (AP) - The tiny lecture hall was crowded, hot and sticky. But few in the audience - even those who had to sit on the floor - seemed discomforted as they gazed at slides of mummified Egyptians and followed Zahi Hawass on his personal journey into antiquity. "This is love," the archaeologist said, tenderly describing a 2,500-year-old woman who was found curled next to a child, as if to comfort it even in death. This sensitive scholar in his sober dark suit isn't the Zahi Hawass the world knows. For that Hawass, the swashbuckler in the Indiana Jones hat, rewind to last May and a live TV special in which nearly 6 million Americans watched the burly 51-year-old Egyptian plunge into an ancient tomb, exclaiming, "Let us go inside and start our adventure!" On Fox television, Hawass had a co-star for maximum showbiz effect: actor Bill Pullman, described by anchorman Hugh Downs as "y of Pennsylvania along the way. As a scholar, he is perhaps best known for the excavations of the graves of the laborers who built the granite-and-limestone pyramids outside Cairo. The digs have opened new windows onto how ordinary Egyptians lived in ancient times. As chief curator of the pyramids and Sphinx, he has had to balance conservation against the tourism that brings in the cash that makes research possible. He has allowed the pyramids to be used as backdrops for car races, tennis tournaments, a spectacular millennium concert. The crowds are kept as far away as possible, he said, and he has lectured organizers about cleaning up the trash left behind. Cairo and its 16 million inhabitants have encroached on testrial theories about the origins of the pyramids, and is vilified by them on the Internet. One site offers speculation he's an incarnation of a devil. Hawass dismisses them as "pyramidiots." "I used to attack them. Now I ignore them," he says. To a Japanese TV interviewer's question he replies: "The builders of the pyramids were Egyptians. They were not people from outer space or anything like that - that's just nonsense."
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