Interview with “Talk of the City”
Recently I went to the Egyptian Museum for an
interview with an Egyptian talk show, called “Talk of the City.” This is
a very popular one-hour program in Egypt that features stories and
events that are being talked about around the city.
The host of this program, Mofeed Fawzy, is a very
famous journalist; he was editor-in-chief of a magazine called Sabaah
il-Kheir, and he is also a writer for Al-Ahram newspaper in Egypt, as
well as producer for this unique program, “Talk of the City.” It is a
very popular show, like the Oprah Winfrey show in America, all the
Egyptians wait to watch this program because of the character of the
host, Mofeed Fawzy.
[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذه الصورة]Dr. Hawass interviewed by Cairo TV personality
Mofeed Fawzy in the mummy room at the Egyptian Museum. (Photo: Jennifer
Willoughby)
Currently, they felt the talk of the town is
the
discovery of the family of Tutankhamun, which I recently announced
to the public. Therefore, I met Mr. Fawzy in the second mummy room in
the Egyptian Museum for an interview this week. This is actually the
first time an Egyptian television asked me to conduct and interview
inside this mummy room. I was very happy to do it, because this shows
how Egyptians are interested in ancient Egypt, and this show can educate
them about mummies, mummification, and the caches where the royal
mummies were discovered, such as the Deir el-Bahari cache that was
found.
I recently visited the Deir el-Bahari cache, which
is a very difficult tomb to enter. It is down a 15-meter deep shaft, and
you must be lowered down by rope into the shaft. From the vertical
shaft is the entrance into the tomb: a few stairs down into a roughly
cut passage through the rock, which leads to more stairs and ends in a
large room where the royal mummies were hidden by priests in the 21
st Dynasty. Now we close up the entrance to the tomb so that no one may
enter, although there is nothing left inside. The reason for this is to
show the importance of this tomb, because inside was found one of the
most important discoveries, which is, in my opinion, even more important
than the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922.
[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذه الصورة]Dr. Hawass inside the
Deir el-Bahari cache with his assistant, Reis Ali. (Photo: SCA)
The
story of the discovery of this cache is amazing. A young man named
Ahmed, a member of the famous Abdel Rassul family was leading his goats
in the hills near the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, when one
of them escaped. When he ran after the goat to catch it, he saw the
entrance to this shaft. When I entered this shaft last week, I realized
there was no way he could have entered it without ropes. In my opinion,
he must have returned home and brought back a beam of wood to place
across the top of the shaft to attach ropes and use them to climb down
the shaft. When he entered into the tomb, he found himself surrounded by
mummies, coffins, and precious objects. Imagine how incredible it would
have been to see the cache when it was first found!
The reason I went into this cache recently is that
we are working now on an important study of the Egyptian Mummy Project,
which is to identify the family of Ramses II. We are searching for the
mummy of Ramses I, which has never been identified. Some people believe
that the mummy I brought back from the Michael Carlos Museum in Atlanta
could be the mummy of Ramses I. Now we are working to extract DNA and
perform CT scans on this mummy as well as Seti I, Ramses II, and Ramses
III, in order to find answers about these mummies. We are also examining
Unknown Man E, to possibly identify him and his relationship with
Ramses III. We hope that this investigation will reveal the secrets of
the family of Ramses II.
The Talk of the City interview explained everything
that we discovered about the family of Tutankhamun as well as his cause
of death. After me, Mofeed Fawzy continued the interview with Ashraf
Selim, who conducted the CT scans of the mummies, and also Dr. Somaya,
who extracted DNA from the mummies. I hope that Egyptians will watch
this interview and learn more about the important work of the Egyptian
Mummy Project.
موضوع: Interview with “Talk of the City” 
الجمعة 9 أبريل 2010 - 20:27
