The temple of Queen Hatshepsut, whose mummy may soon be identified by CT scan.

Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), is a man who needs little rest. In July and August, anyone with the means fled the nation’s capital to escape the summer heat, but Hawass continued his daily regime of excavation, reclamation and restoration of Egypt’s ancient treasures - and he has planned an exciting last few months of 2006 to cap it all off.

On my last visit to Hawass’ office, I was greeted by a waiting room brimming with people waiting for appointments with the Egyptologist: contingents from the National Geographic Society, Discovery Channel and AUC Press, plus various special project managers and an impressive number of SCA staff weaving their way in and out of his office for signatures, instructions and general guidance on how to get things done. Amidst these daily responsibilities, Hawass paused for an exclusive interview to let Egypt Today readers in on some of his most significant plans for the SCA in the coming months.

At the moment, the endeavor closest to Hawass’ heart is a massive mummy-cataloging project, which will hopefully have its first phase completed by the end of this year. The entire world of archeology is watching to see how Egypt pulls off this feat - and is waiting to find out if one of the mummies in the Egyptian Museum is actually the famous Queen Hatshepsut.

Dr. Zahi Hawass

Dr. Hawass descending into the burial chamber discovered between the back of the Sphinx and the second pyramid.

Indicating where the shawabti were found.

View of the shawabti.

Cecelia (owner of Egypt & Beyond) examining the shawabti.

Hawass: We are going to accomplish a lot before the end of this year, but the most important thing that we are starting is actually going to be called the Egyptian Mummy Project. As you know, non-royal mummies are scattered everywhere. No one has ever tried to make a database or tried to document all of these mummies, and, for the first time, we will do this. This will cover the mummies held in the [Egyptian, Greco-Roman], National, Luxor and Mummification museums as well as in all other sites around Egypt.

There are many sites in Egypt with mummies that no one knows anything about. This project will also take a sample of the mummies and do CT scans on each one. The largest part of the project, which will come later, will be that we will open a museum for all non-royal mummies in Fustar. Many of these mummies are currently in storage houses and offices and things like that in very bad condition.

The second mummy project we will complete is the study on royal mummies. We will start with two mummies in particular that have never had CT scans done on them. In 1906, Howard Carter found two mummies inside KV6O. One was on the ground, and the second one was in a coffin. The coffin had an inscription with the last three letters of the name of the wet nurse to Queen Hatshepsut, and so naturally they believed that this mummy was that of Queen Hatshepsut's wet nurse.

Most believe that the second mummy in KV60 is the mummy of Hatshepsut. Now there is not one single photograph that you can see of the second mummy since it moved to the [Egyptian Museum in Cairo]. At the time I was lecturing at the Metropolitan Museum about Hatshepsut, I spent a lot of time looking at this mummy. I noticed that her hands were placed on her chest in a royal fashion. I also found that the size of this mummy was about one-and-a-half meters, and the size of the coffin was two meters, so I believe that KV60 was for the mummy of the wet nurse of Queen Hatshepsut.

Hatshepsut always wanted the people that were near to her to be buried beside her.

In the time of the third intermediate period, when there was destruction of the mummies from Dynasty 21, the temple priests began to move the mummies from tomb to tomb to save them. In my opinion, the mummy of Hatshepsut was probably moved from KV20 to KV60. Perhaps people put the mummy of Hatshepsut in this coffin to protect her. Next month, we will do a very important CT scan of the two mummies and we will try to find anything we can that will lead to the truth.

We are thinking about DNA but the problem with ancient DNA is that there are mistakes about 40 percent of the time. Maybe we will try an experiment with an Egyptian team, an experiment with the mummy of Tuthmosis II and with the mummy of Hatshepsut. If they are related, maybe this will prove it.

We will also do CT scans of famous mummies, like "[unknown] man E" that no one knows anything about. We will do CT scanning of the mummies of Tuthmosis III and Ramses II.

Meanwhile, we have opened a second mummy room at the Cairo Museum and, in 2008, we will open the museum in Fustar. We have a big area for mummies, but the mummies will be shown for education and not for thrills. We will have Ramses II in one room, and we will write the history of Ramses II and all of the building construction that he did in his lifetime, and at the end we will show the CT scan. People will learn about the mummies - I don’t believe that mummies should be shown for a thrill.

The third project on Hawass' list to launch by the end of the year is another series of tomb excavations at Saqqara. With the worldwide media frenzy unleashed by last year's discovery of KV63, the first unopened tomb discovered in the Valley of the Kings in over 80 years, you can count on Hawass' latest unveiling to be an international sensation.

We actually discovered two tombs at Saqqara. The first one was in the shadow of the second pyramid and near the causeway of the third pyramid. At the end of the causeway, we discovered that the Egyptians of Dynasty 4 found that the causeway was broken. They began to repair the north side of it, and they made that restoration with stone rubble. So we asked, “Why did they do that?" Because there was a tomb and they sealed the end of the tomb with the stone rubble!

This is the project that I will begin next. I believe that this is the tomb of a nobleman and I am hoping that it will be intact.

You know, I always try to go to the top of the Great Pyramid to see new things. When you go to a higher place your eyes become like a screen and you can see things that you cannot see when you are walking on the ground. From the top of the Great Pyramid I looked at the area between the back of the Sphinx and the second pyramid. This area has evidence of tombs that date to the late period of Dynasty 26. This was an important period for the Pyramids because there were the priests of Khufu who maintained his cult and we have evidence that Khufu was worshipped as a god in the twenty-sixth Dynasty.

I began the excavation in this area and I found a tomb. We excavated the shaft down about 30 feet [nine meters], and at the end of 30 feet, I found six rooms cut into the rock and, in one of them, a wooden box that contained 400 shawabti. Shawabti are the small statuettes that [Ancient Egyptians] left by the body of the deceased to answer the questions in the afterlife. We did not go all the way down to the burial chamber. I assume that the burial chamber goes down another 20 feet [six meters], and we are hoping that this could be another intact tomb. This will all be done in 2006.

The third project will take Hawass back to the very beginning of his career in Egyptology and could yield the most important of all of the SCA chief's finds.

Another thing that will happen in 2006 started for me when I was a young man. When I began my career, I was working in Luxor, and I met this man whose name was Sheholly. Sheholly was the last member of the famous Abdul Rasul family. One of the members of this family actually found the tomb of King Tut. This family found a cache of mummies in 1871, and they entered this cache only three times in 10 years. They never told anyone about it until the Egyptian government found it.

This Sheholly was the owner of a hotel called the Al-Basem Hotel, and I would speak with him often. One day, he said that he wanted to show me a secret. He took me to the tomb of Seti I, and he said, This shaft goes down for 300 feet, and, at the end of the shaft, I feel that the sacred burial tomb of Seti is there. One day, you will be an important archeologist and maybe you can help us.”

Later, I learned that what they found in this place was a sarcophagus with only a single piece of mummified ox in it. There were no major artifacts found there at all. Last year, I began to look into what this man told me thirty-five years ago. I took a very thick rope and tied it at the beginning of the shaft. I took a measuring tape and a flashlight, and I went down the shaft and had a wonderful adventure. It took me about six hours, and I went down 270 feet. I couldn’t go any further because the stone rubble from the shaft began to fall in on me. I came back up and decided that this will be the year that I start making documentation of this shaft and maybe we will discover something important.

Any endeavor relying as much on personality as it does on knowledge and ability will produce some interesting characters. This is especially true in the world of archeology.

Hawass isn't always popular, and he can be the best friend or the worst enemy of any archeologist, curator or academic who hopes to center his or her work on Egypt's ancient treasures. He demands respect for these antiquities, for the SCA and for himself. He will suffer no fools, and this occasionally leads to confrontation, something Hawass doesn't apologise for. His attempt to have some of Egypt's stolen treasures returned, even if only temporarily, is a case in point.

Some people say that I am severe in my attitude - they are correct. I have to be.

I will you one example. We decided to celebrate 100 years of German archeology in Egypt. I proposed a conference to take place in November of 2007 and offered to make an exhibit to show what they have found here in Egypt.

In front of the president of Germany, I said, "I hope, Mr. President, that we can have the bust of Nefertiti as a loan for three months. In return, we will give Germany a masterpiece - perhaps even better than this one - for three months." They refused! This is why next year, we will make it an international mission with the support of the archeological community.

I was not asking for everything to come back - not at all. I was asking for the unique pieces to come back on loan, so that they can be seen by the Egyptian people who never travel. Because I was refused, my strategy now is not to have it for a loan, but to have it back - period.

Therefore I am inviting the countries that have rich archeological heritages - China, Greece, Mexico, Italy, Syria and Lebanon — and we will meet in Cairo. Every country will come with a list of the unique pieces that remain outside of their countries that they want back. We will, all of us, create an international list, and we will gain the support of the world, and I am sure chat we will win these objects back!

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