THERES NEVER a dull moment when youre hanging out with the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. And with the surge of discoveries in the past few weeks, Zahi Hawass is more frenetic than usual.

Freeing up some time for meeting at his office, Hawass is deluged with phone calls and secretaries flooding in every couple of minutes as he talks about two breathtaking new discoveries, massive changes in the operations of the Egyptian Museum, a new high-tech project to study mummies and the unfolding plans for the new Grand Egyptian Museum.

Still topping the news is the early May discovery of what many experts say is the ancient University of Alexandria by a team of Polish archaeologists. To be accurate, it was first partly unearthed 25 years ago and was then believed to be a performance theater. Hawass says it turns out the structure was in fact not for performances, but a large auditorium for lectures.

While the skeptics havent come out in droves, some have suggested that it is too early to conclude that the find is in fact the ancient university. But Hawass says there is no questioning the authenticity of the discovery.

We dont need any more evidence. We have the classrooms, and this is enough, Hawass says. Thirteen have been uncovered, and each classroom consists of steps, with a place in the middle for the professor to deliver his lecture. I believe the university could have held 5,000 students.

Hawass says that comparing the find to historical record and literature further eliminates any doubt. We already have descriptions from other sources from scribed evidence written in the Roman period that the university existed and was connected with the ancient library of Alexandria.

Mohsen Allam/Egypt Today In early May, a team of Polish archaeologists discovered 13 lecture halls believed to be the ancient University of Alexandria.

There are a number of accounts detailing the origins of the ancient library of Alexandria, though it is generally assumed to have been founded at the beginning of the third century BC during the reign of Ptolemy II. The famed library is believed to have housed the most extensive collection of scrolls in the ancient world.

One story holds that the collection grew extensively under the rule of Ptolemy III, who issued a decree that all visitors to Alexandria were required to surrender scrolls in their possession. These were then swiftly copied by official scribes, with the originals being put in the library while the copies were delivered to the previous owners.

The library, which was likely a series of buildings connected or built within close proximity of each other (some historians have suggested there was not one library but several), was probably destroyed sometime in the early fifth century, but as with its origin, accounts of its destruction also vary.

The growing consensus among historians is that the library died a slow death over the course of four or five centuries due to a series of destructive events, culminating with the late 4th century persecution of pagans by Christians, which resulted in temples and statues being destroyed throughout the Roman empire, and libraries being closed.

Whether the university continued to operate after the closure of the library is unclear. Hawass believes that it was likely abandoned after the library met its end, although the Supreme Council of Antiquities released a statement suggesting the university functioned until the seventh century.

Mohsen Allam/Egypt Today The site of what experts believe is the ancient University of Alexandria is currently overseen by archaeologist Ahmed Moussa.

Major archaeological discoveries are nothing new to Alexandria, which was at one time Egypts capital and by far the most influential city in the region.

We always say that major discoveries are found in Alexandria because of new construction projects, Hawass says. As people are building, they often find in the process something underneath the plot of land. (The preservation versus development debate can be a contentious one: See What Lies Beneath, Egypt Today, December 2003, p. 92)

Treasures also lie in the waters off the Mediterranean city. Over the past eight years, French archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur has been uncovering some of the most important monuments from ancient times, including what he believes to be blocks from the Pharos of Alexandria. The ancient lighthouse, also built during the reign of Ptolemy II, stood more than 134 meters high and was one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Hawass says the ancient lecture halls will be opened for public viewing in about five years time. They are now restoring the site. For example, if a [major structural piece] is missing, they add it.

While the discovery of the ancient university has certainly created a buzz in archaeological circles the world over, Hawass is more excited about a project that, among other things, will bring relief to those who cant seem to handle the 40-plus degree Cairo summers: more air-conditioned rooms at the Egyptian Museum.

Associated Press This alabaster pot was discovered by Australian archaeologists last month when they unearthed a 5,000-year-old necropolis with 20 well-preserved tombs dating to the first and fourth dynasties in Helwan.

Not a man who wastes words by displaying false modesty, Hawass says his new project will be talked about for generations to come. Or, in his exact words, What I am doing now is something that will go down in history.

Hawass project is indeed a sizable undertaking. Kicked off in mid-May, it will involve a complete clearing out of the basement of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The area will then be used as an additional exhibition area.

Until now, the basement has been little more than a storage area, and Hawass says he believes there are as many as 200,000 artifacts lying around.

This last week we took out rubbish. The next step is to take every last box out of the museum. There are thousands of sealed boxes containing artifacts from Upper Egypt that were found over the last 100 years.

Hawass claims that many of the boxes have never been opened, making it anyones guess whats inside. If some of them contain wooden artifacts, these may have deteriorated. There are boxes that havent been opened since they were first brought to the basement.

Associated Press At the recently discovered Helwan necropolis, Australian archaeologists found thiswell-preserved relief of a woman seated in front of an offering table.

More significant than the relocation of the artifacts is Hawass plan to undertake a complete inventory of the contents of the museums basement, a decision that comes in the wake of allegations two months ago that a precious relief went missing. Was it stolen? Or simply not catalogued properly?

Either way, the inventory wont take place at the museum. If we are going to open the boxes and do inventory at the basement it will take hundreds of years, says Hawass.

Instead, the inventory will be moved to several locations around Cairo and the cataloguing done there. The boxes will be moved to a large storage magazine. This will be completely secured. The bones and the skulls, of which there are thousands, will be sent to the bone lab that I opened at Giza. The non-Royal mummies at the museum that are cataloged now will also be moved to [the same location as the sealed boxes.]

The move is expected to take three months, Hawass says, and, a company will then be brought in to turn the basement into an exhibition area. It will be air-conditioned and clean. Like the British Museum.

Hawass explains that artifacts for the new exhibition area will initially come from other areas of the Egyptian Museum, and aside from the work in the basement, an extension of the west side of the museum will be built, with a new bookstore, a cafeteria, and a childrens museum. Thats my plan. This will take a maximum of two years except for the inventory count, which will take about five years.

courtesy Ministry of Culture Computer-generated model of the Grand Egyptian Museum, slated to open within five or so years on the Giza Plateau.

Hawass, who is personally overseeing the project, says an Army general has been brought in to monitor the administration, and 12 archaeologists have been appointed to work on the project.

It is a mission impossible, Hawass says, but I will do it.

Hawass project was in part motivated by what he describes as irresponsible curatorship at the museum, something he says will no longer be tolerated. The problem is the curators are not performing curatorial work, Hawass complains. They are sitting drinking coffee and tea, and when they are not doing that they are catering to the foreign visitors.

They do not understand what it means to properly label the artifacts, Hawass continues, to publish non-published artifacts, or to conduct proper exhibitions. But this will change now. I have hired a new director and I have given a timeline and a set of instructions on what must be done to improve the situation over the next year.

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo contains a vast array of antiquities, including the death mask and other artifacts of the boy king Tutankhamun. But the layout and organization of the museum has long been a source of embarrassment for Egypt, with many of the displays covered in dust and poorly labeled.

And the overall lack of organization may be behind the disappearance of several dozen antiquities. The latest embarrassment is the collection of 38 pieces of jewelry from the Roman period that have apparently gone missing from the basement. Although the s word has been used, Hawass insists the artifacts have not been stolen, but have simply been misplaced.

He again blames the work ethic at the museum.

The artifacts are in the museum somewhere. I am sure of this. But because of how these young people are neglecting their work, we dont know where the artifacts are. I myself, working as an archaeologist, excavated a site at Kom Abu Bella in the Delta. I discovered beautiful Aphrodite Statues. Can anyone tell me where they are? No, no one can tell me.

But Hawass says he is for the most part comfortable with the way the museums across Egypt have advanced since he took over as secretary general in early 2002. We have 12 museums we are now working on, and we are changing our museums from what looked like storage magazines to ones that will have well-organized and logical displays.

There is also the $350 million Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), a mega-project that will replace the existing Egyptian Museum. The GEM, which is to be located at the first desert plateau between the great Pyramids of Giza and Cairo, will not only be the largest museum of Egyptian artifacts in the world, but also one of the largest museums in the world.

In June 2003, Dublin-based Heneghan Peng Architects won the architectural competition to design the GEM in a competition that saw over 1,500 design entries from 83 countries. Hawass says construction will begin sometime next year, and will take about five years to complete.

In other antiquities developments, mummies across Egypt are about to undergo a medical examination of sorts. German electronics and engineering titan Siemens AG will in the coming months be shipping over a CT (computerized tomography) scanner, paid for by the Discovery Channel. The machine will be permanently fixed to a trailer that will then be driven to various sites around Egypt for the purpose of scanning mummies.

The initiative is known as the Egyptian Mummy Project, and is being headed by Dr. Saleh Bedeir, a retired orthopedic surgeon and former dean of the faculty of medicine at Cairo University.

Bedeir says advances in science and technology are playing a significant role in the study of ancient human remains. He believes the CT scanner can help gather a wide range of information, including new data on diseases that may have been prevalent in ancient times.

The CT scanner uses X-rays and computers to produce three-dimensional images of the human body. But unlike traditional X-rays, which highlight dense body parts, such as bones, CT provides detailed views of the bodys soft tissues, including blood vessels, muscle tissue, and organs.

Bedeir explains that the process will take about 20 minutes per mummy.

The mummy will be placed into the tube of the CT scanner. Once the analysis is complete the information is put onto a CD, and from there we can do anything we like. We will have pictures of the mummy as a whole, we will be able to view cross sections of the body, and we will be able to construct a three-dimensional view.

Without removing the mummys wrapping or damaging it whatsoever, Bedeir continues, we will be able to gather information about how many layers of wrapping were used on the body, whether the embalmers had injected the brain with resins or packed it with linen, the positioning of amulets and what type of material the amulets are made up of, and so on.

The CT scanner will eventually be used to analyze the royal mummies located in the Egyptian Museum, Bedeir says. We will start with the non-royal mummies until we master the technique. Then when we are sure we have all the steps down, we will take a look at the royal mummies.

While the CT scanner will allow the mummy to remain in its original state, it will also permit more targeted analysis should tissue or other matter from the body need to be collected.

The CT scanner will allow us to take samples from the mummies with minimal violation, Bedeir says. Because the CT gives us three-dimensional views, we can use a syringe to take samples from the bodies in a very targeted manner. With guidance from the CT, we cannot miss.

Bedeir says that in the past archaeologists have generally viewed human remains as an object for display, placing them as secondary in importance to the treasures that an uncovered tomb often yielded. Now this has all changed. Now the most important thing in a tomb is a mummy, because the human remains reveal a great deal about how people were living at the time.

Information such as age, height and gender can quickly be revealed by a CT scan, and the examination of the soft tissue and bones can in some cases be used to tell the cause of death, Bedeir says. The CT scan can, for example, reveal if there was calcification on the walls of the coronary vessels, which are only a few millimeters in diameter.

While experts have CT-scanned Egyptian mummies once in the past, it involved taking the mummy to a hospital to perform the scan. Bedeir says what is revolutionary about the Mummy Project is that it will be the first time that a CT scanner will be employed solely for the job of scanning ancient remains. We will be able to conduct hundreds and hundreds of scans in a short time period, he claims.

Although DNA analysis is being employed outside of Egypt to study the genetic makeup of ancient remains, a systematic genetic profile of the nations mummies isnt in the offing right now.

The artifacts are in the museum somewhere. I am sure of this. But because of how these young people neglect their work, we dont know where the artifacts are.

With ancient DNA there is contamination, Bedeir says. For example, a small drop of sweat that may have been transferred to the mummy will have given the tissue additional DNA, so we cant depend on DNA analysis 100 percent. For now its functions are limited. We can use it to reliably tell us whether we have a male or female subject, or an animal or human. We hope that we will be able to take DNA samples during the Egyptian Mummy Project and keep them for future investigation, for when the DNA analysis of ancient remains is reliable. We feel the most important breakthrough to come in the future for the study of ancient remains will be DNA analysis, but it has a long way to go still.

Aside from Bedeir, the Egyptian Mummy Project team consists of Hawass, an American archaeologist, and a radiologist, and two alternating CT technicians.

The core team is small, Bedeir says, but we will be sharing the information with experts from around the world. For example if we are to examine the body of Tutankhamun, and we want to find out the exact cause of death, we can bring in a forensic archaeologist to provide analysis.

The Mummy Project will likely take a close look at the recently unearthed 5,000-year-old necropolis, home to 20 well-preserved, previously unexcavated tombs in Helwan.

At press time, Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni had revealed that the Helwan find is a mixture of small, plain tombs with larger ones meant for the middle and upper classes, and containing alabaster, limestone, clay and copper pots and pans.

Dr. Christiana Kohler of the Australian Centre for Egyptology at Sydneys Macquarie University and head of the Australian team of archaeologists that made the find in mid-June, announced that they had also discovered a limestone relief engraved with early hieroglyphic texts plus two large limestone tombs that date to the Old Kingdom (2575-2134 BC) and contain a collection of small chapels and niches.

Believed to be up to 5,000 years old, the remains in the tomb were found curled up in a fetal position in what would have been ancient Egypts first capital city, Memphis, and could provide a wealth of information about this cross-section of people, buried in tombs of a range in sizes.

The range of sizes reflects the different wealth and status of the people buried in them, claims Kohler, who says she is amazed at the number of finds being made nationwide of late.

When you think that in Egypt there have been excavators for at least 150 years and that every year they have about 100 international teams working there, I personally still find it quite mind-boggling that we still have the opportunity to uncover undiscovered tombs. et et