THIS MAGAZINE only occasionally carries business stories, and it’s been exactly three years since we last had one on the cover. I certainly hadn’t planned to have one this month.

A few months back, Staff Writer Cache Seel was fresh off a piece that took him to Sinai and the Occupied Territories for a story on the nation’s Bedouin. Cache gets hives when he’s confined to Cairo for too long, so I (rather blithely) suggested he head out to the desert to look into what was going on with Centamin, a little-known mining company.

Centamin, I knew, was doing some interesting things down near Marsa Alam, where it has a concession that includes several old Pharaonic gold mines that have sat largely unworked for centuries. In fact, the Pharaohs mined more than 95 percent of all the gold that has ever been produced in Egypt, and the last to work the site were the British, who had barely started exploring the long-forgotten mines before they were booted out of the country in the run-up to the revolution.

While I was editing Business Today Egypt, our sister publication, back in 2001 and 2002, we broke news about Centamin’s finds and the problems they were having with red tape as they tried to explore them further. Egypt Today, though, had never done a significant piece on the story, and it has been a little over two years since we’ve looked into how the company, founded by an Egyptian-born Australian citizen, was faring.

I thought Cache would return with a nice little yarn about life at a gold mine, and maybe the makings of a short feature that could run in bt this fall.

What he came back with, a week or so before the July 23 Revolution Day celebrations, was a piece that suggests Centamin might be sparking a revolution of its own — an economic one, in this case.

Just look at the math: In internationally certified assays, Centamin has proven it has reserves worth north of LE 23 billion — that’s in just part of one of its six former Pharaonic gold mines, and they’re still exploring like mad.

By Centamin’s math, Egypt could have enough ore sitting in its hills for the gold-mining industry to one day make nearly as big a contribution to gross domestic product as tourism and the Suez Canal (today’s two top earners) combined.

If that’s not an economic revolution, I don’t know what is. Cache’s story starts on page 76.

Meanwhile, I have a handful of introductions to make this month as we welcome a new team of assistant editors to our masthead.

Two of the names should be familiar to many of you. Copy editors Callie Maidhof and Dan Reese have made the leap out of The Slot (as the department is known). Callie has been with us since January and, in addition to her copy editing duties on et, bt and Horus, has written pieces on subjects as diverse as the bands Nagham Masry and the Sex Pistols.

Dan, a former teacher, joined our staff this past summer, and recently returned from home leave to assume his new duties.

Joining them are Nicolè Staab and Jessica Olien, fresh arrivals from the United States. Nicolè, the first of the two to arrive, has previously lived in Latin America and West Africa and comes to us with a year of journalism in China behind her. Jessica, who most recently worked at a Midwestern weekly, has lived in Cairo before and spent a year working in Thailand for two prominent Thai magazines.

Capping a busy month of hiring, we welcome aboard Staff Writer Hanaa Ahmed, who will be reporting for both et and bt in and is already hard at work on a feature for our September issue.

Finally, I’ve been remiss for several issues now by not introducing Assistant Editor Fatima El-Saadani, who works primarily on bt, where she has proven herself an exceptional business writer, and who also files for Newsreel each month. et