Dig days: Surprise delivery By Zahi Hawass As an Egyptologist, I have met many strange people. Some of them, known as "pyramidiots", have far- fetched ideas about aliens, lost civilisations and the power of the pyramidal form. Others want to drill inside the Pyramids. Some want to become famous, so they announce mere theories as facts. We live in a strange world. Recently I heard from Jack Graves, a professor at the University of California. His letter was enclosed in a Fed- Ex package sent from California to my office in Zamalek. The package was extremely heavy and when it was delivered my secretary, Nashwa, was afraid it might contain a bomb. After all, some people would like to get rid of me. I told her not to worry and explained that those who wanted to do away with me must know that the people who replace me will follow in my footsteps and dedicate their lives to protecting Egyptian monuments. Inside the package was a piece of alabaster with hieroglyphic inscriptions. It was an authentic artefact dating from the New Kingdom, and the inscription was an utterance to the god Osiris from the Pharaoh. Also on the fragment was a part of the cartouche of Seti I, who built his great tomb in the Valley of Kings. It is a known fact that many blocks have been stolen from this tomb. However, we do not know what happened to the objects that were placed in the burial chamber, and because of the nature of the fragment I believe it is not part of the tomb itself but part of one of the Pharaoh's funerary objects, possibly the canopic chest. It is also possible that this fragment comes from another hidden chamber, as predicted by Sheikh Ali Abdel-Rasoul. He said there was a tunnel down there, and at the end of this tunnel was another chamber. I recently entered this tunnel and crawled exactly 217 feet. Who knows what might be found in the future? In 1821 Giovanni Belzoni exhibited the alabaster sarcophagus he found when he discovered Seti's tomb. He tried to sell it to the British Museum for �2,000, but the museum foolishly refused the piece. In 1824 the sarcophagus was acquired by Sir John Sloane, and it now resides in the Sloane Museum in England. The actual mummy of Seti I was found in 1871 in the cache at Deir Al-Bahri which had been stumbled upon by the Abdel-Rasoul's family. Egypt's own first great Egyptologist, Ahmed Basha Kamel, and the Antiquities Department moved the royal mummies discovered in the cache to Cairo. The mummies travelled down the Nile by boat to Cairo, but when they arrived and were being processed through customs the agents could not find the word mummy in the books so they improvised and accepted them as "salted fish". In the package with the beautiful alabaster fragment that landed on my desk was a unique letter from Jack Graves. He began by telling me how much he had enjoyed seeing me on TV discussing the mummy of King Tut, and said his favourite moment was when King Tut and I were regarding each other face-to-face. Graves then told me a story about a friend of his who had visited Egypt in 1958. When his friend was inside one of the tombs in the Valley of Kings he found this piece of inscribed alabaster, and simply picked it up and hid it inside his jacket. His friend spent the rest of his life feeling guilty about taking the fragment, and before he died he gave it to Graves, who duly sent it to me. I am very happy that he took the honourable way out, and I hope it encourages others to return artefacts they may have acquired. The fragment is now being registered in the Egyptian Museum.
