Posted on 06/14/2006 10:50:26 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
At a preview of a King Tut display at Chicago's Field Museum last month, Hawass, whose critics call him "the Show-Biz Pharaoh," a "media whore" and "part P.T. Barnum, part Indiana Jones," asked museum officials to remove one of the exhibition's corporate sponsors after learning its chief executive owned a 2,600-year-old Egyptian coffin... In April, he fired off a letter to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, asking him to return a 71-foot-high Egyptian obelisk in Central Park if he didn't start taking care of it. The pillar, which is in poor condition because of neglect, has been in the park since 1881 -- a gift from the Egyptian government in return for American aid in constructing the Suez Canal... Last year, he allowed the mummy of King Tutankhamen to be removed from its tomb for the first time in 80 years to learn how the boy king died, using state-of-the-art scanning equipment. Computer images determined Tut's appearance. Critics decried the event as more of a media circus than science, and Hawass later docked the pay of a Supreme Council member who criticized the re-creation of Tut's face, disputing the computer image's Caucasian look... In 2003, he banned English archaeologist Joann Fletcher from Egypt after she announced on the Discovery Channel -- without consulting him -- that a previously discovered mummy was Queen Nefertiti, a hypothesis few scholars took seriously... Most recently, Hawass publicly objected to a fatwa, or religious edict, issued by Ali Gomaa, Cairo's Grand Mufti -- the nation's highest official of Islamic law. In April, Ali Gomaa forbade the production and display of ancient sculptures, causing some Egyptians to fear Islamic militants would use the ruling to destroy statues depicting the pharaohs.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
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