Actually, when I was a young boy I had no interest in archaeology.  I wanted to be a lawyer.  At 15 ½ years old, I went to study at the Faculty of Law at Alexandria University.  I bought all of my assigned books, read one line, and realized I hated it.  Then I moved to the Faculty of Arts, where I joined the archaeology department quite by accident. 

At 19 ½, I took my first government job as an inspector of antiquities, but I really didn’t enjoy it.  I didn’t like the work I was doing nor did I like the people I worked with, so I left and decided I wanted to be a diplomat.  I worked very hard, studying to pass my exams.  As it turned out, I passed the written exam, but failed the oral exam.  So I found myself back at the antiquities department!  One day they asked me to travel to the desert to work on an excavation.  I was very unhappy about this.  I really hated the idea of going to desert, and I didn’t want to leave my girlfriend in Cairo.  But I had to go, or I would have been punished by my boss, so I simply planned to spend every weekend, as much as possible, in the city.  One day I was preparing to go to Cairo, dressed very nicely in my best clothes, and the workmen asked me to come and see the new discovery of a tomb.  I followed them, and they started teaching me how to excavate.  Well, I began to like it.  I descended into the tomb, no longer caring that my nice clothes were getting very dirty, and I still remember the man behind me as I reached the bottom of the tomb.  He was the Reis (Arabic for the overseer of workmen) and everyone called him Doctor.  This was not because he actually was a doctor – he wasn’t, he could not even read or write – but his family expected him to be as skilled as a doctor, and he commanded a great deal of respect.  I still remember the doctor’s face when he gave me a brush and said, “Young man, clean in the middle of the tomb.”  And while I was cleaning, I saw a statue.  It was a statue of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love and beauty, I began to clean the statue with my brush.  At that moment, I fell in love with archaeology.  My heart started beating very fast, my face turned red, and I began to tremble.  It has been the great love of my life ever since.  Last year, I went down to the basement of the Cairo.Museum to look for that statue again; the one that had changed my life forever.

Twenty years ago, as an Egyptian, if you told anyone that you were an archaeologist, you were laughed at.  Back then, the field of archaeology belonged to foreigners.  But now, in Egypt, archaeologists are bigger than movie stars!  Children playing in the street run up to me now and say, “Uncle, when will you tell us about the secret behind the doors of the Great Pyramid?  When will you find the tomb of Cleopatra and Mark Antony?”  I am so proud to be an inspiration to a new generation of Egyptian archaeologists.  It is so important to search inside you and find what it is you truly love.  If you like to do something, even love to do something, it is not enough.  It must be your passion in life.