The host of this program, Mofeed Fawzy, is a very famous journalist; he was editor-in-chief of a magazine called Sabaah il-Kheir, and he is also a writer for Al-Ahram newspaper in Egypt, as well as producer for this unique program, “Talk of the City.” It is a very popular show, like the Oprah Winfrey show in America, all the Egyptians wait to watch this program because of the character of the host, Mofeed Fawzy.

 

Currently, they felt the talk of the town is the discovery of the family of Tutankhamun, which I recently announced to the public. Therefore, I met Mr. Fawzy in the second mummy room in the Egyptian Museum for an interview this week. This is actually the first time an Egyptian television asked me to conduct and interview inside this mummy room. I was very happy to do it, because this shows how Egyptians are interested in ancient Egypt, and this show can educate them about mummies, mummification, and the caches where the royal mummies were discovered, such as the Deir el-Bahari cache that was found.

 

I recently visited the Deir el-Bahari cache, which is a very difficult tomb to enter. It is down a 15-meter deep shaft, and you must be lowered down by rope into the shaft. From the vertical shaft is the entrance into the tomb: a few stairs down into a roughly cut passage through the rock, which leads to more stairs and ends in a large room where the royal mummies were hidden by priests in the 21^st Dynasty. Now we close up the entrance to the tomb so that no one may enter, although there is nothing left inside. The reason for this is to show the importance of this tomb, because inside was found one of the most important discoveries, which is, in my opinion, even more important than the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922.

 

The story of the discovery of this cache is amazing. A young man named Ahmed, a member of the famous Abdel Rassul family was leading his goats in the hills near the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, when one of them escaped. When he ran after the goat to catch it, he saw the entrance to this shaft. When I entered this shaft last week, I realized there was no way he could have entered it without ropes. In my opinion, he must have returned home and brought back a beam of wood to place across the top of the shaft to attach ropes and use them to climb down the shaft. When he entered into the tomb, he found himself surrounded by mummies, coffins, and precious objects. Imagine how incredible it would have been to see the cache when it was first found!

 

The reason I went into this cache recently is that we are working now on an important study of the Egyptian Mummy Project, which is to identify the family of Ramses II. We are searching for the mummy of Ramses I, which has never been identified. Some people believe that the mummy I brought back from the Michael Carlos Museum in Atlanta could be the mummy of Ramses I. Now we are working to extract DNA and perform CT scans on this mummy as well as Seti I, Ramses II, and Ramses III, in order to find answers about these mummies. We are also examining Unknown Man E, to possibly identify him and his relationship with Ramses III. We hope that this investigation will reveal the secrets of the family of Ramses II.