In June of 2005, the Los Angeles Times profiled Dr. Hawass in connection with an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The face so often smiling in television specials about ancient Egypt is stern. The brown eyes that shine when he’s playing raconteur at sold-out lectures about the pyramids and pharaohs radiate cold intensity as he inspects each object in “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs.”

“These monuments of Egypt are the heritage of everyone,” he says later, and he wants them seen in their best light.

Hawass is Egypt’s chief antiquities official, the man primarily responsible for the return of Tut’s artifacts a generation after they caused a sensation in American museums in the 1970s. Like an ancient high priest, he must see that the pharaoh’s touring treasures are properly arrayed.

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