I think Ellen mentioned this to me a day or two ago, but there it is anyway for those who may not have heard. Zahi Hawass is everywhere when it comes to Egyptian archeology. There only seem to be about seven Egyptologists in the English-speaking world, you'll see them all the time on documentaries, but Zahi seems to be in every single one of them as well.

(By contrast, there seem to be about nine Roman historians. I especially like the guy that narrarates in black leather.)

Anyway, if you've ever seen anything on Egypt in the past, say, six or seven years, you've seen this guy. He's got his own web site (which I can't get to right now). A nice brief bio is here. I can't claim to know the man, but I did see him get victimized by network TV once during a live "digging in Egypt" special. He seemed to handle the enthusiastic if clueless talking heads pretty well (I seem to recall it was Maury Povich's bunch, perhaps on Fox?), only getting impatient with them once or twice. He seemed to have boundless energy and tended to talk too quickly and too intelligently for the newsreaders to really follow along.

Everyone knows the pyramids are old, but it takes awhile to get some perspective on what that really means. A quick one: In America, depending on where you're from, an old building is between one and three hundred years old. Most of the rest of the world quietly chuckles at this, but even in places like England an old building is about a thousand years old, and in Italy and Greece old buildings can be as much as twenty five hundred years old.

The pyramids were already more than two thousand five hundred years old when Cleopatra unrolled herself at the feet of Julius Ceasar. To put that event in perspective, Jules and Cleo ran through their little drama some forty years before Jesus made his dramatic entrance.

Heyyy-yaaa-HUP!