Sharon Waxman

Well, this may be a bit of a surprise to those following my journey in the Middle East. My last story before book leave appears in today’s Sunday Styles. It’s about Ron Boyer, aka Rod Fontana, porn star turning preacher. It says: "After 30 years of sowing the wildest of oats, Mr. Boyer, 54, has…

Heading to Turkey, to discover more about looted antiquities. Cairo teems below on a hazy Sunday morning. Last night the French embassy had its Bastille Day bash, 2,000 people in the garden of the embassy. A choir sang the French and Egyptian national anthems, there was disco music with throwback tunes (anyone remember "Life is…

We are diligently tracking down the origins of the masterpieces that Zahi Hawass wants to borrow, and eventually reclaim from Western museums. There is no legal claim to the statue taken from the pit where my archeologist guide, Essam, is crouching. This is the mausoleum, or mastaba, of Hamiunu, whose statue is now at a…

Hot news from Sofia, that’s in Bulgaria,  where officials are demanding that Greece return nine silver plates, dating back to the 12th century, illegally dug up and smuggled out of the country.(Here’s the story, from Sofia News Service, no kidding.) This entire enterprise begins to make the mind spin. Greece wants things back from England;…

Here it is, the famous ceiling of the zodiac at the Temple of Denderah, north of Luxor (in black). Except it isn’t. The real ceiling was hacked out of this space in the early part of the 19th century because of its extreme rarity: there are few (I’m told none, but I’d want to check)…

Apparently, cross-cultural love has become quite the thing in this tourist town on the Nile. The latest trend is retired English ladies taking up residence, and finding love with young Egyptian men. (I saw one such couple around midnight in the lobby of my hotel. She looked relaxed.) This is resulting in marriages and some…

This is a rare photograph, taken inside the tomb of Amenophis III in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings this week. The tomb is not excavated and as such is closed to the public; and photos are not permitted in any tombs at all. (Also, the tomb is pitch black, so I am amazed it came…

Well, I’ve definitely got that I-should-be-blogging feeling, it must be bred by this form of media. I am in Luxor, the modern-day city that was once Thebes, capital of pharaohs, and a stone’s throw from their tombs in Valley of the Kings. I am technologically not able to share from here the amazing images I…

A word about a languid dinner on a Cairo rooftop with a group of journalists last night, badly in need of a beer and a break. Most of them are denizens of the Iraq war — Jill Carroll, the kidnapped journalist, now in Cairo for the Christian Science Monitor, Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post,…

Wow, a tsunami of support and encouragement from out there across the world. I sent the blog link out to most of my address book (half of it, anyway), and many of you shouted back. Fantastic! You are all readers, writers, otherwise sophisticates to whom I don’t need to show Cairo on the map. Excellent.…

Here we are in Zahi’s office. (My new camera! Nice, right?) I sat for no fewer than six hours watching him work, an unbroken stream of letters, calls, signatures, meetings, convocations. No lunch break. One bathroom break. He called it the calmest day he knew in his office yet. I wanted a medal by the…

I’m sitting in the office of Zahi Hawass, chief of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, in Cairo. His office, in the SCA headquarters on the island of Zamalek, is a garden variety Egyptian bureaucrat’s bland mix of tan walls and oversized stuffed furniture. (Happily, the wireless Internet works.) But there’s a curious thing in the…

Our friend Zahi Hawass’s mug was on the front page of the Times again today. What is it this time? A landmark discovery of the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut, based on the surprising, unexpected find of a tooth in her long-familiar sarcophagus. The exciting news was ably chronicled by John Noble Wilford. But the key…