The ornate pharaonic tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings are doomed to disappear within 150 to 500 years if they remain open to tourists, the head of antiquities has warned.
Zahi Hawass said humidity and fungus are eating into the walls of the royal tombs in the huge necropolis on the west bank of the Nile across from Luxor, which is swamped daily by several thousand tourists.
Poor ventilation and the breath of the hordes of visitors are causing damage to the carvings and painted decorations inside the tombs, he told …

A British writer has staked claim to finally finding the lost underworld of the pharaohs which has been rumoured to exist since the construction of the Great Pyramid nearly 5,000 years ago, creating a stir that is set to rock the Egyptological world.
Armed only with the forgotten memoirs of a nineteenth century British explorer, history and science writer Andrew Collins, working alongside Egyptological researcher Nigel Skinner Simpson, tracked down the entrance to this forgotten cave system and were the first to explore it in modern times.
The story begins in 1817 when Henry …

It took about 20 years to build the Great Pyramid of Giza, archaeologists believe. It will take about the same amount of time for the Grand Egyptian Museum to be completed.
Given the scale of the project, it is not entirely surprising. Conceived in 1992, the US$550 million (Dh2.02 billion) museum is an undertaking worthy of the Pharaohs: a vast, stone-roofed structure that will extend from the edge of the Giza plateau across an area the size of 11 football pitches. The museum will house more than 100,000 ancient artefacts, chief …

Egyptian archaeologists digging near the Suez Canal have discovered the remains of what is believed to be the largest fortress in the eastern Delta, Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni announced.
Located at the site of Tell Dafna, between El-Manzala Lake and the Suez Canal, the remains reveal the foundation of a military town about 9 miles (c.15km) northeast of the city of western Qantara.
“The fortress covers an area of about 380 by 625m, while the enclosure wall is about 13m in width,” Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud, head of the Central Department of …