Grab your pith helmets and sunscreen!

Deep in Egypt’s western desert, some 3 hours southwest of Cairo, lays an oasis known as Bahariya. Despite being distant and isolated, people have occupied Bahariya from antiquity to modern times. Egypt’s own “Indiana Jones,” the well-known Egyptologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, and his team made an astonishing discovery in Bahariya: a vast cemetery complex, dated to the Greek period in ancient Egypt, which may contain as many as 10,000 mummies and related funerary artifacts, many in a superb state of preservation even after more than 2,000 years.

Since 1999, at least 34 tombs have been excavated; this lecture first takes us on a virtual safari out to the Bahariya Oasis and finally into the oasis and inside its ancient tombs, where gold-gilded mummies lay stacked like cordwood under the Egyptian sands.