Stranger still, this "set" is arguably one of the biggest archaeological finds in Egypt since the discovery of the tomb of Ramses II's 50 sons. This is the Valley of the Golden Mummies, where in 1996 — so the story goes — an errant donkey's hoof crashed through the roof of a crypt containing gilded Greco-Roman mummies. Officials now estimate 10,000 mummies lie beneath ten square kilometers (four square miles) of Egypt's Bahariya Oasis.

Seeing the place (which was recently dubbed the Cemetery of Anubis) buzzing like a studio lot in Hollywood recalls the line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in which a confounded Sean Connery asks, "You call this archaeology?"

'Not for a Thrill'
The mummies will not be "shown for a thrill or to scare children," said Dr. Zahi Hawass, Undersecretary of State for Giza, Saqqara and Bahariya and project director for the oasis excavations. "I don't like to see mummies in a museum. I believe you should use mummies for education, not for a thrill."

Either education or thrill — or, closer to the truth, "infotainment," that modern mix of both — is precisely what brought Hollywood to Bahariya: 141 people and a million pounds of equipment trucked to the middle of nowhere for Fox's Opening the Tombs of the Golden Mummies: Live! The two-hour special broadcast on May 23 culminated with the opening of a 26th Dynasty sarcophagus from the seventh century B.C. on live TV.

Egyptology has walked hand in hand with entertainment since the 24-volume Description de l'?gypte was published in the early nineteenth century. Intended as a work of research by 150 scientists brought by Napoleon to Egypt in 1798, it captivated Europe with its engravings and color illustrations of obelisks, ruins, and mummies.

Later publications by such adventurers as Giovanni Belzoni, discoverer of Seti I's tomb in the Valley of the Kings, further stirred public curiosity. In 1821, a 15-meter (50-foot) model of the tomb and plaster casts Belzoni made of two of the tomb's chambers were exhibited in London. They immediately became the must-see event of the summer.

Belzoni also brought a number of mummies with him to England. There, in 1820, he asked a British physician and professor of anatomy named Thomas Pettigrew to examine them. Pettigrew was immediately hooked. Thirteen years later, he was buying mummies at estate sales and unrolling them before standing-room-only crowds.

In time, Pettigrew learned to draw out the suspense of his mummy unrollings by prefacing them with a series of six lectures. Tickets to the lectures cost one guinea ($66.76 U.S. today) for mummy-side seats and half that for rear seats. Television can't gauge its success by counting ticket sales like theaters — or even mummy-unravelers. Opening the Tombs cost $3 million to make and scored an estimated 8.7 million total viewers. It finished behind all three major networks, but the total viewership beat last year's Tuesday average by 12 percent. Meanwhile, the four most-viewed items on the Fox website that night were stories and photos related to the special; May 23 turned out to be one of the most heavily trafficked days in the history of FOXNews.com. Even a day later, activity on the site was up 10 percent from the day before the show.

Donkey Petrol
The financial payoff of the mummies for the oasis itself is even less clear. Bahariya is a drowsy place where life seems to continue much as it has for millennia.

Most residents of Bahariya live in mud- or limestone-brick houses, and donkeys are the primary form of transportation for people and goods. The main agricultural crop is dates, but farmers also grow apricots, bananas, mangoes, pomegranates, and figs. There is even enough water to nurture a few small crops of rice. To feed their beasts, farmers grow alfalfa — "donkey petrol," as one guide called it.

Those who don't make a pastoral living cater to visitors seeking desert safaris or a campout under the Saharan stars. Given that only seven small hotels serve the 2,000-square-kilometer (772-square-mile) depression that forms the oasis, tourism would seem a feeble industry for Bahariya, at least compared to the popular Siwa Oasis to the northwest with its famous springs and handicrafts. Bahariya has springs, too — around 300, some hot, some cold — and their reputed medicinal benefit attracts a small stream of out-of-towners. The one man with the authority to change that trickle into a flood is Zahi Hawass. Bahariya, with its 10,000 mummies, could become another Luxor if managed correctly. But Hawass says he doesn't want the mummies themselves on public view — only the tombs.

"I don't like people to visit them," Hawass said of the mummies he uncovered in Bahariya. "But since this discovery became very famous, everyone wants to visit them. I'm not permitting anyone to visit them." Hawass's plan is to remove most of the mummies from their tombs, study them briefly, then re-inter them elsewhere.

"These people will forgive us if we are disturbing them a little bit," he said. "After we finish our excavations, we are keeping them in peace. I will take only five mummies and put them in a museum, and we will open the sites of Bahariya."

Peter Wirth, a German expatriate who owns the International Health Center in nearby Bawiti, came to Bahariya in 1995 and built his hotel around one of the hot springs. The warm, ferrous pool is unappetizing in the heat of spring, leaving rust-colored watermarks on the walls of its ceramic basin. "When the discovery of the tombs was announced, I got calls from all over the world from people who wanted to come to Bahariya to see the mummies," Wirth said. Many of those guests vented their frustration on him after learning they could not see the famous mummies.

"The discoveries have put Bahariya on the map," Wirth said. "It is very important all this publicity doesn't just puff away."