Eternal Egypt is his business;

Zahi Hawass moves through dim galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a sport-coated platoon leader walking the point on a tense patrol.

The face so often smiling in television specials about ancient Egypt is stern. The brown eyes that shine when he's playing raconteur at sold-out lectures about the pyramids and pharaohs radiate cold intensity as he inspects each object in "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs."

"These monuments of Egypt are the heritage of everyone," he says later, and he wants them seen in their best light.

Hawass is Egypt's chief antiquities official, the man primarily responsible for the return of Tut's artifacts a generation after they caused a sensation in American museums in the 1970s. Like an ancient high priest, he must see that the pharaoh's touring treasures are properly arrayed.

Just as in the royal tombs, eternity is at stake. But instead of trying to achieve immortality for Tut's body and soul, Hawass wants to speed the rebirth of a torpid bureaucracy on whose vigor the future of Egyptian antiquity depends.

The Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, which Hawass leads as secretary general, is responsible for the country's monuments and museums. But it has long been overshadowed by Europeans and Americans, who have the leading schools of Egyptology and, before Hawass, had run their digs with few restrictions from the impoverished host country.

Now, some Westerners are grumbling about his policies -- especially in England, where his 2003 call for the return of the iconic Rosetta Stone caused alarm. But many are applauding too. Hawass requires archeologists to concentrate on conserving what they've found, rather than digging for new discoveries. And in a field where some love digging more than writing, he insists that finds be published within five years. Otherwise, permit-holders lose the right to keep digging. The result -- less glamour, more desk work, more expense -- has not endeared Hawass to everyone, and his outsized ego makes him an easy target. But experts say that speedy publication expands knowledge and that conservation is a must.

To Hawass, it's all essential if he's to preserve his country's heritage while molding the 30,000-employee antiquities council into a modern priesthood of archeologists, educators and art conservators who will at last make Egypt a leading force in the discovery, protection and display of its ancient riches. He counts on Tut to generate the cash and publicity needed to give his ambitious program a push. Egypt already has received $20 million upfront; he hopes to increase that to $36 million by the end of the 27-month, four-city U.S. tour.

At 58, Hawass has been in charge for three years, with just five more to solidify his initiatives before law mandates he retire. And so, the return of Tut is his moment too. Detractors decry his famous self-promotion; admirers counter that it's his passion and personality that make him effective. Perhaps, they say, his greatest contribution may be that, for the first time, the face of Egyptology is Egyptian.

Hawass is known as an entertaining and exuberant promoter of his nation's antiquities, but to archeological insiders he also is a free-swinging and sometimes autocratic wielder of power.

At the National Geographic Society, where he holds the title of explorer-in-residence, he is known as "The Pharaoh" -- partly, says Tim Kelly, president of the organization's TV division, because he is given to occasional joking threats: "Do this, or I will cut off your head!"

Hawass says nothing as he walks LACMA's Tut layout for the first time, apart from exchanges in Arabic with his six assistants from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Then, he enters the final gallery, housing a photographic display dubbed "The Face of Tutankhamun." He stops short, glares from across the room at a latex bust of Tut -- and decides in an instant that he must cut off somebody's head. Specifically, the boy king's. This time, he is not joking.

The Tut head is meant to be the last object in the show, as laid out by its American producers and designers. National Geographic, the tour's creative sponsor, has provided the piece de resistance from a recent TV special in which Hawass presided over the first CT scan of Tut's mummy. Crafted by a French sculptor and forensic anthropologist who worked from the scan, the face already is famous, thanks to television and the cover of this month's National Geographic magazine.

Never mind all that. On this day, the exhibition's opening -- on June 16 -- is just three days away. The model belongs not in a display case, but "in the toilet," Hawass says, shocking an entourage that includes officials from the tour's corporate funder, AEG, and its designer, Arts and Exhibitions International. It's not an authentic art object, he complains, and it's not historic.

"This is an art exhibition. You don't ruin it with speculation." The head can be seen, he decides, but only in photographs. "Then it's perfect."

It's a classic Zahi moment. The sort that puts a fond chuckle in Dorothea Arnold's voice as she speaks by phone from her office at New York's Metropolitan Museum, where she heads the Egyptian art department.

"He's a full person, a full human," says Arnold, who has known Hawass since the 1970s, when she worked on German archeological digs in Egypt. "He's very jolly and very nice to be with, but also he can be very angry. He's not your careful person, and sometimes maybe he goes a bit over. But that's what makes him so inspiring. If you have an outstanding person, maybe you have to live through some more spectacular moments."

Salima Ikram, a Pakistani-born, Bryn Mawr- and Cambridge- educated professor at the American University in Cairo, has worked with Hawass over the last eight years on a variety of projects. She says he can be dictatorial, egotistical and just plain wrong, and he tends to drive his staff and everyone else mercilessly. But he will listen -- really listen -- to those strong enough to stand up to him and make a cogent case for an idea or opinion that contradicts his own. He seeks advice, and logic can win him over.

"It's what makes him charming, as opposed to a pain in the butt," Ikram says.

Hawass' ability to enthrall an audience ranks with an Egyptian flute player's skill at charming a cobra. When he was a small boy, his father would send him -- on the festive nights following the introspective days of Ramadan -- to a sheik who told stories.

Sitting barefoot in a Washington, D.C., hotel room -- to commence the national media blitz before the L.A. opening -- Hawass recalls what it was like to be an overactive 8-year-old gripped by stillness for two hours while an old man told tales from "Arabian Nights."

"I learned from this man the way that you can make people listen," he says.

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He talks, people listen

A few hours later, several hundred people are listening, laughing, then listening some more as Hawass talks about Tut in an auditorium at National Geographic's Washington headquarters. His accent is heavy, his English syntax sometimes skewed. But his delivery engages.

Summing up the intrigue and mystery surrounding Tut, he says: "It's like a play that we don't know the end of the play." But the recent CT scan has filled in a few blanks. "This machine can change the dead to be alive."

The voice moves from piercing staccato when he's being emphatic or argumentative, to smooth and languid in moments of transport. His energy and focus are unflagging. It's like encountering the Arab equivalent of a first-class Irish yarn spinner. There is no lack of blarney.

Hawass considers himself a scientist and a scholar. His 1987 doctorate in Egyptology from the University of Pennsylvania says he is, and he has made significant discoveries in his 37-year career with the Supreme Council -- especially the tombs of the workers who built the pyramids.

But he's also a showman, an entertainer who knows which routines will grab 'em. "There is no mummy's curse," he'll declare simply. Then he'll detail all the spooky legends that gave rise to belief in a curse, and relate the many near-disasters and eerie coincidences in his own life. The mummy's curse, for Hawass, is what a ball of yarn is to a cat: so easy to unravel and tear apart, but since that would end all the fun, why not just keep poking at it and let it roll?

What enchants on TV doesn't play well in some academic circles, says Dennis Forbes, who as editorial director of KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt, has watched -- and sometimes published -- Hawass since launching the quarterly in 1990.

"Some people [think] that a true scholar isn't supposed to be a star," Forbes says. "He's wined and dined and lionized," but that can leave him open to barbs and eye-rolling from the Egyptological cognoscenti.

"Zahi is known for making grand statements that have no basis," Forbes says, such as the oft-repeated contention that 70% of Egyptian antiquity still lies buried and waiting to be discovered. Nevertheless, the North Carolina-based editor counts himself firmly in Hawass' corner. "In my experience, he's the first [antiquities chief] who has really had an impassioned attitude toward the job. He's out there. He's everywhere. How he has the energy to do these things is beyond many people's understanding."

Lorelei H. Corcoran, director of the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archeology at the University of Memphis in Tennessee, says she and her students chuckle sometimes at Hawass' romantic pronouncements. But she wouldn't want him to trade his effusiveness for scholarly caution.

"It's a means to attract attention, excite enthusiasm and gain support for the prosaic things we do every day," she says.

If Hawass is a master at outreach, he's a black belt at infighting.

His loftiest target has been Dietrich Wildung, an eminent scholar who runs the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. In 2003, Hawass announced that Egyptian police had a tape of known antiquities thieves talking about the kinds of things Wildung would be willing to buy from them for his museum's collection.

"The ... authorities have incontrovertible evidence that he was involved in the illegal trafficking and buying of antiquities," Hawass wrote in his column for the English edition of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. But when asked why Egypt, two years later, still hasn't moved to indict Wildung -- as Italian authorities recently did in bringing a case against Marion True, the J. Paul Getty Museum's curator of antiquities -- Hawass acknowledges that the tapes are hearsay that can't prove a case.

Wildung, once friendly with Hawass, is now banned from excavating in Egypt but denies any wrongdoing. He says Hawass is playing to Egyptian public opinion and perhaps retaliating because Wildung criticized him for empty showmanship on a 2001 TV special that put a robot into a pyramid. "For populistic reasons, he has unfortunately invented these stories, which are 500% against my personal conviction and my understanding as a museum professional," Wildung says from his Munich home.

Hawass and his supporters say that banning foreigners if they break the rules -- as he has done in several cases besides Wildung's -- puts teeth behind policies that are in the best interest not only of Egypt, but also of scholarship and preservation. Others express concern that the big stick the secretary general wields could beat down debate and dissent. An archeologist on the periphery of one of Hawass' battles refuses to talk about him: "I plan to go back to Egypt, and I don't want anything that could hold that up."

Within Egypt, Hawass has been brawling lately with critics who question the methodology of the CT scan of Tut's mummy, and the forensic re-creation of his face. Hawass curbed the authority and docked the pay of one persistent foe, Ahmed Saleh, an archeological inspector for the Supreme Council who complained, among other things, that the procedures used in the facial re-creation made Tut look Caucasian, disrespecting the nation's African roots.

Hawass insists he is not angry, vindictive or power mad; firm enforcement of the rules is essential to prevent chaos, he says, given the hundreds of ongoing archeological projects in Egypt and the continued threat of antiquities theft.

"Yes, it's inflammatory," Willeke Wendrich, a UCLA professor of Egyptian archeology, says of Hawass' willingness to attack perceived rule breakers in the press and ban them from excavating. "Maybe cooperation would be better served if he formulated things slightly differently. But it's counterbalancing what has been going on too long, a colonialist attitude that hasn't disappeared even now. I think the way he acts is partly his personality, but it's partly a reaction to a very arrogant treatment of Egyptians and Egyptian officials."

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Pondering his legacy

In retirement, Hawass -- married to a gynecologist and father of two sons, a physician and a businessman -- says he looks forward to the less grueling and contentious pursuit of writing up his discoveries for scholarly publication. He hopes to spend more time in L.A., where for six summers, from 1996 to 2001, he was a visiting professor in UCLA's department of Near Eastern languages and cultures. He says the greatest monument he will leave behind is a growing Egyptian corps of well-trained, highly motivated and better- paid archeologists, museum curators, antiquities guards and business managers who can carry on a vision that, ultimately, is too big for one man and one life's work.

Ikram, the Cairo-based professor, who is on the editorial board of a scholarly journal published by the Supreme Council, says that Pharaonic antiquity has meant little to most Egyptians and the pyramids have been nothing but a good place to picnic. But that began to change, she says, on the night in 2001 when Hawass went on live TV to send a little robot through a previously unexplored passageway in the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza.

"My maid said, 'Oh my God, did you see that program? Do you see what we have in the pyramids?' " Ikram recalls. "For the first time, there's identification, a great deal of pride and awareness."

As she left for a day of teaching university students and planning museum displays, Ikram says her maid, who previously had shown no interest in her employer's job, said something surprising for an Egyptologist to hear in the land whose ancient history and culture Egyptologists study.

"I'm glad you're doing what you're doing."