This is a cruel editor's joke ... right? Send the Egyptian intern to cover the CT scan of an ancient Egyptian mummy that belongs to Westminster College. Ha, ha.

		Moustafa Ayad is a Post-Gazette intern (mayad@post-gazette.com).

Somehow, I will have to awe my editors with my ability to conjure up the spirits of my dead ancestors and transfer their mystic power into perfectly phrased prose. This is going to be great.

That's how my mind processed my fifth assignment of my summer internship at the Post-Gazette.

I drove 60 miles north last month to see a part of my history. I even got to lift the coffin -- I know, everybody's dream. There you are in front of a piece of your history, a portion so rich and deep that it has the ability to connect you with your past in ways you've never imagined.

But, it's hard to imagine your past, if you've always run from it.

I'm from Cairo. Not Cairo, Ill., as written on my old voter registration card, which was replaced immediately. Arabs and voter fraud don't mix. Nope, I'm from the city in the shadow of the Great Pyramids. The city that has been molded by more foreign hands than Michael Jackson's face.

Here's where the images of a blue Nile, great sand dunes, men with names like Abdul and Mohammed atop camels with the Sphinx in the background flood into your consciousness. Beautiful, isn't it?

I left Cairo when I was 18 months old. So, those images just don't seem to resonate with me as strongly. My first words were a mixture of Arabic and English, fitting for a child who spent half of his life in the Middle East and half in the United States. It's not that I resent my Egyptian heritage, it's just ... well, what exactly is an Egyptian?

Are they the keepers of the world's most storied civilization? Or are they the Third World nation that has never been truly in charge of their history or destiny?

When I was a child visiting my paternal uncle in Egypt, he sought to dispel all the myths and reservations I may have had about my people growing up.

He decided to take me to the Pharaonic Village. It's like a parent with a confused American boy taking his child to see how the Amish live, only about 3,000 years more out of date. Historic re-enactments of Ancient Egyptian bed making were going to make me more in tune with that King Tut deep inside of me. There I am in front of some guy in a loincloth, weaving straw. Being 8 years old, I'm wondering how this gentlemen seems to keep his, um, act together.

He looked better fed than the Egyptians on the street by my grandmother's apartment in the heart of downtown Cairo. He was also wearing mascara. An Egyptian Boy George, is that what my uncle wanted me to see?

The whole village added more muddle to my befuddlement. There were beautiful Egyptian maidens tending to the crops. One had a cigarette in her hand. Ah, that's the part of my history I had no knowledge of before, nicotine addiction among the peasantry.

The journey was like some weird LSD trip back through time where you could still read the Hanes tag on some of the makeshift loin cloths.

Egypt is that way with me. She is a constant reminder of my lost self-image. Where are the definitive roots that bore me? They're not back in the historic village.

Egypt has been under way too many occupations, colonial rules and democratic tyrannies to ever have one definitive image.

Napoleon and the French shot off any sense of self-identification I may have had when they took aim at the Sphinx's nose. This is a misconception, but it rings true with much of the Egyptian population and it makes me feel better about my heritage as well. The visage on the half lion could have had a striking resemblance to mine.

The British left a giant footprint by way of bureaucracy.

The boys across the pond knocked down any sense of normalcy I felt whenever I visited Egypt with their affection for queues. Standing in a visa-stamping line in the Egyptian airport is like waiting for Jesus' triumphant return: It might happen, but you got to have faith.

The Americans -- well, that footprint is actually more like a combat boot print. Egypt was the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel. Now, I believe she's the third. Iraq is No. 1. President Hosni Mubarak is grateful for every penny, it keeps democracy running smooth in that part of the world.

Through all of this conflict and submission, Egypt's pharaonic history is the last bastion of any true definitive self-identity.

Wrong.

Thanks to great European and American missionaries as well as scientists and archeologists, that part isn't ours either. Egyptians sell parts of their history that they can't keep it up to par and they eat their children. That's a joke, we don't really eat our children. Those are all excuses for the mass mummy diaspora that has come to grip the modern world.

Mummies are in every major museum, college and nook and cranny of the Western World. New York City has its own temple. There's a mummy in New Wilmington, Pa. Do I need to say any more?

So, I'm back 60 miles away from Pittsburgh moving Pesed, Pennsylvania's Egyptian mummy.

This is the part where being one with your past takes on a whole new meaning for me. The mummy and I, well, we touched. Heads.

Bending over to pick up the casket -- because apparently as a reporter with a notebook, you seem eager to drop the pen and pad and lift a dead woman -- my head touched the mummy's. I even got a deep refreshing exhale of "essence de history." "Essence de dead woman," it's all the same.

But the whole movement reminded me of that lost child in the Pharaonic Village. Just moments before the move, one of the nurses CT scanning the mummy exclaimed, "What type of people sell their history?"

A people who have been beaten down by the powers-that-be for more than 3,000 years, a people who have been forced into a position where self-identity has become only a sidebar.

Excuse me while I become one with my history.