Our guest speaker for the March general meeting was Tony Thomas, who reported on his trip to Egypt the previous fortnight focusing on the incredible treasures found by Howard Carter in 1922 at the unrobbed tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Tony followed up with two visits to the just-opened Grand Egyptian Museum where thousands of Tut's treasures are now state of the art display. They include of course his beautiful mask - 10kg of gold and lapis lazuli for the wonderful blue ornamentation. But that pales in gold content compared to Tut's innermost coffin which is 110kg of gold, beautifully inscribed and worked. Below - the solid gold coffin. Tony said he was awestruck by the know-how of the bronze-age Egyptians, which included a 45m ship capable of transporting monuments and building blocks totalling hundreds of tonnes. Even more amazing, he visited the ancient quarry at Karnak where the workers had carved an 1100 tonne obelisk almost out of the bedrock, but it cracked and they abandoned it in place, giving Egyptologists 3-4000 years later an excellent blueprint for how they worked the quarries. Of course an even bigger mystery is how they planned to cart the 1100 tonne obelisk on sleds to the Nile where they would load it onto some unimaginably large barge (or several lashed together. As Tony said, this trip gave him food for thought for a lifetime.