"Nobody of any standing in Egyptology will come out to help you," said one well-known Egyptologist of his colleagues, "because they'd lose their jobs. Sadly, people are cowering round his ankles." He is right. The hugged ankles belong to the most powerful man in archeology, Dr Zahi Hawass, aka Big Zee, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). It is Hawass who holds the keys to the pyramids, the Valley of the Kings, the Sphinx, Abu Simbel, everything. No Egyptologist
gets in without his permission, and few will chance his anger.

You can see why. Hawass is a one-man conflict zone who could start a war in an empty sarcophagus. In 2003, by some accounts (no fact passes unchallenged), Hawass expelled 14 expeditions from the country and, by his own account, denied access to hundreds more. He decides who digs where, and reserves for the SCA — in effect, himself — the exclusive right to reveal their findings. Such is the level of paranoia that some archeological teams are scared even of their own success.

"There are people digging out there," says another UK specialist, "who are praying they won't find anything significant. If they do, they know the dig will be shut down until a certain individual arrives to take over. There are artefacts that have been excavated, only to be put back until the certain personage gets round to visiting the site so that he can 'discover' them for himself." But exactly who are these people? Will they talk? Can any of this be proved? No surprise: noses are tapped, papers shuffled, but nobody steps up to the microphone or hands over the evidence.

What is certain is that Hawass himself feels no such inhibition. Offenders are characterised as "nuts", "amateurs" or "pyramidiots". To those on the wrong side of his outbursts, this marks him out as a bully. But to supporters he is a hero who has routed the old colonial powers of the English and French, and reclaimed Egypt for the Egyptians. This, for example, was his message to London: "If the BritishÉ want to restore their reputation, they should volunteer to return the Rosetta stone because it is an icon of our Egyptian identity. I don't want to fight anyone now, but if the British Museum doesn't act, we will have to employ a more aggressive approach with the government . . .

The artefacts stolen from Egypt must come back." Bloomsbury may blanch, but this kind of stuff plays well in Cairo. British libel laws make it impossible to repeat much else of what he says. The curator of an internationally famous museum, possessor of another precious artefact that Hawass wants returned, is denounced as a thief. "Ask any Egyptologist. He is known all over the world for buying stolen artefacts."

All this, and more, has helped cement Hawass's reputation. Anyone who puts on an Indiana Jones hat, sticks out his jaw and faces the foreigners down is stepping straight into his own legend. Hawass swats his critics like insects: "If you really look at other colleagues who maybe attack me and say I'm on the TV all the time, they run after the TV for an interview. And when they are interviewed, nobody listens to them because they are boring." His life is an epic struggle of good against evil. "I must battle daily with the forces of Seth, ancient god of evil and chaos and enemy of success, who appears in the form of careless tourists, greedy politicians, jealous colleagues and the destructive forces of nature." This does no harm to his swashbuckling image. People like to see a bit of passion: better a red-blooded, emotionally connected maverick than some dried-up time-server with dust in his veins. But there is a price for all this, and it has to be paid, by those who cross him, with damaged reputations and broken careers.

Hawass's most prolonged campaign of vilification has been against Joann Fletcher, the English archeologist who believed she had found the mummy of the ancient world's most famous beauty, Queen Nefertiti. I described her theory in two magazine articles in June 2003, preceding a feature-length documentary screened worldwide on the Discovery Channel. Hawass did not mince his words. "This lady," he said, "every Egyptologist in the world said she is nuts."

The theory involved a mummy first discovered in 1898 by a French archeologist, Victor Loret, in the tomb of the pharaoh Amenhotep II in the Valley of the Kings. The mummy, catalogued No 61072, was coffinless, naked, bald, with gaping holes in its face and chest, and was found lying in a small side chamber with two similarly frayed companions. Loret made three observations. On the floor near 61072 lay a woven hairpiece. The mummy was a man. It lacked a right arm.

Mummy 61072 was next examined in 1907 by Grafton Elliot Smith, professor of anatomy at Cairo School of Medicine, while he was preparing his famous tomb-by-tomb inventory of the royal mummies. He added two of his own observations. Also lying in the cell was a spare right forearm, flexed at the elbow; and the mummy was not, as Loret had reported, male. "It requires no great knowledge of anatomy," he wrote, "to decide that the excellently preserved naked body is a young woman's." He noted that the female genital area was "widely open and had been plugged with linen from within". The only possible reason for Loret's error, he guessed, was "the absence of hair" from the shaven head.

Fletcher's theory evolved over a dozen years until early 2003, when she travelled with a team from York University to x-ray the three mummies in situ. Her interest centred on the hairpiece described by Loret, which had pricked her curiosity, and which she tracked down and examined in the Cairo museum. She reasoned that it was likely to have belonged to the only shaven-headed mummy in the cell — 61072 — and that it was of a kind peculiar to royal women at the time of Nefertiti. But there was more.

The forearm found by Smith, and rediscovered among the mummy's wrappings in 2003, was likely also to belong to 61072 (the others had both arms intact). Its flexed position suggested its owner was royal. Further: the three mummies were likely to have been part of a family group which, if other experts were right, included the mother and brother of Nefertiti's husband, the pharaoh Akhenaten. The rare double piercing of her surviving ear was typical of a royal woman of the right period; so was the method of embalming. The attack on her face was untypical of damage caused by robbers looking for jewels inside the body cavity. More likely it was done spitefully, in revenge for the heresies of Akhenaten (who notoriously defied the priests of Amun and declared himself a living god). The mummy's long, swan-like neck closely resembled the famous painted limestone bust in the Berlin museum, and an impression on the mummy's forehead suggested that it had been bound in a headdress. The apparent age of the mummy at time of death was right for Nefertiti.

Nobody could come out with a theory like this and expect the godfathers of Egyptology just to roll over. For good reasons (academic rigour) and bad (possessiveness; vested interest in theories of their own), they were bound to sharpen their gimlets. Some accused Fletcher of naivety or "wishful thinking". Others complained about the findings being announced in the media, rather than in a scientific journal — a particular sin in academic circles. Some carried more weight. There were disagreements about the particular significance of the hairpiece, the double ear-piercing, the damaged face, the flexing of the arm, the age of Nefertiti at death, and the apparent age of the mummy. It was correctly argued that none of these things taken alone was absolute proof of identity. But "case not proven" was the worst any objective critic could come up with. There was a body of circumstantial evidence that was at least consistent with Fletcher's theory, and it was acknowledged that, with DNA testing of 3,000-year-old mummies not only unreliable but also banned by Hawass, absolute proof was unachievable. Yet Hawass went berserk. Fletcher's theory was "a pack of lies", he said. She had "cheated the world".