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What she had actually done was offend his protocols. By allowing her findings to be revealed in the media, she had broken Hawass's rule that archeologists must not announce their own results. As he explained in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, that right was his alone.

"Archeologists must present us with official reports of their results. We then decide when, how, and whether to make an announcement in the media." The problem for the York team was that they were funded by a television channel that — inevitably in a competitive world — expected exclusivity. For this offence, Hawass said, they would be banned from all further work in Egypt (though, not untypically, the ban seems never to have been made official).

In early June 2003, he went further.

Not only had Fletcher broken the rules but she was a bad archeologist. He dismissed her as "a new PhD recipient" and claimed her theory was "based only on facial resemblance between the mummy and Nefertiti's bust, and on artistic representations of the Armana period in which the queen lived". In fact she had held her PhD for eight years (hardly negligible, even when measured against Hawass's 16), and the assertion that the identification rested on "facial resemblance" was clearly false. "Physical resemblance is weak evidence," is what Fletcher had actually said.

Then Hawass made a more serious claim. To be Nefertiti, the mummy would have to have been aged around 30 at time of death. Hawass now announced that x-ray analysis, which he had done with a professor from the American University in Cairo, "indicated that it was the body of a 16-year-old girl". This, as we shall see, was the first in a sequence of increasingly eccentric pirouettes. On August 20, 2003, the Egyptian State Information Service dropped a bombshell. "In an interview with Middle East News Agency," it reported, "Dr Hawass said that the mummy . . . was that of a man." And we did not have to take his own word for it: "That is what Fletcher's supervisor said."

The "supervisor" was the York team leader, Professor Don Brothwell, a world expert on human remains. He had said no such thing. Though he acknowledged that there had been some confusion (pace Loret), he had unequivocally identified the mummy as female. From the foothills of mere strangeness we now ascend to the peaks of farce. Only two paragraphs further on, the body changes sex again. "The mummy, which Dr Fletcher claimed to be that of a 25-year-old woman, turned out to be the mummified corpse of a female aged between 16 and 20," said the statement, which went on to quote Hawass directly: "That is what the head of the expedition proved. Therefore it cannot be the mummy of Nefertiti, because she died at 30 years old." In fact, Brothwell, who had the benefit of digital x-rays, had given the age range at anything between 18 and 30.

Hawass even denied the existence of the crucial hairpiece "because those who were with Fletcher at the time of the discovery denied seeing such an object". Did he really not understand that its discoverer was Victor Loret in 1898, and that Fletcher had seen it in the Cairo museum? Two days later came yet another sex change. According to The Times, Hawass now said the mummy was a 15-year-old boy. And so it went on. A week later, Hawass writes again in Al-Ahram Weekly: "After x-ray examination it was determined that the mummy was a girl about 15-20 years old."

Another week passed before Reuters yet again quoted him to the contrary — "I'm sure that this mummy is not a female". Reuters also asserted that Brothwell had concluded it was a woman only "because of a lack of evidence of male genitalia". This was just plain wrong.

In 1907, Grafton Elliot Smith had clearly described female genitalia, not just an absence of male, and so had Professor Brothwell, who noted also the typically female pelvis and collapsed left breast, as well as the mummy's "gracile" face and "long thin feminine neck". Hawass also now revised Nefertiti's age at death, raising it from 30 to 35, and thus out of the range that Professor Brothwell had proposed for the mummy.

On September 14, 2003, Hawass finally self-destructed. A short film, Tomb Raiders, was aired in the Sixty Minutes programme on Australia's Channel 9. In it, Hawass is seen with the reporter Tara Brown, examining mummy 61072 in its cell. Unlike the York team, they ignore protocol and wear no protective clothing. They prod at the mummy with ungloved fingers and lean over it, unmasked and dripping sweat. The following dialogue ensues: Hawass: If you look at the face and if you look at the body and this part, there is no one single evidence that can say it's a female, but it's more to me to be a male than a female.

Tara Brown: But didn't you once believe this was a young woman?

Hawass: No.