" I had a special kind of life because I was perhaps the only actor in international cinema who didn’t work out of his home. My home was Egypt, but I was making films all over the world and living out of hotels.

Politics at home were getting more and more tense back then, and I was working with many Jewish people in the film industry. In the Nasser days, you needed an exit visa to leave the country, and I was afraid one day I would come home and find myself barred from leaving again. So I stayed away from Egypt for about 15 years.

But at some point, I lost my identity. I had a mixed culture: somehow Oriental, somehow Occidental — and the two were impossibly intertwined. I speak many languages, but I don’t have a mother tongue. I don’t speak any language without an accent, even Arabic. For Egyptians who watch my old Arabic films, my voice makes me unique. That different lilt and cadence added to my characters’ romance made them no less exotic than the parts I played in Lawrence of Arabia or Dr. Zhivago.

Living abroad, I acquired an Occidental culture. But my character never changed — and my roots, my heart, and my temperament remained Oriental. Then one day, President Gerald Ford introduced me to President Anwar Sadat in the White House, and it was that great peacemaker who convinced me to come back to Egypt. When I returned, it was as if I had never left. I found my roots and I found my real self again.

I identified with the people, and I fell in love with the warmth and the tendency towards melodrama that is so Egyptian. Hugging, touching, kissing — when you live abroad for a long time, you forget what it’s like to be close to everyone around you. In the Orient, you’re in love all the time — with your friends, with your parents, your brothers and sisters. In Egypt, you feel that you love nearly everyone you talk to, even if you forget about them afterwards.

I love Egypt. I think it’s the most fascinating country to visit, and I never get tired of it. I recently went on a trip to Luxor and Aswan with my son and his wife and my grandchildren. We Egyptians are very proud of our pharaonic identity and this great civilization. It is a history that is so ancient, it boggles the mind. Imagine: 4,500 years ago, Egyptians were building the pyramids without our modern construction tools. The pyramids are works of such magnitude and enormity that they can’t really be appreciated unless you’re physically standing under them and looking up at those vast blocks receding to a distant point in the sky. I never get tired of the temples, the monuments, and the tombs. They are, quite simply, fantastic.

I have been all over the world, and I have never really seen anything quite like what I see in Egypt. And we are just beginning to discover things. I think we haven’t discovered one thousandth of what Egypt holds, and in the next 20 years we’re going to learn more than what we have learned in all the rest of the history of Egyptology. That’s why Egypt Revealed is so important — because it is keeping time with the new discoveries.

In the past five years alone, we have learned so much about the way the ancient Egyptians lived and the social structures of the non-royal classes. When Dr. Zahi Hawass (a world famous expert in Egyptology) started excavating the tombs of the workers who built the pyramids, he revealed a whole new link in our past. We learned that these workers weren’t just slaves: They were Egyptians working on a national project. They had a social structure, religious beliefs, and funerary rituals that followed those of the nobility and royals.

In spite of the clues that archaeology is giving us about ancient Egypt, there are still so many questions left unanswered. And people are offering a thousand different theories to fill the gaps of our knowledge. Some believe the pyramids were built by aliens or colonists from the lost city of Atlantis. I don’t believe in these theories, but they are part of this whole mystery that keeps all of us enthralled — from archaeologists to mystics and everyone in between.

The great thing about ancient Egyptian history is that you can’t be sure about it. We have a good idea about dates, dynasties, kings, and queens. But you don’t quite know. There are lots of things one doesn’t quite know about Egypt. We still don’t know how they built the pyramids. We have a theory, but we’re just not sure. We’re not sure of anything.

We’re only just starting to discover and appreciate the relationship the ancient Egyptians had with astronomy. There appears to have been an incredible relationship with astronomy, which shows that architectural feats and mathematical knowledge and state-building were not the only accomplishments of this great civilization.

There is so much there just waiting to be discovered. When people formulate ideas about aliens and Atlantis, it’s because Egypt is mysterious. People love mysteries, and I, for one, would like to see them kept alive. Fortunately, there are still a few mysteries yet to be solved. "