Nina Burleigh
Bio: Nina Burleigh is the author of two widely praised books, The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian and A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer. Her articles have appeared in Time, the Washington Post, New York, the New York Observer, Elle, Mirabella, Redbook, Jane, Spy, Regardie's, the Chicago Tribune, George, on Salon.com, and many other publications. She has traveled widely in the United States, covering American elections, and extensively in the Middle East, reporting from inside Iraq during the 1990s on assignment for Time. She lives in New York with her family.
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Little more than two hundred years ago, only the most reckless or eccentric Europeans had dared traverse the unmapped territory of the modern-day Middle East. Its history and peoples were the subject of much myth and speculation--and no region aroused greater interest than Egypt, where reports of mysterious monuments, inscrutable hieroglyphics, rare silks and spices, and rumors of lost magical knowledge tantalized dreamers and taunted the power-hungry. It was not until 1798, when an unlikely ban... 
