Viva Lost Egypt : O.C. archeology buffs go on expedition to the Luxor in Las Vegas (yes, Vegas) to view the resort’s over-the-top take on an ancient civilization.

He has stood before the Great Pyramid at Giza, excavated at Mendes in the northern Nile Delta, studied the tomb of Ramses II in Thebes, and led an ongoing expedition to the Precinct of the Goddess Mut at Karnak.

On this spring morning, however, Egyptologist Richard A. Fazzini is gazing at Luxor--the new Luxor, the one with a 30-story pyramid of bronzed glass towering over a gaudy golden sphinx that emits laser beams from its eyes, the one with amusement park-style thrill rides that star an archeologist who utters New Age platitudes and has “3-D psychic visions” during solar eclipses.

All of which begs a question: Just what is Fazzini doing here? Well, for starters, he’s looking slightly bemused. “No matter how hard we try,” he says with a shrug, “the public sometimes gets a different idea of archeology than archeologists have.”

Fazzini was in Las Vegas at the invitation of the Orange County society of the Archaeological Institute of America, which organized a field trip to the resort. Society president and founder Norma Kershaw admits that some members of the group figured she had to be joking when she first proposed the excursion, but they signed up anyway. The trip was a sellout.

While bringing archeology buffs to Luxor would seem, on the surface, to make about as much sense as sending a paleontology convention to those roadside dinosaurs near Palm Springs, the archeology buffs were more than willing to put up with the faux-Egyptian touches in return for a little gambling and a show or two.

The goal, Kershaw said, was “to have an educational weekend while having a good time”--a couple of nights on the Strip, coupled with a morning lecture (the trip also helped raise money for the group’s educational efforts in county elementary schools). Fazzini’s talk was on the history of Egyptomania, the fascination with all things Egyptian that started with the Romans and finds its ultimate expression in the newly opened Luxor.

In addition to his excavations, Fazzini heads the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian, classical and ancient Middle Eastern department, helping to oversee one of the world’s finest collections of Egyptian antiquities. In his lecture at Luxor, he expressed dry amusement at the resort’s over-the-top blend of carefully reconstructed authenticity and out-and-out fantasy.

“It is very hard for people not to associate Egypt with mystery,” he told his audience of about 50, crowded into a tiny, unfinished meeting room at the gigantic resort. “It’s almost silly to walk around a casino and say, ‘Is this accurate?’ ”

Later, when asked if it bothered him that the hotel perpetuates exotic visions of Egyptian civilization, Fazzini shook his head and said he takes it in the spirit of fun in which it is intended. “If this place had a sign out front that said, ‘If you take our Nile cruise, you’ll never have any need to go to Egypt or visit a museum,’ then I’d have a problem.”

Kershaw, a retired archeologist who excavated at Cyprus and other sites around the Mediterranean, was likewise in a tolerant mood. “I know it’s all done tongue-in-cheek, so it doesn’t bother me,” she said. “In a sense, it delights me, because it will stimulate people’s interest in the real ancient Egypt.”

Luxor opened in October, a $375-million “entertainment megastore” with 2,526 hotel rooms honeycombed along its inward-slanting walls. Contained within the towering central atrium are a 100,000-square-foot casino, seven themed restaurants, and an indoor canal carrying guests on a “Nile cruise.”

Historical consultants were called in to help guide the creation of indoor sculptures and wall murals, giving the resort a veneer of authenticity. There’s also a painstaking detailed recreation tomb of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, as it was found by Howard Carter and Lord Carnavon in 1922.

All the much-hyped attention to historical detail, however, exists alongside another vision of ancient Egypt that’s pure fantasy. The three-part thrill ride puts high-tech film effects at the service of a story line that’s a virtual grab bag of exotic myths about Egypt, some old (ancient connections to Atlantis) and some new (flying machines discovered in a pyramid beneath, um, Las Vegas).

Other fanciful touches in the resort include a pair of talking animated camels in the casino and an elaborate stage show, “Winds of the Gods,” about a Pharaoh whose resting place is disturbed by thieves. The show has a very un-Egyptian chariot race as its climax.

Luxor is part of a trend toward family entertainment in Las Vegas, the gaming mecca that in recent years has had to face competition from a steady growth of gambling in other parts of the country. It sits next door to Excalibur, with its fantasy castle motif, while farther along the Strip are such recent additions as the MGM Grand, with its “Wizard of Oz” theme, and the dueling pirates of Treasure Island.

As Fazzini pointed out, Luxor is not the first Las Vegas landmark to “use the ancient world as a sort of adult theme park”: the enduring Caesars Palace looked to ancient Rome when it opened in 1966.

The real-life Luxor is an Egyptian market town that has grown up around the southern half of the ruins of the ancient city of Thebes. Architecturally, the Las Vegas Luxor is modeled loosely on the Great Pyramid and the Great Sphinx at Giza.

Luxor, said Fazzini, is the latest in a long line of “Egyptianizing” buildings, his term for structures inspired by the monuments of ancient Egypt. In fact, he said, the new resort is probably “the most thoroughly Egyptianizing building in the United States.”

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The first to experience an Egyptian craze were the Romans, who conquered Egypt in 30 BC. European interest in ancient Egypt was revived during the Renaissance, but it was a somewhat skewed vision, according to Fazzini, filtered through Roman interpretations.

Europe got a truer picture of Egypt in the 18th Century, as an increasing number of travelers ventured there and returned with accounts of the pyramids. Egyptomania blossomed with the Napoleonic expeditions of 1798 to 1801, in which the ruler took an army of scholars along on a military campaign that ultimately proved disastrous to his reign.

Meanwhile, in North America, a new nation had been created by the Founding Fathers with mystical visions of old Egypt, fed by their ties to Freemasonry. The evidence is right there on the back of the dollar bill--the Great Seal, with its steep-sided pyramid topped by an all-seeing eye.

In many ways, ancient Egypt has come to be a “vector for symbols,” representing mystery, wisdom, lost knowledge and immortality, Fazzini said. Architectural reminders of an American fascination with Egypt are legion. The use of Egyptian-style obelisks for memorial markers, a practice transplanted from Europe, was first seen in Baltimore in 1792 and culminated in the Washington Memorial, dedicated in 1885.

Fazzini showed slides of a vast array of Egyptian-influence buildings in the United States: museums, libraries, insurance offices, Masonic halls, even prisons.

In a nod to ancient funerary practices, Egyptian touches were common in cemeteries through the 1920s, from gateways to memorial markers. One odd little marble marker from the 19th Century grouped a Nativity scene with a dog-sized sphinx looking lovingly at the baby Jesus; Fazzini described it as “Jesus, Mary and Joseph and their pet sphinx.”

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In the mid-19th Century, architect Franklin Webster Smith proposed an elaborate new capital complex borrowing architectural styles from across the world and earned some serious consideration from Congress. The design included a vast Egyptian hall and a model of the Great Pyramid and Great Sphinx on the Potomac.

“Does it remind you of any building you’re sitting in now?” Fazzini asked his audience. “We wouldn’t have to go to Las Vegas if they would have built this.”

With the growth of modern architecture in the 1920s, Egyptian influences largely disappeared from large public buildings, but the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 sparked a craze of Egyptian style in many smaller buildings--most notably, for Los Angeles at least, in elaborate movie palaces.

Grauman’s Egyptian theater in Los Angeles, most of which has been destroyed, was the epitome. Southern California, particularly San Diego and Los Angeles, was a center for Egyptian-style structures, from apartments and bungalow courts to real estate offices. “For whatever reason, Los Angeles is Fantasyland. The same is true of San Diego,” Fazzini said.

Luxor “is certainly, in a way, a descendant of the fancy movie palaces of the 1920s,” he added.

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Egyptomania goes on today, even outside Las Vegas. Memphis, because of the name connection, has always been Egypt-crazy, even in the age of Elvis. The new city zoo is an elaborate adaptation of Egyptian design, and the new sports arena is a pyramid.

Beyond architecture, there are other reflections of the craze, including a Utah company founded in the 1980s that mummifies its customers, going so far as to put a mask of the deceased onto the sarcophagus lid and copyrighting the term “mummification.”

Egyptomania has become a popular sideline for Fazzini. This month he goes to Paris to lecture on the subject, in conjunction with an exhibit on Egyptomania on view at the Louvre. It all started, he said, after his lecture in Las Vegas, when patrons at the Brooklyn Museum began asking him questions about popular exotic myths of ancient Egypt.

As a scholar, Fazzini said, he had been little aware of the common perceptions of Egyptian civilization. He started investigating, taking slides of Egyptian-influence buildings and haunting flea markets and antique shops in search of Egyptian-style posters, lamps, clocks and other curios.

“People seem to find it an interesting lecture subject,” he said.

The invitation from the Orange County archeological group allowed him his first look at Luxor, and he took the opportunity to snap slides for future lectures. When asked if the size and scope of the resort was more than he expected, he shook his head.

“The first time I had ever seen the real pyramids, many years ago, that was more than I had expected.”