He has held the mummified head of King Tut in his hands and says he is close to solving the mysteries of the boy king's death and the relation of the two fetuses found in Tut's 3,000-year-old tomb.

For more than 30 years, Zahi Hawass -- a charismatic and formidable archaeologist who is the official keeper of Egyptian antiquities -- has worked to promote and protect the life of Tutankhamun, who became king at age 9 and died a decade later.

"I am the happiest man on Earth because I live with the pharaohs," said Hawass, secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, who recently gave President Obama a personal tour of the pyramids.

"I live in the past, " he boasted. "The life of the pharaohs has magic and mystery. It makes me more alive."

The long-anticipated "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" exhibition recently opened at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, where it will remain until next March. The exhibition comes 30 years after Tutmania swept the United States, with the first show touring seven cities.

"Tut was a boy who became a king. His story has captured the hearts of everyone around the world, " Hawass said.

It was Hawass who helped convince the Egyptian parliament that the King Tut show should go abroad once again (part of a shrine had been severely damaged in the first exhibition). The new show features 130 artifacts, 10 of which were in the 1979 show. Fifty of the items are from Tut's tomb, opened by British archaeologist Howard Carter on the morning of Nov. 27, 1922. The rest of the artifacts are from the tombs of Tut's royal predecessors and relatives.

In an interview, Hawass spoke of his search for the tomb of doomed lovers Cleopatra and Marc Antony, the early results of DNA testing of the fetuses found in Tut's tomb, and the likely cause of Tut's early demise based on his CT scans. He also said he was wowed by Obama.

"I have figured out that Tut was not murdered," Hawass said, debunking a long-held theory that Tut was murdered by a blow to the head. "I took the mummy out of his coffin. There is a fracture to his left leg. There could have been an infection, but I do not believe that was the cause of death."

He smiles before continuing. "Tut had a disease, that is all I will say -- for now." As for the fetuses, which were presumed to be the unborn daughters of Tut and his wife, Ankhesenpaaten, Hawass says the first DNA analysis is done. A second DNA analysis to prove any relationship is to be completed this summer and an announcement is expected by September.

His time spent studying Tut has made him "feel very close to the boy. He was a young man who loved sports. He married his half sister at around age 9. He was a good hunter, who maybe had problems in his feet. He used walking sticks. He was around 5 feet, 6 inches tall."

As for Cleopatra, the celebrated queen of Egypt, Hawass, who has two grown sons, said, "I have been in love with Cleopatra since I was a boy. I believe she is buried in a tomb beside her palace, which is about 30 miles west of the city of Alexandria. We have found a number of statues, and a large cemetery. We are doing a radar survey to see if there is a burial chamber underneath."

He also is sending a robot into a hidden area behind a secret door he discovered deep inside the Great Pyramid. He chuckled recalling the visit to Egypt by Obama last month.

"We entered the Great Pyramid and Obama asked me where the queens had been buried. I said they were buried apart from the kings. He said, 'Does this mean Michele and I would not be buried together?' Then we were looking at some hieroglyphs and he looked at one of a man with big ears. He said, 'That looks like me!' Obama is a man of great power and simplicity."

At 62, Hawass, the son of a farmer who has been smitten with archaeology since he dusted the dirt off his first find, seems to be just warming up. He says his mission is to bring pride to the Egyptian people for their history and artistry, and to bring recognition and reward to his country.

Egypt was paid nothing when the first Tut exhibition toured, he said. "This time around, Egypt will get around $100 million.

"The pharaohs were a great people," Hawass beamed. "They believed in justice, and ruled through justice. We have to learn from them. Anyone who sees this show will feel more alive."

In an interview over lunch, the colorful Hawass was a study of contrasts. He had the gleam in his eye of an Indiana Jones, but the silver hair and pinstriped suit of a diplomat. He pounded the table with a fist to make a point, and then smiled and sipped Chardonnay. He sampled his pasta and declared it the worst he has ever eaten, telling the waiter the chef "should be sent straight to hell." Then he smiled again.

He periodically checked his cell phone, proudly noting that he limits conversations to precisely one minute and hangs up even if the other person is mid-sentence.

While the emperor of Egypt's antiquities has his share of critics who say he is a showman and a spotlight swindler, he also has his fans, who applaud him for enlivening the dusty field of archaeology.

"As far as Egypt is concerned, he is doing monumentally good work, and as far as this exhibit is concerned, he has been involved at every level," said Renee Dreyfuss, who installed the Tut exhibition and is the curator in charge of ancient art and interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "He does have his own way of doing things, but his ultimate reason for his calling attention to himself is to call attention to ancient Egypt."

For more information, call 415-750-3600 or visit www.deyoungmuseum.org/tut.

(E-mail Julian Guthrie at jguthrie(at)sfchronicle.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)