Some context: Hafez al-Assad (Arabic: HfZ l'sd Hafiz al-`Asad, Levantine pronunciation: ['ha:fez? el'?asad]
In the aftermath of the 1963 coup, at the First Regional Congress (held 5 September 1963) Assad was elected to the Syrian Regional Command (the highest decision-making body in the Syrian Regional Branch). While not a leadership role, it was Assad's first appearance in national politics; in retrospect, he said he positioned himself "on the left" in the Regional Command. Khalid al-Falhum, a Palestinian who would later work for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), met Assad in 1963; he noted that Assad was a strong leftist "but was clearly not a communist", committed instead to Arab nationalism.  During the 1964 Hama riot, Assad voted to suppress the uprising violently if needed. The decision to suppress the Hama riot led to a schism in the Military Committee between Umran and Jadid. Umran opposed force, instead wanting the Ba'ath Party to create a coalition with other pan-Arab forces. Jadid desired a strong one-party state, similar to those in the communist countries of Europe. Assad, as junior partner, kept quiet at first but eventually allied himself with Jadid. Why Assad chose to side with him has been widely discussed; he probably shared Jadid's radical ideological outlook. Having lost his footing on the Military Committee, Umran aligned himself with Aflaq and the National Command; he told them that the Military Committee was planning to seize power in the party by ousting them. Because of Umran's defection, Rifaat al-Assad (Assad's brother) succeeded Umran as commander of a secret military force tasked with protecting Military Committee loyalists.  In its bid to seize power the Military Committee allied themselves with the regionalists, a group of cells in the Syrian Regional Branch that refused to disband in 1958 when ordered to do so. Although Aflaq considered these cells traitors, Assad called them the "true cells of the party"; this again highlighted differences between the Military Committee and the National Command headed by Aflaq. At the Eighth National Congress in 1965 Assad was elected to the National Command, the party's highest decision-making body. From his position as part of the National Command, Assad informed Jadid on its activities. After the congress, the National Command dissolved the Syrian Regional Command; Aflaq proposed Salah al-Din al-Bitar as prime minister, but Assad and Ibrahim Makhus opposed Bitar's nomination. According to Seale, Assad abhorred Aflaq; he considered him an autocrat and a rightist, accusing him of "ditching" the party by ordering the dissolution of the Syrian Regional Branch in 1958. Assad, who also disliked Aflaq's supporters, nevertheless opposed a show of force against the Aflaqites. In response to the imminent coup Assad, Naji Jamil, Husayn Mulhim and Yusuf Sayigh left for London.  In the 1966 Syrian coup d'etat, the Military Committee overthrew the National Command. The coup led to a permanent schism in the Ba'ath movement, the advent of neo-Ba'athism and the establishment of two centers of the international Ba'athist movement: one Iraqi- and the other Syrian-dominated.
How long was Assad in Egypt?
A: 

Some context: Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on 16 August 1888 in Tremadog, Carnarvonshire (now Gwynedd), Wales in a house named Gorphwysfa, now known as Snowdon Lodge. His Anglo-Irish father Thomas Chapman had left his wife Edith after he fell in love and had a son with Sarah Junner, a young Scotswoman who had been engaged as governess to his daughters. Sarah was the daughter of Elizabeth Junner and John Lawrence, who worked as a ship's carpenter and was a son of the household in which Elizabeth had been a servant. She was dismissed four months before Sarah was born.
At the age of 15, Lawrence and his schoolfriend Cyril Beeson cycled around Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire, visited almost every village's parish church, studied their monuments and antiquities, and made rubbings of their monumental brasses. Lawrence and Beeson monitored building sites in Oxford and presented their finds to the Ashmolean Museum. The Ashmolean's Annual Report for 1906 said that the two teenage boys "by incessant watchfulness secured everything of antiquarian value which has been found." In the summers of 1906 and 1907, Lawrence and Beeson toured France by bicycle, collecting photographs, drawings, and measurements of medieval castles. In August 1907 Lawrence wrote home: "The Chaignons & the Lamballe people, complimented me on my wonderful French: I have been asked twice since I arrived what part of France I came from".  From 1907 to 1910, Lawrence read History at Jesus College, Oxford. In the summer of 1909, he set out alone on a three-month walking tour of crusader castles in Ottoman Syria, during which he travelled 1,000 mi (1,600 km) on foot. Lawrence graduated with First Class Honours after submitting a thesis titled The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture--to the End of the 12th Century, based on his field research with Beeson in France, notably in Chalus, and his solo research in the Middle East. Lawrence was fascinated by the Middle Ages with his brother Arnold writing in 1937 that for him "medieval researches" were a "dream way of escape from bourgeois England".  In 1910 Lawrence was offered the opportunity to become a practising archaeologist in the Middle East, at Carchemish, in the expedition that D. G. Hogarth was setting up on behalf of the British Museum. Hogarth arranged a "Senior Demyship", a form of scholarship, for Lawrence at Magdalen College, Oxford, to fund Lawrence's work at PS100 a year.  In December 1910, he sailed for Beirut and on his arrival went to Jbail (Byblos), where he studied Arabic. He then went to work on the excavations at Carchemish, near Jerablus in northern Syria, where he worked under Hogarth, R. Campbell Thompson of the British Museum, and Leonard Woolley, until 1914. He later stated that everything which he had accomplished he owed to Hogarth. While excavating at Carchemish, Lawrence met Gertrude Bell. In 1912 Lawrence worked briefly with Flinders Petrie at Kafr Ammar in Egypt.
What is an interesting fact about his travels?
A:
In the summer of 1909, he set out alone on a three-month walking tour of crusader castles in Ottoman Syria, during which he travelled 1,000 mi (1,600 km) on foot.