Weekly Websites

I've been just a tad busy recently, so I've not done much casual surfing recently. Here are a couple of sites that I thought might be of interest:

AIGYPTOS
A Database for Egyptological literature

The AIGYPTOS database was specifically created to enable the search for Egyptological publications by means of an elaborate subject indexing. It was developed at the Institute of Egyptology in Munich, Germany, and was available only locally for a number of years - therefore the language used for processing literature was German. An additional English version of AIGYPTOS is now available. Its specific aim is to allow queries using English keywords. Due to the limited time that was available for the creation of the English version, it has not been possible to translate the contents of all the searchfields into English, so that the entries in several fields, e.g. "place of publication", "language", "comment" et al. are still in German.

Nekhen News
The Hierakonpolis Expedition's newsletter

Download and read back issues of Nekhen News, the Hierakonpolis Expedition's Newsletter, in PDF format - which is accessible by using Adobe Acrobat Reader (which is free to download).

The earliest of these Nekhen News editions are truly archaeological documents in their own right, and you can read how the excavations at Hierakonpolis took shape, as well as see how we developed our 'Friends' organisation.

More websites from which second hand books are available:
Joppa Books Ltd (incorporating ADAB Books)
http://www.joppabooks.com/
Thanks to Greg Pack for the link to the Used Book Search website:
http://www.usedbooksearch.co.uk/

mtDNA analysis of Nile River Valley populations: A genetic corridor or a barrier to migration?
Pubmedcentral

To assess the extent to which the Nile River Valley has been a corridor for human migrations between Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa, we analyzed mtDNA variation in 224 individuals from various locations along the river. Sequences of the first hypervariable segment (HV1) of the mtDNA control region and a polymorphic HpaI site at position 3592 allowed us to designate each mtDNA as being of "northern" or "southern" affiliation. Proportions of northern and southern mtDNA differed significantly between Egypt, Nubia, and the southern Sudan. At slowly evolving sites within HV1, northern-mtDNA diversity was highest in Egypt and lowest in the southern Sudan, and southern-mtDNA diversity was highest in the southern Sudan and lowest in Egypt, indicating that migrations had occurred bidirectionally along the Nile River Valley. Egypt and Nubia have low and similar amounts of divergence for both mtDNA types, which is consistent with historical evidence for long-term interactions between Egypt and Nubia. Spatial autocorrelation analysis demonstrates a smooth gradient of decreasing genetic similarity of mtDNA types as geographic distance between sampling localities increases, strongly suggesting gene flow along the Nile, with no evident barriers. We conclude that these migrations probably occurred within the past few hundred to few thousand years and that the migration from north to south was either earlier or lesser in the extent of gene flow than the migration from south to north.

By M Krings, A E Salem, K Bauer, H Geisert, A K Malek, L Chaix, C Simon, D Welsby, A Di Rienzo, G Utermann, A Sajantila, S Pääbo, and M Stoneking.
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and Department of Zoology, University of Munich, Munich, Germany
Am J Hum Genet. 1999 April; 64(4): 1166–1176.

The full paper is available on the above site in PDF format.

Marianne Luban's home page
http://www.geocities.com/scribelist/
Marianne Luban has placed some of her work online at the above address, including her detailed speculation about the mummies in KV55, and her drawn reconstructions of the faces of pharaohs and other royal personages. There is also a page dedicated to Senenmut.

The Pyramid of Pepi I at South Saqqara
The Nile Pharaoh
Moataz has updated his blog with a description of the pyramid of Pepi I, complete with diagrams and photographs.

Cornucopia
http://www.cornucopia.org.uk/
If you live in the UK or are visiting, this is quite a useful tool for finding some of the lesser known collections which house ancient Egyptian artefacts.

Welcome to Cornucopia, an online database of information about more than 6,000 collections in the UK's museums, galleries, archives and libraries. Whether you are interested in painters or politicians, dinosaurs or space travel, the Romans or the Victorians, Cornucopia can tell you what is available and where to see it.