Sunday, September 02, 2007

Tutankhamun still revealing secrets

The Philadelphia Inquirer

This seems a bit strage, but Hawass is claiming to have found items in the tomb of Tutankhamun that were not captured on the official Cairo Museum inventory:

Egypt's top antiquities official was down in the fabled tomb of Tutankhamun a few weeks ago - doing a television interview, of all things - when he noticed something curious he had never seen before.

In a back room closed to public view, Zahi Hawass spotted a cluster of reed boxes crammed with plaster fragments and limestone seals used to stamp hieroglyphs. Intrigued, the scholar took a closer look and saw that both were marked with a trio of icons - sun, scarab and basket - whose meaning he recognized instantly: Neb-kheperu-re, the throne name of the boy pharaoh.

Eighty-five years after his tomb was discovered, and after his treasures have been ogled by millions of museumgoers, King Tut is still revealing surprises. In addition
to the seals, apparently left behind by the original excavators in the early 1920s, Egyptian workers recently found 20 sealed jars with the pharaoh's name in an old storage facility nearby. Neither group of items is part of the official Tut inventory at the Egyptian antiquities museum in Cairo, Hawass said in a phone interview.

See the above page for the full story.

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