Weekly Websites

Tools for studying the Pyramid Texts online
Pyramid Texts Online
By Vincent Brown

Vincent has updated his Pyramid Texts Online website with the addition of a useful Dictionary of Middle Egyptian. On his blog, Vincent says that "This dictionary was created by Paul Dickson as a result of his frustration with the existing dictionaries and their arrangement around the approximate sounds of the words instead of their spelling, as dictionaries are usually organised". Vincent's blog continues to grow nicely.


Egypt's Natural Heritage at Risk
CultNat

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) annually publishes a list of endangered animal and plant species in each country. This list includes native mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, molluscs, insects and plants that have been assessed as being at risk of extinction on a global level (a Red Data list).
The Egyptian Red Data list (2002) includes 35 mammals, 20 birds, 6 reptiles, 10 marine fishes and mollusks and two plant species.
The majority of reports on these species makes a clear link to specific human activities, which because of their intensity, extent, or persistence, have negatively affected the habitat or condition of particular species.

Silence, Darkness and Light The Grand Egyptian Museum
By Ahmed Kamal Ali
Digital Library and Archives

Thanks to David Petersen for this link to a book which can be dowloaded free of charge (55 pages). Here's the Abstract:

How can the unique legacy of the most ancient of civilizations be represented within a single building? How can one building spans the area between heaven and earth, the space described in the cosmology of our pharonic ancestors?

Certainly, to design such a building is a unique challenge, and an unprecedented opportunity, on this most privileged of sites in the history of mankind, that a museum is to be constructed capable of linking the immemorial past with the distant future spanning both the horizons of the ancients and those as yet unseen.

Through the investigation of phenomenology, geometry, simplicity, purity and light, listening to the voice of silence, emerging to the light from the darkness, and by understanding the strength of simplicity after passing through complexity, This thesis offers an endless stream of ideas that challenge the mind.

The vision for the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) is to establish a place where people from different nations and cultures will be able to immerse themselves in the rich culture heritage from more than 5.000 years of Egyptian civilization. With the support of new technology, more effective and efficient dissemination of information can be achieved, enabling the New Museum to be a source of enjoyable, entertaining, educational and cultural experiences for all visitors.

This project aims at structuring a complex of exhibits and facilities, which will accommodate all Pharaonic periods, it will be the largest museum in the world, and will provide access to information and future knowledge. It results from the careful articulation of the problem and a subsequent ordering of constraints within the context of the competition proposal.

Virtual tour of the mastaba of Khafkhufu I
CultNat

This application is slow in Explorer, and I couldn't get it to work at all in Firefox, but if you like to read Old Kingdom inscriptions, this virtual walk-through is worth the effort. The CultNat website appears to be functioning rather more effectively than it used to. The navigation is clunky, but the site is worth exploring.

The Mastaba of Khafkhufu I is situated in the row nearest the great pyramid in the eastern cemetery, it lies south of the pyramid causeway and east of the three queens’ pyramids. The mastaba is in fact the southern chapel (G 7140) of the double-mastaba G 7130-40. The northern chapel (G 7130) is that of his wife.

The entrance of the Khafkhufu I chapel is from the east through the mastaba doorway to the external hall (A). The only decorated part of the external hall (A) is the western wall through which passes the corridor to the main offering-chamber (B) which is also decorated. The reliefs feature the tomb owner and his family. The walls of the offering chamber are fully decorated as characteristic of the old Kingdom tombs, and show decoration items of this period including the titles of Khafkhufu.

Ancient Egyptian Love Songs
The Eloquent Peasant

Margaret Maitland has a nice piece on her blog about love songs, timed to coincide with Valentine's Day, with a couple of very useful links.

Whether you love it or hate it, today is St. Valentine’s day, and while the Egyptians didn’t really have an equivalent, the closest they had to such a holiday would perhaps be the festivals of Hathor, who, as the goddess or love, beauty, music, fertility, and even drunkenness, would make a much more likely patron of lovers than a canonized Roman martyr.

Although the Egyptians didn’t go in for roses and heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, they did have lots of love poetry. Many people don’t realize what a rich body of literature the ancient Egyptians had, from fun stories about the adventures of magicians, to epic poems about epic journeys, and even what one might call the Egyptian version of the fairytale Rapunzel.

See the above pages for full details.