More re the search for Cleopatra

Dominican Today

An Egypt-Dominican archaeological team which excavates a dig to look for the tombs of Cleopatra and Marc Antony has made important findings, said Friday doctor Kathleen Martinez, the Dominican embassy's Cultural attaché in that Arab country and the group’s leader.

Martinez said the findings were possible by the work of leading researchers and Egyptian technicians, who’ve worked for more than four years in a Ptolemaic temple in the outskirts of Alexandria, where she believes Cleopatra and the Roman general are buried. “He had to be a moved to a point away from the city of Alexandria, to preserve the bodies of disgrace for the Romans, by then victorious agaisnt the queen and her ally.”

Tutankhamun buys Egypt a new museum

Guardian, UK (Will Hobson)

More than a million people have now seen the Tutankhamun exhibition at the O2 Centre, a popular success that, although it has made fewer headlines, matches Tut's first extravaganza in the 1970s, which packed out the British Museum for six months (tickets 50p) and criss-crossed America for three years. Its triumphant progress then (twice the number of people saw it at Seattle Art Museum as were living in Seattle at the time, for instance) earned the Egyptian Government a tidy sum by the standards of the day - $7million on the American leg alone - which was officially earmarked for a revamp of the display facilities at the treasures' permanent home, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Thirty years on, it's hard to think any of the money actually reached its destination. In fact it's hard to think of change of any sort disturbing the dusty, eternal dreams of the Egyptian Museum for large stretches of the last century. This incredible building offers many delights, not least the world's most magnificent collection of pharaonic art, but display facilities are not obviously one of them. Captions, wall panels, organisation by themes – all but none of the trappings of the modern museum corral the contents of its vast halls and atrium modelled on the interior of an Ancient Egyptian temple. Instead, its vast mother lode of splendours mutely await discovery, like Ancient Egypt itself, one of the best documented and, at the same time, most enigmatic civilisations in history.

Artist's impression of the proposed Grand Egyptian Museum next to the Pyramids. All this may soon be about to change. A new museum, the Grand Egyptian Museum, is due at any moment to be built on a 100-acre site next to the Pyramids.

Smuggled artefacts returning to Egypt

Al Ahram Weekly (Nevine El-Aref)

The two ancient Egyptian objects were saved for the nation when the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) succeeded in halting their sale in London and Amsterdam respectively as part of its campaign to stamp out the trade in illegally-smuggled artefacts.

The first object, which was listed for sale at Bonham's auction hall in London, is an inscribed limestone relief that was chopped off the tomb wall of the 26th-Dynasty nobleman Mutirdis. . . .

The relief appeared in Bonham's sale catalogue two weeks ago, and Hawass immediately wrote to the auction house requesting that the sale be stopped as the relief had been stolen and smuggled out of Egypt.

In the second case, a green 19th-Dynasty ushabti figure of a woman named Hener was removed from sale by auction with the help of Egypt's ambassador to Holland.

See the above page for the full story.

More re DNA testing to be carried out on mummy

Egypt State Information Service

More re the announcement by Zahi Hawass that an anonymous mummy is going to undergo DNA testing with a view to determining if it is Tuthmosis I.

A mummy found at the Valley of the Kings in Luxor might belong to Tohotmos I (1525 -1516 BC), father of Queen Hatshepsut of ancient Egypt, says the chief of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawwas.

Discovered outside the tomb of King Seti II during the last century, the mummy will be moved to the Egyptian Museum to undergo examination, Hawwas announced Thursday 29/5/2008. An Egyptian archeological team will run DNA tests and CT scans to know for sure if it is the mummy of Tohotmos I.

The remains of two other mummies will also arrive at the Egyptian Museum Friday 30/5/2008. The mummies, which belong to two women, had been discovered by Italian archeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni in 1817. Destroyed in the 19th century, the remnants of the two mummies were collected in coffins to move them to the museum with what is believed to be Tohotmos I Mummy. All this is done as part of a mummy study project that the SCA initiated. Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawwas inspected on Thursday three mummies found in Qirna area, west of Luxor city.

The mummies are due to be ferried to Cairo Friday to be thoroughly examined and to know if they have relations with Pharaonic kings and queens, amidst expectations that one of the mummies is royal. Hawwas inspected two more mummies inside Amenhotep tomb. The inspection was filmed by the cameraman of a foreign TV channel that accompanied Hawwas.

Egypt leads international campaign to restore its antiquities in world museums

Egypt State Information Service

Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities launched a campaign in cooperation with some Arab, Asian and European states to restore the prominent antiquities that were taken illegally from said countries.

Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawwas said that the council will invite a number of Arab and foreign countries including Palestine, Iraq, Mexico, Italy and Greece to convene under the UNESCO in order to discuss this issue and define the most prominent antiquities. Egypt will submit a proposal for UNESCO to restore the Egyptian antiquities in other museums, Hawwas added.

Rehabilitating Islamic Cairo

Al Ahram Weekly

Rehabilitating Islamic Cairo is part of the cultural heritage mission successfully accomplished by Jan Figel, the European commissioner for culture, education, training and youth, who was in Cairo last week to inaugurate a number of EU-funded cultural projects, Rania Khallaf reports

It is a long walk through the alleys of Khan Al-Khalili and Gammaliya to reach Wekalet Al-Maghrabi. On a sunny day the area is buzzing with tourists and street vendors, and this was just another routine day, nothing unusual. On one of the narrow streets of Wekalet Al-Maghrabi, however, a new mood had been growing. There, at 14 Wekalet Al-Maghrabi, stands the house of Farouk Abdel-Aal, which has been rebuilt and rehabilitated by the RehabiMed project sponsored by the European Union.

It was not only Abdel-Aal's house that was in need of urgent renovation to prevent imminent collapse. Twenty workshops specialising in producing metalwork such as plates and other household items were also in a state of deterioration. All were renovated and rehabilitated by the project. . . .

Wekalet Ahmed Al-Khatib, recently named Al-Maghrabi, includes four small industrial and traditional crafts for metal turning, metal washing and painting, manufacturing brushes and hand decorated brass. The wekala was constructed in the 18th century, and Ottoman architectural features are clearly visible. Shops and markets have always been a main feature of this relatively poor area, where urban development is slow.

Exhibition: Coptic fabrics on display in Florida, U.S.

Creative Loafing (Megan Voeller)

Unlike any other gallery or museum in the area, Ybor's Brad Cooper Gallery takes a foray into the fiber arts of the ancient world with an exhibit of Coptic textiles curated by Egyptologist Dr. Robert Bianchi. The roughly 20 woven fragments on display, which date to 400-800 A.D., offer a deep historical context for the mostly contemporary weavings on view in other local exhibitions. To be sure, the ancient Egyptians were proficient weavers of plain flax long before the cotton and wool weavings of the Coptic period were produced, but these cryptic relics -- characterized by intricate patterns, color and human and animal figures -- mark an evolutionary jump in the complexity of the craft.

The Copts, early Christians native to Egypt, were a multicultural group, steeped in classical Greek culture -- not only its mythology but the Greek practice of dyeing, spinning and weaving with wool and cotton fiber -- as well as emerging Christian iconography.

See the above page for more (it begins several paragraphs down this review of different fabric exhibitions in the area).

There's a press release in PDF format on the gallery's website.

Farouk Hosni remarks may harm UNESCO hopes

Al Ahram Weekly

How far will the campaign led by Israel succeed in preventing Farouk Hosni from becoming UNESCO's president, Nevine El-Aref asks

Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni is no stranger to criticism. For over 20 years he has been among the most controversial cabinet ministers, frequently locked in feuds with the National Democratic Party (NDP) and Islamist politicians as well as left-wing intellectuals.

But in what is perhaps the fiercest campaign against him to date, last week Hosni was accused by Israeli newspapers of upping the ante in increased diplomatic tension between Egypt and Israel after being quoted as saying he would burn Israeli books himself if he found any in libraries in Egypt. The remark could, as some suggest, thwart his bid to become the head of UNESCO.

Daily Photo - Temple of Luxor

The next few days are going to feature some photos from the Temple of Luxor. Most of my photos of this temple are actually in Luxor, for some reason, but I will be collecting those next week (I'll be going up to north Wales on the 5th, back on the 10th but I'll post a reminder that the blog won't be updated for those days nearer the time).

The Temple of Luxor is much smaller than that of Karnak, to which it was once connected by a row of sphinxes, but it still has a complicated story to tell. The temple was established under the reign of Amenhotep III. It was expanded and embellished by successive rulers, the best know of which are Tutankhamun, Horemheb, Ramesses II and Alexander the Great. As well as being dedicated to the deity Amun, it was also the focal point for the Opet festival, scenes of which are shown on the interior temple walls. The obelisk that can be seen in the background of the second photograph is one of a pair. Its partner is now, however, in Paris

As the first two photographs show, it has a mosque (Abu Haggag) built into the side of it, which shows the ground level prior to the excavation of the temple. The mosque can now be reached from the road side. Last year there was quite a lot of publicity when part of the Pharaonic temple was revealed behind part of the mosque - there's a summary of the find (dating to Ramesses II) on the National Geographic website.

Egypt to carry out DNA test on a mummy to determine if it's famed Pharoah

PR-inside.com

Egypt plans to conduct a DNA test on a 3,500-year-old mummy to determine whether it belongs to King Thutmose I, one of the most famous Pharoahs, the country's chief archaeologist said Thursday.

Zahi Hawass, Egypt's antiquities chief, said the test will be carried out on an unidentified mummy found in the ancient Thebes on the west bank of the Nile, what is today Luxor's Valley of the Kings.

Egyptian experts will also X-ray the mummy, Hawass was quoted as saying by the nation's Middle East News Agency.

Hawass said a mummy currently on display in the Egyptian Museum that was purported for many years to have belonged to Thutmose I does not actually belong to him. . . .

Egypt has acquired a $5 million DNA lab, funded by the Discovery Channel, which has become a centerpiece of an ambitious plan to identify mummies and re-examine the royal mummy collection. . . .

Hawass had long refused to allow DNA testing on Egyptian mummies and only accepted it recently on condition it would only be done by Egyptian experts. He has never disclosed full results of the examinations, sometimes on grounds of national security. Though Hawass has never explained the reasons for this, apparently there is concern the tests could cast doubt on the Egyptian lineage of the mummies.

See the above page for more details.

Also on the Associated Press site.

Sphinx in need of bird repellent

Egypt Daily Star News (Ahmed Maged)

The crowds of pigeons, doves and sparrows that have been landing regularly on several parts of the Sphinx indicate that the level of humidity is dangerously increasing within the stone structure of the statue, senior tour guide Bassam El Shammaa warned.

Visitors to the site have noticed birds settling on the statue’s head and the shaded northern part of the structure. Other birds sit in the shaded gaps that make up the Sphinx’s eyes and ears.

Besides leaving behind acidic droppings, the birds also slowly eat into the fragile stone as they pick the tiny grains of sand.

El Shammaa launched an on-line campaign last year called “Save the Sphinx,” in which he expanded on his theory that the rising groundwater levels endanger the monument, with water seeping into the stone and creating calcium deposits.

It is these calcium deposits, he says, that are attracting increased numbers of birds.

See the above page for the full story, with photograph.

Confluence Point Hunting

New Stuff from the Explorer School (Robert Twigger)

Getting to the Point

“It’s over there,” said Dave, “Somewhere.” I scanned the desert horizon. It was midday and the Egyptian landscape was flattened by the overhead sun. In a few minutes, maybe ten, we would be the first people ever to be at that specific point on the earth’s crust. 28N 31E to be precise. 28 00 00 N 31 00 00E to be very precise. There would be no distracting minutes and seconds, just the pure integers of latitude and longitude. The going got tougher, the desert surface gravelly and now stretching uphill. We were climbing up the humpy left side of a wadi, or dry riverbed. There was no vegetation visible anywhere in a 360 degree circle- I scanned hard but saw nothing except low dun grey hills and dry valleys. The only sight that drew the eye was a rock breaking the skyline. We had parked the 4×4 some way back and now I was out of breath, what with the heat and going uphill. Dave strode on manfully, pulling ahead. It was then I suspected, that like Hillary and Tenzing, only one of us would get to that sacred spot first. We both had GPS machines that checked our position but Dave’s was bigger, more authoritative. Plus he had a longer stride than me. It looked like I was about to assume the Tenzing position.

We were only climbing a small hill not a mountain and we weren’t interested at all in the summit. What drew us on was the promise of bagging a confluence point. A confluence point is where a degree line of latitude and longitude meet like 50N 25W or where a whole lot of lines meet like the North or South poles. It has to be a whole number and on land or within sight of land. There are 14,029 out there. There are 11,396 still waiting to be bagged. And Dave and I were after 28N 31E , somewhere in the Egyptian desert between the Nile and the Red Sea.

The reality of archaeology

LoHud.com (David Germain)

It's a slow news day, so forgive the slight side step from the specific (Egyptology) into the general (archaeology). I've been enjoying the various responses to the new Indiana Jones movie from many archaeologists who, whilst generally enjoying the whole series, are appalled by the chaotic image of archaeology that the scenes portray. This article contrasts the gung-ho approach of Indiana Jones to the fin-grained reality of archaeology as it is actually carried out today. It also raises concerns about looting.

When Indiana Jones managed to retrieve the trinket he was after in the opening moments of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," he pretty much wrecked everything else in the ancient South American temple.

Though he preaches good science in the classroom, the world's most famous archaeologist often is an acquisitive tomb raider in the field with a scorched-earth policy about what he leaves behind.

While actual archaeologists like the guy, they wouldn't necessarily want to work alongside him on a dig.

Real experts in antiquities acknowledge that the movies are pure fiction. Still, they cringe at the way Indy manhandles the ancient world.

"There are codes of ethics in archaeology, and I don't think he would be a member. Not in good standing, anyway," said Mark Rose, online editorial director for the Archaeological Institute of America.

In a career spanning 27 years and four films, Indy has been both a blessing and curse for the musty world of archaeology, fanning interest in the field beyond academic circles but doing a Hollywood number on how the job actually works.

In 1989's "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," nerdy Professor Henry Jones Jr. tells students that 70 percent of archaeology is done in the library and advises them to "forget any ideas you've got about lost cities, exotic travel and digging up the world. We do not follow maps to buried treasure, and 'X' never, ever marks the spot."

Then he puts on his fedora, smashes through crypts, kills scores of Nazis and desecrates a grave by using a human leg bone as a torch. And, in one scene, "X" really does mark the spot.

The reality of archaeological field work involves large groups of workers painstakingly sifting through grids to retrieve artifacts as mundane as pottery fragments.

See the above page for the full story.

Daily Photo - Karnak

Fred Sierevogel sent me this photograph and asked me to identify it, but I'm afraid I cannot be of much help. The statue is located in the Great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak and shows the deity Amun accompanied by a second figure whose head is missing.

I cannot find out if the statue is contemporary with the Hypostyle Hall or was placed there at a later stage. Nor can I find out for sure if there are any inscriptions on it. I've looked at all my books and had a hunt around the web but I've found nothing conclusive. It is all too easy to eat up the hours trying to find out this sort of information! If anyone has any useful information on the subject I'll update this post.

I really need to get back to Luxor in the next year or so and spend some serious time at Karnak!

Archaeologists find ancient army HQ in Sinai

Reuters AlertNet (Jonathan Wright)

Egyptian archaeologists have discovered what they say was the ancient headquarters of the Pharaonic army guarding the northeastern borders of Egypt for more than 1,500 years, the government said on Wednesday.

The fortress and adjoining town, which they identify with the ancient place name Tharu, lies in the Sinai peninsula about 3 km (2 miles) northeast of the modern town of Qantara, Egyptian archaeologist Mohamed Abdel Maksoud told Reuters.

The town sat at the start of a military road joining the Nile Valley to the Levant, parts of which were under Egyptian control for much of the period, the government's Supreme Council for Antiquities said in a statement.

The archaeologists, led by Abdel Maksoud, have been working on forts along the road since 1986 but it was inscriptions found this year which clinched the identification, he said.

The inscriptions mention three Pharaohs -- Tuthmosis II, who ruled from about 1512 BC and who built one of the military installations along the route, Seti I and Ramses II, who between them ruled Egypt from 1318 to 1237 BC, it added.

The site contains the remains of a mud-brick fortress dating from the time of Ramses II and measuring 500 metres (547 yards) by 250 metres, with towers four metres high, it said.

Associated Press

The ancient military road, known as "Way of Horus," once connected Egypt to Palestine and is close to present-day Rafah, which borders the Palestinian territory of Gaza.

Archaeologist Mohammed Abdel-Maqsoud, chief of the excavation team, said the discovery was part of a joint project with the Culture Ministry that started in 1986 to find fortresses along that military road.

Abdel-Maqsoud said the mission also located the first ever New Kingdom temple to be found in northern Sinai, which earlier studies indicated was built on top of an 18th Dynasty fort (1569-1315 B.C.).

A collection of reliefs belonging to King Ramses II and King Seti I (1314-1304 B.C.) were also unearthed with rows of warehouses used by the ancient Egyptian army during the New Kingdom era to store wheat and weapons, he said.

Egypt Daily Star News

An undated picture released by the Supreme Council for Antiquities on May 28, shows a carving of the ancient Egyptian sky-god Horus dating from the reign of Egypt's well known pharaoh Rameses II (ca. 1279-1213 BC) discovered in a temple dedicated to Horus located in the largest military complex excavated in the ancient 18th-19th Dynasty city of Saro in North Sinai.

Yahoo! News

An ancient Egyptian inscription which was found in what archaeologists believe is the fortress town of Tharu in northern Sinai, is seen in this undated handout photo made available May 28, 2008.

Modernity meets monasticism in Egypt's desert

Yahoo! News (Will Rasmussen)

I met Ruwais St Anthony in 2006 - and as well as being a very good communciator he is certainly gregarious. The monastery is an amazing place. Tour guides are not permitted to explain the monastery and this is a job that the designated monks carry out very effectively. If you are visiting St Anthony's Monastery you should make sure to visit The Monastery of St Paul at the same time - it is quite near and it has a very different feel to it.

A speck of green in a sea of sand, St. Anthony's Monastery in Egypt welcomes those seeking God in silence broken only by the whisper of the wind.

Monks at what is considered by many to be the world's oldest active Christian monastery still rise before dawn to chant and pray just as their predecessors did for more than 1,500 years.

Now, they also carry mobile phones, send e-mails and maintain a website (http://www.stanthonymonastery.org), embracing modernity that has helped sustain the ancient monastery, nestled beside a spring where Egypt's eastern desert meets the craggy Red Sea mountains.

But the changes have sent some monks fleeing to a more austere existence in nearby mountain caves.

"There is nothing wrong with microwaves or mobile phones -- they save time," Egyptian monk Ruwais el-Anthony, who has lived at the monastery for more than 30 years, said through a bushy white beard. "But God will ask you what you have done with the time that was saved."

The monastery, which was founded in 356 AD, has survived Bedouin raids, the Islamic conquest of Egypt, and wars between Egypt and Israel that turned the area into a combat zone.

Almost all the monks here are Egyptian Coptic Christians, a minority faith in the most populous Arab country, which is about 90 percent Muslim. Most Christians in Egypt belong to the Coptic Orthodox church, which gives allegiance to its own Pope in Egypt, Shenouda III.

Once closed off from marauding Bedouins behind towering white stone walls, the monks now open iron doors, engraved with Coptic writing, to busloads of tourists and pilgrims.

The monks raise chickens, grow fruit, and lead tour groups through the compound's 15th century church, which is built above the oldest monk cells ever discovered, dating from the fourth century, the monks say.

Monks believe a recently discovered grave under the church is that of St. Anthony himself.

"When I came here, it was very primitive and totally isolated," monk Athansious el-Anthony, 62, said.

When he first arrived in the late 1960s, the only visitors were Egyptian soldiers demanding water during Egypt's war with Israel. The monastery was near the front-lines of fighting in the war, which began in 1967.

Now, a new road through the desert brings busloads of visitors, most from Europe and Russia.

Only the most gregarious of the 120 monks at St. Anthony's deal with visitors. The others isolate themselves in their rooms or spend their days praying in the caves.

See the above page for the full story.

Daily Photo - Photoshop'd images

These photographs were sent to me by Ben Morales-Correa. The first is one of mine and the second is one that he took, copied from his All About Egypt site - both have been manipulated to look like artwork in Photoshop. Really good fun. Thanks Ben! It is nice to have something a bit different to post.

Ben has a Photoshop tutorial site at the following address:
http://www.bmcphotoart.com/

Portico found in Nile at Aswan

National Geographic (Andrew Bossone)

There have been various bits of news trickling out of Egypt about underwater discoveries in the Nile at Aswan. Here's the latest.

Archaeologists have discovered a portico, or covered entryway, of an ancient Egyptian temple beneath the surface of the Nile River.

The entryway once led to the temple of the ram-headed fertility god Khnum, experts say.

A team of Egyptian archaeologist-divers found the portico in Aswan while conducting the first-ever underwater surveys of the Nile, which began earlier this year.

"The Nile has shifted, and this part of the temple began to be a part of [the river]," said Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. . . .

Today's Nile obscures many objects from ancient times, and archaeologists believe the underwater excavations will reveal other significant artifacts.

The massive portico is too large to be removed during the current excavation, but archaeologists removed a one-ton stone with inscriptions that could date from the 22nd dynasty (945-712 B.C.) to 26th dynasty (664-525 B.C.).

The stone itself could be much older, however, because like many objects throughout Egyptian history, the original materials of the Temple of Khnum were reused to construct newer buildings.

See the above page for the full story, which is accompanied by a photograph of the one-ton stone with its inscriptions.

Antiquities, the World Is Your Homeland

New York Times (Edward Rothstein)

James Cuno's new book has generated a lot of interest in the media and on individual blogs. He has published this book at a good time, when issues of repatriation and the ownership of heritage are very much in the forefront of discussions amongst those concerned with the management of art and heritage collections. If you need a username and password for this article enter "egyptnews" in both fields.

To what culture does the concept of “cultural property” belong? Who owns this idea?

It has, like much material property in the last 50 years, often changed hands. And in doing so, it has also changed meanings and grown in importance. It now affects the development of museums, alters the nature of international commerce and even seems to subsume traditional notions of property.

It was brought to modern prominence in 1954 by Unesco as a way of characterizing the special status of monuments, houses of worship and works of art — objects that suffered “grave damage” in “recent armed conflicts.” In its statement Unesco asserted that such “cultural property” was part of the “cultural heritage of all mankind” and deserved special protection.

But the framers of that doctrine with its universalist stance would hardly recognize cultural property in its current guise. The concept is now being narrowly applied to assert possession, not to affirm value. It is used to stake claims on objects in museums, to prevent them from being displayed and to control the international trade of antiquities.

It is critically surveyed in an illuminating new book, “Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage” (Princeton) by James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago and former director of the Harvard University Art Museums. The idea is as troubling as Mr. Cuno suggests.

See the above page for the full story.

If you are interested in this topic, David Gill keeps tabs on heritage ownership news and issues on his Looting Matters blog.

Ramesses in custody

Egypt Daily Star News

There's a rather sad photograph on the above page, showing the statue of Ramesses II in its new location awaiting the construction of the new Grand Museum of Egypt (the most recent estimate for which I have seen is 2010). Here's part of the caption:

The 3,200-year-old massive statue of Ramses II remains in a protective shed in Cairo on May 26. After years of controversy, based on worries that heavy pollution was damaging the statue, the 83-tonne, 11-meter high pink granite colossus was moved on August 25, 2006 in a ten-hour operation using two flatbed trucks through the city after standing for 50 years in a downtown Cairo square, hemmed in by bridges, an underground railway and a mosque, to stand closer to its original location in Giza, near the pyramids plateau, just south of the Egyptian capital.

ESB News Update May 2008

The Egypt Society of Bristol News Update (in PDF Format)

The ESB generously share their newsletter with visitors to their site. Although much of the newsletter is concerned with membership issues, there are a number of good lecture summaries which may be of interest to non-members:

• The Politics of Placement - The Development of the New Kingdom Theban Necropolis, by Dr JJ Shirley (University of Wales, Swansea)
• Viscount Castlereagh in Egypt and the Levant 1841-2, by John Ruffle (lately of the Oriental Museum, University of Durham)
• Just Who Was Tutankhamun? by Dr Aidan Dodson (Chairman of ESB)
• The Pyramid of Ahmose I at Abydos, by Dr Stephen P Harvey (Stony Brook University, USA)
• The Secret Lives of the Ancient Egyptians - Love, Laughter, Fear and Hieroglyphs, by Angela McDonald, University of Glasgow

Book Review: The Atlantis Story - A Short History of Plato's Myth

Bryn Mawr Classical Review (Reviewed by Lynn LiDonnici)

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato's Myth. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007.

We live in a time of parallel historical 'realities,' or perhaps more properly, mentalities: those constructions and parameters within which the scholarly community generally operates, and those of popular culture. Although these occasionally may wave to each other in the distance as they pass on the highway, in many cases they exist in conceptually opposite corners, swords drawn in active hostility. The phenomenon of this alienation between scholars and the general public, in which each side battles to own or control the categories proof, evidence, objectivity, critical distance, the scientific method and scholarly authority, has been examined in several studies over the last ten years or so, yielding fascinating analyses of various controversies, including the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the archaeology of Palestine-Israel-Jordan, the real existence of Noah's Ark, the split between mainstream Egyptology and certain elements of Mormonism, the biography of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, and of course anything and everything mentioned in The DaVinci Code.

Book Launch: Women on the Nile

The book Women on the Nile: The Writings of Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale and Amelia Edwards, by Professor Joan Rees (Rubicon Press), has been announced by Stacey International. It will be launched by the Friends of the Petrie at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL (London, UK), on 27th June 2009, 1930-2030. For those interested in attending the full address for the Institute is 31 Gordon Square London WC1H 0PY.

By combining extracts from their most famous works with Rees' insightful essays, Women on the Nile illuminates the life and writings of three remarkable women and captures something of the romance of 19th century travel to the East.

Harriet Martineau was a doughty and influential campaigner for multiple social causes; Florence Nightingale became a universally acclaimed reformer of nursing and hospital practices; Amelia Edwards, formerly a novelist and prolific professional writer, returned from Egypt to found the Egypt Exploration Society and endow the first Chair of Egyptology at a British University.

All three were independent minded women of strong character and exceptional gifts. They were accomplished writers each with a distinctive style, and their accounts of their Nile journeys are richly individual and full of life, thought and observation.

Weekly Websites - Faiyum part 2

New Kingdom

The New Kingdom is something of a black hole in the Faiyum. During the Middle Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period the Faiyum's vast lake was at around 20m above sea level but research has suggested that for a 200 period between 3100 and 2900BP the lake reached lows of 10m below sea level (Fekri Hassan 1986 - let me know if you want the reference). Perhaps the Faiyum was simply factored out of Egyptian economic thinking until the Ptolemaic period.


Graeco-Roman

Digital Egypt

During the periods preceding the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 BC, the Fayum was most prominent in the Middle Kingdom (2025-1700 BC). In the Ptolemaic Period, the Fayum was one of the main regions where Greeks settled.

The Ptolemies founded a number of towns around the Fayum lake. Although some of them are of considerable size, none of them had the administrative status of a city (polis). These sites continued to flourish into the mid and late first millennium AD. They are often well preserved (including organic material such as wood and papyrus), and therefore they are an important source for settlement plans and architecture, and daily life objects, especially of the late Roman and Byzantine Periods. However, many of these sites were excavated by researchers hunting exclusively for papyri; little attention was paid to other finds.

Crocodilopolis

Crocodilopolis or Krokodilopolis (Greek: Κροκοδείλων πόλις) or Ptolemais Euergetis or Arsinoe (Greek: Ἀρσινόη) was an ancient city in the Heptanomis, Egypt, the capital of Arsinoites nome, on the western bank of the Nile, between the river and the Lake Moeris, southwest of Memphis, in lat. 29° N. Its native Ancient Egyptian name was Shedyet.

In the Pharaonic era the city was the most significant center for the cult of Sobek, a crocodile-god. In consequence, the Greeks named it Crocodilopolis, "Crocodile City", from the particular reverence paid by its inhabitants to crocodiles. The city worshipped a "sacred" crocodile, named "Petsuchos", that was embellished with gold and gems. The crocodile lived in a special temple, with sand, a pond and food. When the Petsuchos died, it was replaced by another. After the city passed into the hands of the Ptolemies, the city was renamed Ptolemais Euergetis. The city was renamed Arsinoe by Ptolemy Philadelphus to honor Arsinoe II of Egypt, his sister and wife, during the 3rd century BCE.

The Soknopaiou Nesos Project (Dimai)

The Soknopaiou Nesos Project can be defined as a complex idea that developed in the years. At the beginning the only aim of the Joint Expedition was to document the site with modern topographical and archaeological techniques of survey. The archaeological area was surveyed in two seasons (2001 and 2002). A preliminary record of all the visible buildings was also done. Contemporary, other two different researches were begun, one relating the record and study of the Greek literary papyri coming from Soknopaiou Nesos and one on the bibliography and old images of the site. For this last research a great help came from the Kelsey Museum of Ann Arbor that provided us freely many photographs from its archive. The collection of the bibliography is still in progress and it will be a long task especially because of the great number of papyri published. In fact, we would like to realize in Lecce an archive on Soknopaiou Nesos both digital and on paper.

As is well known, Soknopaiou Nesos is one of the most important source of information on the Graeco-roman society thanks to its excellent state of preservation and not only for the past findings of papyri. Still it is a very rich source of information for different scientific matter. For this reason we started to imagine a more complex enterprise that can involve scholars and specialists in an interdisciplinary and wide study.

Qasr Qarun (Dionysias) by Jimmy Dunn

Near the western edge of Lake Qarun in the Fayoum, Qasr Qarun marks the location of the ancient town of Dionysias, now located near the modern village of Qarun. During ancient times, it was the beginning (or end) of the caravan route to the Bahariya Oasis, and thus, of some importance. The town was cleared by a Franco-Swiss archaeological team in the 19401s and 1950s and an epigraphic survey was conducted in 1976, but has since been the subject of several restorations projects.

The town is spread out north and south and is mostly in ruins save for a few structures that are worth mentioning. The Roman bath is a mere outline on the ground as are most of the houses, but a few still sand, at least partially. Some even have fresco decorations on the interior walls. The most noteworthy of these is located just east of the Roman fortress. Thermal baths with frescoes were discovered here in 1948, but the desert has long since reclaimed them.

Here, we also find a most interesting temple dedicated to Sobek-Re, that is sometimes referred to as the "Temple of Stone", located in the middle of the ancient town. It dates to between 323 and 330 BC during the Ptolemaic period, but has not been dated more precisely due to the absence of inscriptions.

Roman Karanis: Discoveries of the University of Michigan Expedition to Egypt (1924-1935)

This web site is an on-line version of the 1983 Kelsey Museum of Archaeology exhibition catalogue of the same name by Elaine K. Gazda. For the purposes of the electronic version, text has been abridged and some illustrations omitted; full text and illustrations can be found in the print version of the catalogue, which is still available for purchase from the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology (Go to Kelsey Museum Publications).

Faiyum Mummy Portraits

Mummy portraits or Fayum mummy portraits (also Faiyum mummy portraits) is the modern term for a type of realistic painted portraits on wooden boards attached to Egyptian mummies from Roman Egypt. They belong to the tradition of panel painting, one of the most highly regarded forms of art in the Classical world. In fact, the Fayum portraits are the only large body of art from that tradition to have survived.

Mummy portraits have been found in all parts of Egypt, but they are especially common in the Faiyum Basin, particularly from Hawara and Antinoopolis, hence the common name. "Faiyum Portraits" should therefore be thought of as a stylistic, rather than a geographic, description. While painted Cartonnage mummy cases date back to pharaonic times, the Faiyum mummy portraits were an innovation dating to the time of the Roman occupation of Egypt.

They date to the Roman period, from the late 1st century BC or the early 1st century AD onwards. It is not clear when their production ended, but recent research suggests the middle of the 3rd century.

Coptic

I couldn't find anything very useful about the history of Coptic monasticism in the Faiyum - there are photographs and bits and pieces of information but nothing detailed. This seems surprising to me, as some very famous Coptic saints are said to have come from the Faiyum, and there is a long tradition of Coptic monasticism in the area.

Sundry

UCLA Fayum Field School

Reports for three seasons of survey and excavation in the Fayum by the UCLA, who run a field school for Egyptian archaeologists. This is seriously well worth a look if you want to get a feel for how this sort of field operation works. The seasons covered are 2002-2004 inclusive.

Faiyum Tourism (E-C-H-O)

In early September 2005, the Minister of Culture - Farouq Hosni, approved an LE 3 million Egyptian-Italian project to renovate and develop archaeological sites in the area of Medinet Madi, located in Gharaq Depression in the Faiyum. Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities said that further excavations would be conducted in the Temple Area, dating to the Middle Kingdom and Ptolemaic period. Hawass added that the aeolian sand presently covering the cemetery adjacent to the temple would be removed, and the whole site would be renovated. This project is expected to be completed within 12 months, and aims at providing the facilities required to put this area on the local and international tourist maps.

The government has launched a development project of the Wadi al-Hitan (aka Wadi Zeuglodon or Whale Valley) Protectorate (nature reserve) in the Wadi Rayyan, Faiyum Governorate. The project aims at placing the area, newly inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, on the eco-tourist map.

The Endangered Faiyum (Geoffrey Tassie)

It is uncertain what form the development of the northern shore of the Faiyum will take, but it is certain that watching briefs are essential for any development in the area. Consultation with archaeological bodies such as the EAIS, the SCA and CultNat are crucial if the destruction of major settlements such as Kom W are to be avoided.

Tragically, it seems that it is already too late for some sites, such as Kom K, that are already in the midst of modern agricultural development projects. Moreover, the bringing of any tourists to the area puts not only the known sites at great risk, but may destroy evidence of sites which are yet to be discovered. Unless the tours are strictly managed and all the tourists are carefully briefed and monitored it could result in lithics and potsherds being removed (which is a criminal offense) by unsuspecting tourists who want a souvenir of their visit. Taking tourists to fragile sites in the Eastern and Western Deserts has resulted in appalling intentional vandalism as well as the careless and harmful handling of rock art. Rather than preserving the past, the opening up of the north shore of the Faiyum to eco-tourism may have the opposite of the desired effect, for it may destroy the very thing that the tourists want to see and archaeologists wish to preserve: the origins of one of the world’s earliest and greatest civilisations.

Lake level changes throughout the prehistory and history of the Faiyum

Archaeologists and geographers at UCL got together with a GIS expert to recreate the lake levels of the Faiyum Depression over a long period of time. The Faiyum's lake was fed by a run-off of the Nile called the Bar Yusef. This means that the lake reflects the Nile's flood levels and its annual fluctuations. This is a super visual indication of the area which could have been settled and farmed in the Faiyum at different times.

Daily Photo - Nile-side views

After undiluted Karnak for a week I thought I'd throw in some scenic shots of the Nile in Upper Egypt as it is today, as seen from the sundeck of a cruise ship.

More on the search for Cleopatra

AFP

An alabaster head of Cleopatra and a mask thought to belong to her lover Mark Antony have been found near Egypt's Mediterranean city of Alexandria, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Monday.

The two treasures, a bronze statue of Goddess Aphrodite and a headless royal statue from the Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled Egypt between 323 and 30 BC, were discovered by a joint Egyptian-Dominican Republic team of archeologists in the Tapsiris Magna temple, Hawass said.

Some 20 bronze coins stamped with Cleopatra's face were found in underground tunnels 50 metres (164 feet) deep in the archeological site, Hawass said.

The teams had originally been searching for Cleopatra's tomb but Hawass "categorically denied" that they were any closer to finding the queen's burial place.

"We have found nothing that indicates the presence of the tomb," he said, adding that the search for the tombs will restart in November.

GMANews.TV

Archaeologists from Egypt and the Dominican Republic have unearthed a bronze statue of the goddess Aphrodite and other artifacts during excavations at an ancient temple on Egypt's Mediterranean coast.

Also among the finds were the alabaster head of a Queen Cleopatra statue, a mask believed to belong to Mark Anthony and a headless statue from the Ptolemic era.

Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities announced the discoveries Monday. It issued a statement quoting the Council's chief, Zahi Hawass, as saying several deep cellars were discovered inside the Taposiris Magna temple, which was built during the reign of King Ptolemic II (282-246 B.C.)

Taposiris Magna is an ancient town located on Lake Mariut which is today called Abusir, near the northern coastal city of Alexandria.

For anyone unfamiliear with the site there's a feature about Taposiris Magna on the TourEgypt website, accompanied by a plan and photographs. A more detailed overview is provided in French by the Mission Francais des Fouilles de Taposiris Magna.

Hiding in plain view - identifying sites from satellite photos

POPSCI.com

A slideshow demonstrating how Sarah Parcak goes about finding ancient Egyptian sites using satellite photographs.

I should warn you that the site was down over the weekend, and when it first came back up I was only able to access the first couple of slides - but it seems to be working normally at the moment. Well worth a look if you're interested in how sites are found.

Lots of people live in Egypt. They always have. So how do you find ancient ruins when modern humans live and farm the land? Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham uses images from a hyperspectral satellite, which has cameras that take pictures in various wavelengths. She sorts the data to reveal the high concentrations of organic matter and phosphorus content that mark ancient Egyptian house mounds. Then she gets a closer look and starts to dig.

Equipo español excavará templo funerario de Tutmosis III en Luxor

Terra

A Spanish team lead by archaeologist Myriam Seco have been granted the concession to excavate, record and restore the Temple of Tuthmosis III in Luxor, starting work in autumn 2008. Eventually the plan is to prepare the site so that it can be opened to visitors.

Un equipo español dirigido por la arqueóloga Myriam Seco excavará a partir del próximo otoño el templo funerario del faraón Tutmosis III en Luxor, donde no se llevan a cabo trabajos desde los años sesenta, según informó a Efe la arqueóloga.

La Academia de Bellas Artes Santa Isabel de Hungría de Sevilla ha recibido la concesión del Consejo Supremo de Antigüedades para este proyecto realizado con la colaboración de la Embajada de España y financiado por la empresa de hidrocarburos CEPSA. . . .

El proyecto de "limpieza, restauración y puesta en valor del templo" incluye el trazado de mapas, documentación fotográfica y la adecuación del templo para que pueda ser visto por los turistas sin afectar en ningún momento los trabajos de restauración.

The World of Ahmed Bey Hassanein

SaharaSafaris

My round-up of Gilf Kebir websites was posted a couple of weeks back, but here's another site which may be of interest to anyone else who is interested in the background to exploration and survey in Egypt's Western Desert (with my thanks to Harry Robbins for sending me the link). The 1924 National Geographic article is particularly well worth the read. Hassenein Bey's excelelnt book The Lost Oases is now published by AUC.

Ahmed Bey Hassanein―an Oxford-graduate Egyptian, grandson of the last Admiral of Egyptian fleet, son of Al-Azhar Professor, diplomat, Olympic champion, Photographer, Writer, King's tutor, politician and a world-famous legendary explorer of the 1920s.

Those pages of SaharaSafaris.org are dedicated to information about his 1923 expedition in which he discovered Owenat in the Libyan Desert that brought him to fame and later a meteoric political career.

You'll find here the only occurrence on the web of the article he wrote to National Geographic (American magazine) in September 1924 complete with 47 impressive photos of his that were scanned directly from the magazine itself (he had movies too). Not only is his accounts are funny, witty, and romantic, but is terribly exciting as well. (A pdf version good for printing could be downloaded here).

Weekly Websites - The Faiyum part 1

The Faiyum is located around 80km to the southwest of Cairo, covering 12000km.sq. The depression is often described as an oasis, but it is not fed by artesian waters. It has a large lake which is supplied by the Bar Yusef, a run-off of the Nile which has fed the Faiyum depression for thousands of years. As the Nile and its floods have fluctuated, so have the lake levels, and depending on the technology available at the time, this has impacted how the Faiyum was occupied and exploited economically.

The area has been used from prehisotric times onwards. In was used for quarrying of gypsum and basalt in the Old Kingdom when the world's oldest road was created. In the Middle Kingdom pyramids and temples were built here when the capital of Egypt was moved to the El Lisht vicinity. The first efforts to manage the water supply were made during the Middle Kingdom, and more sophisticated water management systems were introduced from the Ptolemaic period onwards. The Faiyum has an important Coptic history as well.

I have had to split this post into two because of the amount of information available. For those of you who saw an earlier verison of this post I've sorted out the text colouring problem - edit the main text in Firefox and then when you want to standardize the colours go to Explorer. Sigh.

Before humans - Wadi Al Hitan

The Wadi Al Hitan (Valley of Whales) preserves Eocene fossils of whales and other shoreline marine species and plants which lived in and on the edges of the waters of the Tethys Sea which extended down into the Faiyum area at that time. It's lovely. If you get the chance to visit do go.

United Nations Environment Programme

Wadi Al-Hitan in Egypt’s Western Desert is the only place in the world where the skeletons of families of archaic whales can be seen in their original geological and geographic setting of the shallow nutrient-rich bay of a sea of some 40 million years ago. The fossils and sediments of different periods and levels reveal many millions of years of life and are valuable indications of the palaeoecologic conditions, of Eocene vertebrate and invertebrate life and the evolution of these ancestors of modern whales. Remarkably, two species still had small hind limbs, feet and toes. The quality, abundance, concentration and state of preservation of these fossils is unequalled.

UNESCO Evaluation 2004 (English and French)
This is a fascinating report in PDF format - if you are interested in the subject do have a look.

Over 40 million years ago the so-called Tethys Sea reached far south of the existing Mediterranean. This sea gradually retreated north depositing thick sediments of sandstone, limestone and shale, visible in three named rock formations which are visible in Wadi Al-Hitan. The oldest rocks are the Eocene Gehannam Formation, about 40-41 million years old, consisting of white marly limestone and gypseous clay and yielding many skeletons of whales, sirenians (sea-cows), shark teeth, turtles, and crocodilians. A middle layer, the Birket Qarun formation, of sandstone, clays and hard limestone, also yields whale skeletons. The youngest formation is the Qasr El-Sagha formation of late Eocene age, about 39 million years old. It is rich in marine invertebrate fauna, indicating a shallow marine environment. These formations were uplifted from the southwest, creating drainage systems, now buried beneath the sand, which emptied into the sea through mangrove-fringed estuaries and coastal lagoons when the coast was near what is now the Faiyum oasis, c. 37 million years ago. . . .

Three different species of Eocene whales have been identified with certainty at Wadi Al-Hitan. All are basilosaurids, the latest surviving group of archaeocete whales, and the group which are thought to have given rise to modern cetaceans.

Prehistoric Archaeology of the Faiyum

The Prehistory of the Faiyum Depression, southern Cairo and the Western Delta

It seems more than a little self-promoting to mention one of my own websites, but as far as I know it is the most comprehensive site dealing with the subject of the Faiyum in the prehistoric period. The aim of the website was to aggregate all the fragmented information available in academic journals and books and put it all in one convenient place. The geology page has suffered from age and the maps don't load (and need to be re-done anyway) but otherwise it is a fairly comprehensive record of the area in the prehistoric periods.

Egypt's earliest farming village found near Karanis, February 2008

Archaeologists have uncovered the earliest known agricultural settlement from ancient Egypt, a new study says. (See photos of the site and artifacts.)

The 7,000-year-old farming-village site includes evidence of domesticated animals and crops—providing a major breakthrough in understanding the enigmatic people of the Neolithic, or late Stone Age, period and their lives long before the appearance of the Egyptian pharaohs.

The discoveries were made as a team of Dutch and U.S. archaeologists dug deeper into a previously excavated mound of sand concealing the ancient village in the Faiyum depression, a fertile oasis region about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Cairo.

Just centimeters beneath the modern plowed surface, in an area that had been used until recently to grow grapes, the researchers discovered evidence of structures, such as clay floors, and hearths containing homegrown wheat grain and barley.

Also unearthed were the remains of sheep, goats, and pigs—which, along with the grains, were imported from the Middle East.

Old Kingdom

Gypsum and Basalt Quarries (Elizabeth Bloxham)

Fine-grained white gypsum or alabaster occurs as a dense network of 25-30 cm-thick sub-vertical cross-cutting veins and was exploited for small vessels, plaster and mortar between the 1 st and 4 th Dynasties (c. 2900 – 2465 BC). The quarries have only been described by Caton-Thompson and Gardner (1934), during their investigations of the Northern Faiyum Desert 70 years ago. The archaeological record comprises three workshop mounds, located approximately 200 m north of the quarries, containing gypsum debris, pottery in the form of beer jars, object ‘blanks' or partially worked vessels and hand-held stone axes. The stone tools are of particular interest as most are of stone not local to the area, in particular, dolerite and Chephren Gneiss sourced 1,000 km south in the Aswan region. Located on the plateau above the workshops is an area of 250 stone circles, thought to be the quarrymen's settlement, yet there is more evidence to suggest that places of habitation were in natural rock-shelters in the overhanging escarpment.

Fayoum's Ancient Quarry Under Threat

The site also bears evidence of one of the oldest infrastructures of road planning in ancient Egypt. A 2.5m-wide and 11km-long road stretching across the area is the oldest and most pristine example of a paved road in the world. It was constructed from flagstones and built to gain easy access to the quarries of Widan Al-Faras and to facilitate the exploitation of its geological resources and the transportation of the basalt blocks. A total of eight quarries are connected by side roads to this long main road, which leads southwards to a quay on the shoreline of Lake Moeris (today's Lake Qarun), the huge body of water at the heart of the Fayoum oasis.

When the stone blocks had been extracted from the quarries they were dragged by wooden sledges along the paved road. Once they reached the lake shore, the heavy blocks from the Widan Al-Faras quarries were loaded onto boats which carried them across the lake on a course set for the Bahr Youssef Canal, which ran through a gap in the hills between Hawara and Lahun.

Middle Kingdom

EgyptSites - Medinet Madi by Su Bayfield

The temple remains are in a well-preserved condition, probably due to its isolated location, but are ever threatened by the encroaching sands of the desert. The inner chambers are the oldest part of the structure which is one of the few surviving monuments of the Middle Kingdom, a rare example of architecture from this period. A small columned hall leads to three shrines which contained statues of deities and the two kings. The Dynasty XII reliefs are very worn but it is possible to make out depictions of the pharaohs Amenemhet III and his son and co-regent Amenemhet IV offering to deities in the shrines as well as rare depictons of the cobra-headed goddess Renenutet.

Medinet Madi in the Fayoum of Egypt by Joerg Reid

During the first season of excavation under the Milan team directed by A. Vogliano, the remains of a temple dedicated to Isis Hermouthis, the Greek version of Renenutet was unearthed. Though later transferred to the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, pilasters incorporated into the temple structure were inscribed with Greek hymns to this goddess. However, one line in one of the hymns also referred to an earlier Middle Kingdom temple on the site dedicated by Amenemhet III. That now famous temple was later unearthed in the second excavation campaign. Also uncovered from the sand was a second Ptolemaic temple, back to back with the Middle Kingdom one. However, this series of excavations only lasted for two additional seasons. Afterwards, it was not until 1966, under the direction of Dr. Edda Bresciani that excavations resumed.

EgyptSites El-Lahun and Hawara by Su Bayfield

The region of el-Faiyum thrived during the Middle Kingdom when the fertile area around Birket Qarun began to be developed as a pleasure-ground in which kings and high officials pursued their sports of hunting, fishing and fowling. It became so popular that the Dynasty XII kings Senwosret II and Amenemhet III chose to site pyramids here as their final resting places, at the far reaches of the existing pyramid fields to the north. Senwosret II's pyramid complex is situated at el-Lahun (sometimes called Illahun) and Amenemhet III's complex is at Hawara on the southern edge of the oasis, just off the Beni Suef to Cairo desert road.

The pyramid of Amenemhet III at Hawara by Alan Winston

The pyramid itself was built in typical 12th Dynasty fashion with a mudbrick core and a casing of fine white limestone. The entrance to the subterranean levels was located in the actual face of the pyramid on the south side, very near the southeast corner. Within the pyramid, a descending corridor with a stairway first lead north. This corridor, which descends to a lower level then the burial chamber, was sheathed in fine white limestone, continued until reaching a small chamber, and continuing straight leads to a blind dead end. However, the builders used an elaborate device first seen in the Abydos tomb of Senusret III. A second corridor is hidden within the ceiling of the small chamber. It was originally meant to be blocked by a 20 ton quartzite slab. This corridor very shortly arriving at a second chamber. From this chamber, two corridors depart, one north, and another to the east.

A virtual exploration of the lost Labyrinth

This project explores the possibility of reproducing a destroyed historic site from its remaining artefacts using VR (virtual reality) technologies. We will build an experimental model for an online reconstruction that allows public users to explore and visualise the range of possible forms of the ancient architecture. The project will focus primarily on the Hawara Labyrinth site, a unique combination of buildings and artefacts from two different eras and cultures: an Egyptian pyramid complex, and Roman period cemeteries.

Daily Photo - More from Karnak

Looking for something else entirely, I stumbled across the following page by Sjef Willockx: Columns and Pillars - The Visual Story. The site provides a photographic introduction to the column tops of Egypt, showing different types of capital. Karnak is featured prominently. There is also a useful introduction to columns on the Tour Egypt site by Monroe Edgar, which provides a helpful glossary of terms.

Hawass on the hunt for Cleopatra

Times Online (Sarah Hashash)

A flamboyant archeologist known worldwide for his trademark Indiana Jones hat believes he has identified the site where Cleopatra is buried.

Now, with a team of 12 archeologists and 70 excavators, Zahi Hawass, 60, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has started searching for the entrance to her tomb.

And after a breakthrough two weeks ago he hopes to find her lover, the Roman general Mark Antony, sharing her last resting place at the site of a temple, the Taposiris Magna, 28 miles west of Alexandria.

Hawass has discovered a 400ft tunnel beneath the temple containing clues that the supposedly beautiful queen may lie beneath. “We’ve found tunnels with statues of Cleopatra and many coins bearing her face, things you wouldn’t expect in a typical temple,” he said. . . .

The archeologist, best known in Britain for demanding the return of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum and for promoting the Tutankhamun exhibition at the O2 dome in London, believes the temple’s location would have made it a perfect place for Cleopatra to hide from Octavian’s army.

Work on the site has been suspended until the summer heat abates and is due to resume in November, when Hawass will use radar to search for hidden chambers.

See the above page for the full story.

Ghost toddler from ancient Egypt on show as art

The Telegraph, UK (Roger Highfield)

The ghost of an Ancient Egyptian toddler now haunts a London gallery, after scans of his mummy were fashioned into a work of art.

Artist Angela Palmer has already turned Carol Vorderman's brain, and even her own, into eerie artistic representations, formed from layers of glass that have been engraved with contours based on scans of their brains.

Now she has used the same method to bring the remains of the toddler into view and shed new light on a family tragedy that took place almost two thousand years ago in Egypt.

Her reconstruction of "Mummy Boy 3" is now on display at Waterhouse & Dodd in the West End of London, until June 12.

She had originally wanted to scan the head of the boy king Tutenkhamum, but was told that request was out of the question.

However, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford allowed her unprecedented access to the mummy to shed new light on the toddler's death in Roman times.

See the above page for more details, together with a photograph of the exhibit.

Book Interview: Who Owns Antiquity? James Cuno

The Canadian Press

"That belongs in a museum!" Indiana Jones was scolding one of his many enemies, the last we heard from the hunky archaeologist, 19 years ago.

He has returned to the screen in the much-awaited sequel "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," and the debate about where antiquities belong is heating up again among Indy's less glamorous, real-world counterparts.

In an already controversial new book out later this month, "Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle for Our Ancient Heritage," author James Cuno argues for a return to the idea of "partage." The term refers to the system that persisted for many years in which foreign-led experts - typically Europeans and Americans - worked with locals to excavate antiquities in countries like Iraq and Egypt. Some of the material went to local museums, but much of the rest ended up in the museums in the experts' home countries.

But the system has been supplanted by conventions and national laws designed to keep antiquities in their home countries. Cuno, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, argues the changes have been harmful. He spoke recently to The Associated Press, and his responses are excerpted here.

AP: You write in the book that you've changed your thinking about how antiquities should be handled has changed? How and why?

Cuno: Initially, I thought like everyone probably the best thing was for (antiquities) to be preserved as is, for archeologists to excavate and document. I then came to realize other people wanted other things from them. Those in power in nation states in whose jurisdiction antiquities lay wanted a kind of legitimization of their political position. So antiquities and ancient heritage became a means to a political end, when I thought originally it was the stuff of academic science.

See the above page for full details.

Last of the ancient wonders IV: The pyramid face angle

Al Ahram Weekly (Assem Deif)

When the Egyptians witnessed the rising of Sirius just before dawn (known as the heliacal rising), they knew that the Nile would soon flood; for they depended upon the flooding for the agriculture and fertility of their land. The heliacal rising, which falls close to the summer solstice, marked the beginning of the New Year coinciding with the month of Thoth.

Since Sirius brought prosperity to Egypt, tracing of the star was crucial. At the Isis-Hathor Temple of Denderah there is a statue of Isis which was oriented to the rising of Sirius. When the priests saw the rays from Sirius penetrating the temple to fall upon the gemstone she wore, they announced that a New Year had begun. In the temple appears the inscription, "Her majesty Isis shines into the temple on New Year's Day, and she mingles her light with that of her father on the horizon."

Sirius did not only bless the living by bringing wealth to the Egyptians, but it also blessed their dead. It was believed that Sirius was the doorway to the afterlife, so the ancient Egyptians abstained from burying their dead at the time of the year when the star was hidden from view, which lasted about 70 days. This led Herodotus to assume that the mummification process could take up to 70 days, yet it is commonly known that it used to last 40 days. Presumably, what he meant was that it would not take more than 70 days, as burying the deceased involved other rituals as well.

See the above page for the full story.

The entertainment tail wagging the archaeological dog?

Washington Post (By Neil Asher Silberman)

After 17 years, Hollywood's most famous archaeologist is back in action. Now grayer and a bit creakier, Indiana Jones is again hacking his way through thick jungles, careering wildly in car chases and scrambling through dark tunnels to snatch a precious artifact from the clutches of an evil empire (Soviet, this time).

And I'm thinking, oh no. Here we go again. Get ready for another long, twisting jump off the cliff of respectability for the image of archaeology.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of pop culture. But I have a problem with the entertainment tail wagging the archaeological dog. As someone who's been involved in archaeology for the past 35 years, I can tell you that Indiana Jones is not the world's most famous fictional archaeologist; he's the world's most famous archaeologist, period. How many people can name another? Whether I'm sitting on a plane, waiting in an office or milling around at a cocktail party, the casual mention that I'm an archaeologist inevitably brings up Indiana Jones. People conjure up images of gold, adventure and narrow escapes from hostile natives. And while "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" will almost certainly break worldwide box office records, it will also spread another wave of viral disinformation about what archaeologists actually do.

I know that the Indiana Jones series is just a campy tribute to the Saturday afternoon serials of the 1930s and the B-movies of the 1950s, but believe me, it totally misrepresents who archaeologists are and what goals we pursue. It's filled with exaggerated and inaccurate nonsense. Even the centerpiece of the new movie -- the "crystal skull" -- is a phony. Archaeologists have long known about this class of rare and bizarre artifacts, purportedly from the pre-Columbian cultures of Central and South America. But in the current issue of Archaeology magazine, Jane McLaren Walsh of the Smithsonian Institution reveals how she and her colleagues discovered the telltale marks of modern drills and sanders on their surface -- and recognized that these supposedly mystical ancient relics were made by profit-hungry forgers to feed the modern black market in antiquities.

Even worse, the picture of the vine-swinging, revolver-toting archaeological treasure hunter is all wrong.

I can see why Indiana Jones can rattle the chains of a dedicated archaeologist but it really doesn't bother me that archaeology is represented as something so different from the real experience by films like the Indiana Jones, Lara Croft and National Treasure series. That's what fiction is all about. I don't think that it is practical or desirable to make blockbuster film makers the guardians of our (or any) professions. Imagine if we believed that all policemen were like those in Lethal Weapon or Die Hard? I know some archaeologists who are actually rather flattered by the comparison with dear old Indi, in spite of (or even because of) the fact that they know that it's all absolute nonsense. At least Indiana Jones believes that artefacts should belong in museums :-)

Tutankhamun in London attracts over 1 million visitors

Egypt State Information Service

"More than one million people have visited the Tutankhamun exhibition currently held in the British Museum in London," Head of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs Abded-Raouf Al-Ridi said Saturday 24/5/2008 in statements following his return from London where he attended a symposium organized by the British museum and the Supreme Council for Antiquities .

Ridi further said that the exhibition has become a regular tourist attraction in London, adding that everyone is so excited about it.

Local announcements (London UK)

Apologies to those of you who aren't based in London, but here are a couple of announcements that may well be of interest to those of you who are, one concerning the Friends of the Petrie Museum's upcoming conference and the other about Birkbeck College's Summer School prospectus.

Tutankhamun, the Making of A Legend (UCL website)

To celebrate their 20th anniversary, the Friends of the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology are hosting a special event at the UCL Bloomsbury Theatre on 31 May 2008 from 10am to 5pm.

‘Tutankhamun, the Making of a Legend’ will feature guest speaker Professor David Silverman, curator of 'Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs' exhibition currently showing at the O2, London and Dr Kate Spence who has worked extensively at Amarna, the city of the pharaoh Akhenaten. . . .

Friends of the UCL Petrie Museum Secretary, Jan Picton, said: “There is no-one better qualified to lecture on this topic. This will be a rare opportunity to discover more about ancient Egypt and the intriguing boy-king Tutankhamun, his tomb and treasures, and to hear this passionate and highly distinguished Egyptologist lecture in the UK.”

Lectures are as follows: Amarna: Life in the Royal Cities of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun by Dr Kate Spence. Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and the religion of the aten by Professor David Silverman. Tutankhamun’s tomb(s?) by Professor David Silverman. Tutankhamun: the making of a legend by Professor David Silverman.

Booking details are available on the Bloomsbury Theatre website.


Birkbeck College Egyptology Summer School 2008
Ancient Egypt: Life, Death and Culture

Monday 23rd June to Friday 27th June 2008 10.00am – 5.00pm Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1.

This five day summer school will present a series of lectures and presentations on the life courses of the ancient Egyptians, and include a special day on new research. The lectures themes will range from aspects of the ancient Egyptian life course (pregnancy and birth, education, puberty rituals and marriage, growing old, death and burial rituals) to the origins and developments of Egyptian scripts and language. Daily life will be presented from the perspectives of school-age children, soldiers, farmers’, as well as priests and priestesses. Learn about the ups and downs of relationships and family life, including courtship, love, eroticism, marriage, adultery, domestic violence and divorce. Other topics will deal with clothing and bodily adornment, medicine and magic, feasts and festivals, social care, religious beliefs, ways of dying and the nature of the Egyptian afterlife. This summer school will also include the unique opportunity to enjoy a full day dedicated to presentations by junior UK scholars on the latest research. Tea and coffee will be provided.

Tutors: Carol Andrews, Frances Welsh, Suzanne Lax-Bojtos, Lorna Oakes, Joseph Clayton, Kathryn Piquette, Carol Downer, Rosalind Janssen

Places are limited so early enrolment is advised. To enrol by telephone +44 (0)20 7631 6651, or write to Executive Officer for Archaeology, Faculty of Continuing Education, Birkbeck College, 26 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DQ quoting course code: FFEY053N0 ACS. Cost: £185 for the week. Programme:

Monday 23rd June: Introduction by Chair; Language and Culture; Pregnancy & Birth; Origins of Scripts; Education (Skills and Knowledge Transmission); Puberty

Tuesday 24th June: Love and Eroticism; Marriage, Adultery, Domestic Violence; Bodily Adornment; Middle/Late Egyptian; Soldiers and Farmers; easting and Entertaining
Event: Evening Event for Students

Wednesday 25th June: Medicine & Magic; Priests and priestesses; Demotic Language
Houses; Fixtures and Fittings; Old Age

Thursday 26th June: Ways of Dying; The Coptic Language; Death and Burial; The Afterlife and Ancestors
Event: Meet the Tutors session

Friday 27th June: Full day of presentations from scholars on their recent findings from doctoral and post-doctoral research. Ancient Egypt Quarries; Early Burial Practices; The Subjugation of the Rekhyt People Throughout the Pharaonic Period; Ptolemaic Egypt; Who Was Who in Twenty Fifth Dynasty Thebes; Late Predynastic and Early Dynastic Art: Continuity and Change

Exhibition: Penn in the World

huliq.com

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has built its reputation both as a sponsor of groundbreaking fieldwork, and a center for research and education. It is fitting, then, when developing an exhibition about its 120-plus years of growth and change, the Museum invited Penn students to research and shape the story.

PENN IN THE WORLD: Twelve Decades at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, is an exhibition organized by nine undergraduate and graduate students from an interdisciplinary Halpern-Rogath Curatorial Seminar in Penn's Department of the History of Art. PENN IN THE WORLD tells the still-evolving story of Penn Museum, its majestic building and the grand, often groundbreaking international work carried out by the archaeologists, anthropologists, other scholars and educators within. PENN IN THE WORLD runs through September 28, 2008, in the Museum's William B. Dietrich Gallery.

The exhibition brings together a kaleidoscope of materials from Penn Museum's own vast archives and collections, the University of Pennsylvania archives, and the Architectural Archives. Using historic photographs, original documents, architectural drawings, and a selection of about 30 artifacts from more than a dozen of the Museum's most renowned expeditions—as well as short footage from the 1950s TV program "What in the World," and an interactive research kiosk—PENN IN THE WORLD weaves together diverse narratives of the Museum's long history.

The Expeditions section of the exhibition covers 400 different expeditions including Memphis in Egypt.

Travel: The splendour that is Egypt

The Times, South Africa (Dr Deena Padayachee)

Egypt is a popular holiday spot for South Africans, and one can quickly see why.

We experienced both the romance of a luxury cruise on the Nile and the excitement of seeing for ourselves timeless wonders that are awe-inspiring and magnificent, like the temples at Abu Simbel and the colossal statues of Ramses II.

However, I must confess to being surprised at the plethora of Chevrolet trucks, American hotels, Coca-Cola adverts and KFC stores. It was mind-blowing, too, to see the multitude of Jewish, American and other Western tourists cavorting and relaxing all over the country.

Archaeologists from Poland to the United States and Germany have helped excavate Egypt’s proud heritage, but a heavy price has been paid. There are more mummies located internationally than in all the museums of Egypt. A massive commemorative obelisk from Luxor decorates the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

The country itself still has a romantic Islamic ambience, with the male galbella (a long flowing gown) being the norm rather than the exception. The hijab appeared to be less common. Interestingly, black is not a popular colour among Muslims in the north but is far more popular in the south.

However, the overwhelming feeling (for a beleaguered South African) was the climate of safety.

See the above page for more.

Daily Photo - More from Karnak

Daily Photo - More from Karnak

I am off for the weekend. The blog will be updated on Monday or Tuesday. It is bank holiday weekend here in the UK and inevitably pouring rain has been forecast - but right now it is a stunningly pretty morning in London, with blue skies and a bright sun. Not Egypt, but not bad :-) Have a good weekend!

More responses to covering of mummies in the UK

Inquirer.net

It is interesting that Hawass takes this line because Egypt's own Royal Mummy room at the Cairo museum in Tahrir Square lines up the royal mummies like sardines in glass boxes. Their bodies are covered but their faces and occasionally arms are revealed for all to see. It will be interesting to see how the results of the Manchester consultation impacts other collections with mummies in the future.

Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass on Thursday welcomed a decision by a British museum to cover up its collection of ancient Egyptian mummies, saying it was a question of ethics.

Covering up the mummies is "a very important decision. I myself am with this position on an ethical basis, not a religious one," Hawass told Agence France-Presse.

"We don't want people to see our naked bodies when we are dead, so why should we allow ourselves to view the bodies and expose them in this manner?" something which is not necessary for the mummies' appreciation, he asked.

The Guardian Art & Architecture blog (Maev Kennedy)

Maev Kennedy (a staff news writer for the Guardian, specialising in archaeology) has picked up on the debate and has posted some comments on her own blog, putting the story into the wider context of recent discussions about how to handle the remains of the deceased:

Nick Merriman, director at Manchester, says that this unwrapping, the interference and the fact that the mummies were no longer being displayed as found, was the crucial factor. He has no intention of having a hemp shirt made for Lindow Man, one of the most startling bog bodies, which by curious coincidence went on display at Manchester, on loan from the British Museum, at exactly the same time.

Bristol museum, which recently completely redisplayed a major Egyptian collection, keeps its unwrapped mummies in store. Instead of the previous open coffins, it now displays its two wrapped mummies with the lids slightly raised, which it considers more respectful. The gallery also has one body of a man which was curved into a foetal position to fit into a wooden box: this is now displayed in a dark case, and visitors must choose whether to light it: most do, and there have been no complaints.

The uneasy thought occurs that at both museums the changes actually ramp up the peep show element of the display.

But, at Manchester, Merriman and his deputy director Piotr Bienkowski have bravely led a public debate on an issue which most museums just hoped will go away. Several recent developments suggest it won't: human remains have been repatriated from museums to Native American communities, to Australia and to New Zealand. In Britain there have been several reburials of remains recovered from archaeological excavations, in Christian rites or concocted "pagan" ceremonies.

The Manchester Museum blog, which is currently hosting a discussion on the subject, now has 76 comments in response to its actions.

I was chatting to a friend today who says that a well known palaeoanthropologist has, over the years, received complaints about the display of fossil hominid remains. It is obviously an area of museum management that really stirs people to strong feelings and the need to comment.

Spain, Egypt to investigate 19th century shipwreck

Ria Novosti

Spain and Egypt will start a project later this year to investigate the 19th century sinking of a ship that some believe contained the mummy of a Fourth Dynasty pharaoh, news agency MENA said.

MENA cited Egyptian Ambassador to Spain Yasser Murad as saying the countries would first hold consultations and compare historical records, and attempt to establish the location of the shipwreck.

Khafre, who ruled Egypt more than 2,500 years ago, is known for building the second largest of the three great pyramids at Giza, and may have overseen the creation of the nearby Sphinx.

A ship carrying ancient artifacts from Egypt to Britain that sank off the Spanish coast in the first half of the 19th century is believed by some Egyptologists to have contained Khafre's mummy.

Apparently there is more in Russian from a link on the above page. I'm afraid that my twenty year old GCE o-level in Russian has, over time, left me equipped with little more than the ability to say "I am English". If anyone who understands the article can precis it for me to post I would be most grateful. This is one of those brief posts that raises far more questions than it answers. Very frustrating! Hopefully other online publications will pick up on the story soon - perhaps in Spain first. I'll keep you informed if I find out anything else.

Mummy on the move

NewsOK.com

Just in passing, and in the light of conversations re the Manchester Museum mummy discussions, I though that the issue of moving this mummy from one museum to another showing the appropriate respect for her as a deceased person was quite interesting.

Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art officials were making final plans Monday to use a hearse to move a 2,300-year-old mummy to the Museum of the Red River in Idabel.

Kelly Carter, funeral director for the Conley-White Funeral Home in Idabel.

"We'll treat her with the same level of high respect as any other deceased person we move — that's our business,” she said.

The mummy is being loaned for free to the Idabel museum and will remain there until July, said Dalaynna Trim, curator of the Mabee-Gerrer.

She is one of two female mummies collected during the world travels of the Rev. Gregory Gerrer, who after his ordination into the priesthood in 1900, was sent to Rome to study art. He later returned to Oklahoma, bringing his collection with him.

By 1942, he had collected more than 1,600 pieces of art, Trim said.

Trim said the Egyptian mummy is from the Ptolemaic Dynasty (400-300 B.C.). She said the hieroglyphics on her sarcophagus have not been translated so her name is unknown.

See the above page for full details.

Swaffham Museum finds funding

EDP24

Swaffham Museum has had a funding crisis for a long time now, and was in danger of losing all of its professional staff.

Swaffham Museum has secured a grant which will allow its education officer to continue crucial work for another year.

Earlier this year, the EDP revealed the museum was in danger of losing its professional staff if cash was not raised to fund the salaries of its curator and education officer.

But the Foyle Foundation has awarded £12,000 which will allow education officer Elaine Brown to continue her work both in the museum and in outreach sessions as well as conduct reminiscence sessions in nursing homes.

From an Egyptological point of view its relevance lies in the fact that Swaffham was where Howard Carter was born, but it is nice to see small local museums surviving in the face of financial pressure. As part of a recent revamp the museum's Carter Room will include a reconstruction of the Tutankhamun tomb and will have audio-visual effects and other interactive displays. The computer and projector were donated by retailer Waitrose and they will be used to display learning material produced by the British Museum's Educational Multimedia Unit. It is also currently running outreach programmes which include "Walk Like an Egyptian" art sessions.

New blog - Museu de Arqueologia (Brazil)

Museu de Arqueologia

Thanks to Paula Veiga for the news that a new blog has been established for the Museu de Arqueologia in Ponta Grossa, Parana, Brazil, which displays replicas of ancient Egyptian objects. The posts are accompanied by some good photographs of the exhibits, so even if you don't speak a word of Portuguese you may find it of interest.

The first two posts, available from the above address are:
A II Exposição Permanente: Egito Antigo Vida e Imortalidade (with lots of good photographs) and ProjetoToth de Educação e Cultura

An article in April on the ANBA website by Isaura Daniel, featured on an earlier post, described the museum. Here's an extract:

The Archaeology Museum has in exhibition 260 replicas of objects from the birth of Ancient Egypt. They are from small amulets to larger items, like a bust of Nefertiti or a reproduction of a sarcophagus that is in the British Museum. The site also houses an original object and a mask of a mummy from the second century B.C.

According to Egyptologist Moacir Elias Santos, the owner of the museum, the mask was acquired in France and donated to the museum. The existing information about the object is that it is a male mask made in papyrus, gypsum and linen. The replicas that are part of the museum's collection were made by artist Eduardo Vilela and also by Santos himself. The museum, in reality, has a collection of over 600 objects, but only some of them are being exhibited. The site has two rooms covering a total of 60 square metres.

It all began with the museum owner's curiosity about Egypt.

Fiction Review: Dreamers of the Day

Christian Science Monitor (Yvonne Zipp)

This is a novel about the Cairo Conference of 1921, which has far more to do with the rest of the Middle East than it does with Egypt, but I've put it in anyway just on the offchance that it may be of interest:

Mary Doria Russell’s fourth novel, “Dreamers of the Day,” takes its title from T.E. Lawrence’s “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”: “[T]he dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

Agnes herself isn’t much for daydreaming – it’s too painful. When a man who was courting Agnes falls in love with her pretty younger sister and whisks her off to Lebanon, “no one was less surprised than me,” she says. . . .

Then the great influenza epidemic of 1919 wipes out her entire family. Reeling with grief, but finally free of her mother’s critical eye, Agnes decides to live a little. One makeover later, she’s on her way to Cairo.

“Dreamers of the Day” doesn’t shift into high gear until about 50 pages in, but patient readers will be rewarded when Agnes arrives at the Semiramis Hotel and stumbles into history. When the doorman refuses to let Agnes inside (either because of her flapper costume or because of her dachshund), the commotion attracts the attention of T.E. Lawrence and Lady Gertrude Bell, who, along with Winston Churchill and assorted other luminaries, are in Egypt to redraw the boundaries of the modern Middle East.

See the above page for the entire review.

Daily Photo - More from Karnak

Another fairly random selection of photographs from Karnak.

The first shows the obelisk of Tuthmose I which lies beyond the hypostyle hall (visible in the background). If you are interested in obelisks you might like the Obelisks of the World website which has details on all the known surviving examples - and has the remarkable statistic that only seven remain in Egypt whilst Rome has thirteen! If you want a translation challenge then have a look at the Ancient Egyptian Language website which has a transcription of all four faces (no translation though).

The above photograph looks up into the face of the colossus of a statue variously identified as Ramesses II or Pinedjem. We all know the basics about Ramesses II but the less known Pinedjem was a High Priest of Amun at Luxor and used the weak political situation in Egypt at that time to take over large tracts of land in the vicinity. His main claim to fame, as far as I can gather, is that he was the father of the Pharaoh Psusennes I of the Twenty First Dynasty (based at Tanis). I haven't got the time right now to go rustling around to find out which is correct (or why there is a discussion on the subject) but any input on the subject will be very gratefully received!

Osiris-form statue with the cartouches of Ramesses II
(Usermaatre-setepenre Ramesse-meryamun)

I remember taking this photograph but I cannot remember exactly where within Karnak it was - I am fairly sure it was somewhere on the east side where restoration work was being carried out at the time.

More re decision to cover Manchester mummies

The decision by Manchester Museum to cover the ancient Egyptian mummies that it has on display has now come to the attention of the UK's national media. Here are a few of the reports that have come out.

BBC News

On its website, the museum said the covering was to ensure that the human remains were "treated with respect".

Museum bosses launched the public debate about the way it shows human remains following the controversy stirred up by the arrival of the Body Worlds 4 exhibition at another city museum.

They have been consulting academics and other groups on the issues surrounding exhibits which include remains and whether they should be on display in museums.

Nick Merriman, director of Manchester Museum, said: "We're responding to a significant minority of our visitors who question the public value and educational value of unwrapped mummies.

"We're asking the public what is the most respectful and appropriate way to display them. It's good practice rather than political correctness."

He said negative comments from the public had focused on the display of the unwrapped child mummy.

Mr Merriman added: "Is it appropriate to display them this way, given that they were originally wrapped, but then unwrapped in the 19th century to satisfy scientific and public curiosity? It's all part of the debate.

But he admitted: "The majority of the comments have been that we shouldn't cover them up."

Times Online

The museum's curators say that the cover-up follows more than 100 complaints. They decided to have a period of consultation on how to display the collection. The debate on the ethics of showing human remains comes while the museum is displaying the uncovered body of Lindow Man, from the Iron Age, who died a violent death and was discovered in a Cheshire peat bog.

The cover-up has upset some Egyptologists. Bob Partridge, editor of Ancient Egypt magazine, said: “We are shocked and amazed this has been done in advance of any results from the public consultation. The mummies have always been sensitively displayed and have been educational and informative to generations of visitors.”

The Telegraph

Nick Merriman, the museum's director, said: "We get a regular stream of feedback from people saying it is insensitive to display unwrapped mummies. We are trying to follow government guidelines about how they should be displayed with respect and sensitivity. If the overwhelming opinion of the public is that they want the mummies unwrapped, we would have to take that very seriously."

He added that the body of Lindow Man, the north west's iconic archaeological find, is displayed in the way it was found in Lindow Moss bog, near Wilmslow.

He said: "The mummies were not deposited unwrapped in the ground."

The museum has asked for feedback on its website, which has sparked a fierce debate.

See the above pages for full details.

Virtual Egypt - Archaeorama and the Amduat

Electric Archaeology (blog by Shawn Graham)

Thre have been a couple of articles reacently about attempts to creat virtual experiences of ancient Egypt. Shawn Graham reports on a work in progress:

I confess, I am not very aware of what’s going on in Egyptology - but visitors to Rossella Lorenzi’s new space in Second Life certainly will become so!

Rossella is a reporter for the Discovery Channel, and maintains a blog about the latest happenings in the world of archaeology. Recently, she’s been crafting a ‘Chamber of Secrets’ that recreates the passage from the world of the living to the world of the dead - or at least, how that was conceived in the ‘Amduat - the Book of the Secret Chamber’ and ‘the Book of Gates’. These funerary texts were thought to contain, according to Rossella, the secret to eternal life.

See the above page for more information and a link to a video by rossella Lorenzi.

Nubia museum head links Boston, Egypt

The Boston-Baystate Banner (Kenneth J. Cooper)

The Nubia Museum sits on a hill just up from the floating line of cruise ships moored on the Nile River.

Inside the museum’s yellow sandstone walls works an enthusiastic man with a Boston connection, some 6,000 miles away from this southern Egyptian city. His name is Ossama Abdel Meguid, the founding director of the world’s only museum devoted solely to Nubia.

Scholars now agree that this region — divided between modern Egypt and Sudan — was the homeland of several pharaohs in a late dynasty of ancient Egypt. Some Afrocentric theorists further argue that Nubia provided the foundation of the revered civilization that erected the pyramids, temples and monuments still standing in the Nile Valley.

Three years ago, Meguid, 45, came to Boston to research ancient Nubia. He pored over archival records at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from a Harvard professor’s archeological expeditions in the 20th century. He also toured the National Center for Afro-American Artists in Roxbury, including its permanent exhibit on a Nubian pharaoh, and chatted with director Edmund Barry Gaither about their common interests.

Meguid’s main mission as a Fulbright Scholar at the MFA for five months in 2005 and 2006 was to study the archives of George Reisner, a Harvard professor who conducted the first archeological survey of Nubia in 1907 and 1908 then spent four decades conducting digs in the main Nubian sites.

See the above page for the full story.

A mausoleum fit for a king

Egypt Daily Star News (David Stanford)

A good article about the restoration of the mausoleum of Khedive Tewfiq. The article gives background details to the Khedive, describes the construction of the mausoleum and then goes on to look at the restoration project headed by conservation architect Agnieszka Dobrowolska

His funeral took place the day after his death. The body was taken to the Eastern Cemetery of the City of the Dead, which contains the remains of several past rulers of Egypt, among them the descendents of the great 19th century ruler Mohamed Ali.

He was laid to rest beneath a cenotaph of ebony inlaid with mother of pearl and bronze, close by the white marble tomb of Bamba Qadin, wife of Tushun Pasha.

While the area was a green and peaceful spot, Tewfiq’s grieving family resolved to erect a mausoleum in his memory, enclosing his tomb and those nearby. They instructed the architect of the Khedival Palace, Fabricius Bay, to design something suitably grand, and he obliged with a splendid monument in the Neo-Mamluk style.

In 1894 the stone structure was erected, complete with elaborate stucco decorations and a graceful dome, the interior decorated with intricate paintings and gold leaf.

Despite its sturdy construction, the building suffered from damage of various sorts, both natural and man-made, in the following century. Like many other once great mausoleums in the cemetery, it was in danger of being ruined.

Thankfully, due to the intervention of Tewfiq’s great-grandson, Prince Abbas Hilmi III, the mausoleum has now been saved.

See the above page for the full story.

"Les sens des signes" lectures online as podcasts

Univeristy of Lyon

Four of the lectures delivered at Les sens des signes:panorama du déchiffrement d'écritures anciennes are now availabel online at the above address as podcasts.

• J. Oppert et le déchiffrement de l'akkadien (B. Lion and C. Michel)
• Le déchiffrement du cunéiforme vieux-perse (F. Joannès)
• Le déchiffrement des hiéroglyphes égyptiens (D. Warburton)
• Sur les traces de Darius et de ses prédécesseurs : le déchiffrement de l'élamite (F. Malbran-Labat)

The iTunes software that you will need to run the podcast is available free of charge as a download from Apple website.

Egyptian summer for Melton (UK)

Melton Times (Richard Bett)

Ancient Egypt is coming to Melton this summer with a series of activities and events to be held in the town.

On July 17 and 18 the town centre is to be transformed, bringing ancient Egypt to life.

A street trail around the town will allow children to gather clues to piece together the grisly secrets of mummification. They can also enjoy hearing stories about the ancient empire.

Other activities include a lesson in Egyptian hieroglyphics, building pyramids in the sand, hobby camel racing, Egyptian jewellery making and a fancy dress competition, while snake charmers, stilt walkers and belly dancers will be on hand to entertain visitors.

The Lecistershire County Council website has more details.

More re Akhenaten's unusual appearance

physorg.com

For those of you who may have missed the earlier postings on the subject here's another summary of Irwin Braverman's theories about why Akhenaten is depicted as he is:

ecause no mummy of Akhenaten exists, Braverman used only artwork of the ancient pharaoh to make his medical diagnosis. He presented his theories during the 14th annual Historical Clinicopathological Conference (CPC) at University of Maryland Medical School.

Akhenaten, a pharaoh during Egypt’s 18th Dynasty credited with starting the practice of worshipping one God, fathered six children. He was often portrayed in sculptures and carvings with a thin neck, elongated head, large buttocks, breasts, and even a prominent belly, suggesting pregnancy.

It may be possible to confirm his diagnoses, Braverman said, by conducting genetic tests on the five relevant mummies of Akhenaten’s relatives. “DNA taken from the bone marrow could reveal the presence of the gene defects,” he said.

Aromatose excess syndrome can lead to feminine features in men and advanced sexual development in girls. Akhenaten’s daughters are depicted with breasts at age three and seven in some carvings.

Braverman explains that Akhenaten’s elongated head could be due to the gene defect causing craniosynostosis, in which the fibrous joints of the head fuse at an early age and disrupt the process of skull formation. Braverman said that a number of Akhenaten’s relatives—including his daughters, and two other 18th-Dynasty rulers, Queen Hatshepsut and King Tut—all had cranial abnormalities that mimicked craniosynostosis.

See the above page for the full story.

Travel: Egyptian etiquette for eating

Wall Street Journal (Emily Flitter)

When it comes to table manners, the devil is in each culture's details. Eating with one's fingers may be considered slovenly in one place, but the norm in another. In Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, looking at a fellow diner's plate is considered to be rude.

Cairo native Amr Ragab explains that when someone stares at another person's food, he or she sends a signal of desire and envy. That act of acknowledging what another person owns can bring bad luck: the antidote is to offer to share. "I'm afraid if I don't give you any," says Mr. Ragab, "I'll get the evil eye."

See the above page for the full story.

Trivia: Marriage in Pharaonic style at Karnak

holidayhypermarket.co.uk

Couples are being invited to tie the knot in Pharaonic style later this year in Egypt.

The Pharaonic Wedding Festival will take place in Karnak during October this year, providing 40 engaged couples with the chance to say 'I do' the ancient Egyptian way.

By recreating the rituals and traditions that the Egyptian Pharaohs practiced more than 5,000 years ago, the newlyweds are given the opportunity to step back in time and enjoy a truly unique ceremony.

Brides will be encouraged to wear traditional dresses from the period and ancient dances will take place, which the Pharaohs believed brought eternal happiness for the couple.

Daily Photo - More from Karnak

Apologies for failing to update the blog yesterday - I was running around like a headless chicken yesterday and somehow I just didn't get around to it.

These photos of Karnak are all of the same pair of very fine granite columns showing the lotus (symbol of Upper Egypt) and papyrus (symbol of Lower Egypt), both of which retain some of the original colours.

Newly Redesigned Website for Emory University's Michael C. Carlos Museum

PR Web

Mediacurrent, an Atlanta based interactive firm, is proud to launch the newly redesigned website for Emory University's Michael C. Carlos Museum. Utilizing the Drupal content management system (CMS) the site will serve as a web portal for showcasing one of the Southeast's premier collections of Classical, Ancient Egyptian, Near Eastern, Ancient American, African, and Asian art, as well as a collection of works on paper from the Renaissance to the present. The museum provides unique opportunities for education and enrichment in the community and promotes interdisciplinary teaching and research at Emory University. Annual participation from 100,000 visitors, 30,000 children, and almost 1 million internet users of Odyssey Online, Carlos Museum's interactive website accessed by classrooms around the world, reveals the Museum's commitment to making art and artifacts relevant and accessible to all.

Historic Haunts

Egypt Today (Ethar El-Katatney)

In a city that’s been home to a number of religions and cultures over the centuries, it’s not unusual to see a McDonalds jostling for space with a centuries-old mashrabeya, or a minaret leaning over a small alleyway.

We all fawn over the beautiful architectural marvels that have been left to us, but how many of us have actually taken the time to traverse even one of the old Cairo quarters and enjoy some quality culture time? In that vein, we ask you to put on your walking shoes, ditch the car for a day, take a deep breath, and go on our walking tour.

For the uninitiated, there’s no better place to start than El-Muez Lideen Allah Street, the historic axis of Fatimid Cairo and a maze of over 30 mosques and monuments that span some 800 years. Stretching across the northern gate of Bab El-Futuh to Bab El-Zewayla on the southern wall, the two-kilometer street is the most important commercial thoroughfare of the old city, and a walk down can take you as little as 20 minutes or as long as a day. A whole population of craftsmen, shopkeepers, tradesmen and the owners of restaurants and cafés inhabit El-Muez and its adjoining alleys; many are born, live, work and even die on the same neighborhood.

Fiction Interview: The Rosetta Key

TradingMarkets.com

Bill Dietrich, assistant professor of environmental studies at Western Washington University's Huxley College of the Environment, shares "The Rosetta Key," the sequel to "Napoleon's Pyramids," continuing the adventures of Ethan Gage, who's now in the Holy Land in dogged pursuit of the magical "Book of Thoth" during Napoleon's 1799 invasion of Israel that will climax at the epic siege of Acre.

Question: For those who may not have read "Napoleon's Pyramids," what should readers know about Ethan Gage, the hero of these two novels, in particular his (seeming) attitude that life is a gamble, one "plays the cards" and "takes the risks." (I am also curious whether this is your attitude toward life?)

Answer: Ethan is my alter ego, not autobiographical! I don't gamble, I'm a family man instead of a womanizer, a writer instead of a warrior, and judicious instead of impulsive. Ethan and I are alike, however, in a belief in destiny and opportunity; that while we're responsible for our choices, our fate is not entirely in our own hands. Napoleon felt the same way.

Travel: Marsa Matrouh

Egyptian Gazette (temporary story)

It is a place of heritage, sea, sands, memories of war, temples and cemeteries. Marsa Matrouh is where the romance between Anthony and Queen Cleopatra blossomed.

In World War II, the British Army's Baggush Box (a fortification of the Western Desert Force) was located to the east of Marsa Matrouh, near Maarten Baggush, while Marsa Matrouh was the terminus for a single-track railway, which passed through el-Alamein. It was also where the late famous actress and singer Laila Murad sang her famous song, "I love two things, water and fresh air...", as she sat on a rock on the beach in the 1940s romantic flick Shatt El-Gharam (Shore of Love). Marsa Matrouh lies 290km west of Alexandria and about 220km east of el-Salloum on the Libyan border. The distance from Cairo to Matrouh is 525km. It lies on a bay on the Mediterranean and is distinguished by its 7km-long beach, which - as visitors testify - is one of the most beautiful in the world. The beach is famous for its soft, white sands and calm, transparent waters, as the bay is protected from the high seas by a series of rocks forming a natural wave-breaker, with a small opening to allow light vessels in. Marsa Matrouh offers a getaway to Cairenes eager to flee the capital in the sweltering summer months. One can easily go there by the bus which leaves Giza early every morning. The journey takes around eight hours. If you're feeling wealthy, you can always fly from Cairo International Airport.Matrouh Governorate stretches 400km south into the depths of the desert. Its area is 166,563km square, while its population is just over 278,000. Its beach dates back to the days of Alexander the Great, when it was known as 'Paraetonium' and also as 'Amunia'. It is said that Alexander stopped there during his epic expedition to pay tribute and sacrifice, to the god Amun at Siwa.This meant that he became Amun's son and his rule became a historical continuation of the Pharaohs. There are also the ruins of a temple from the time of Ramses II (1200 BC) in Matrouh.

Trivia: "Ancient Egypt" takes shape in Marsaxlokk

Times of Malta

This is a bit of fun - the photograph of a film set currently under construction. Here's the caption:

The film set constructed at Marsaxlokk for the shooting of the ancient Egyptian epic Agora, based in Roman Egypt in the fourth century AD, has come to life. Construction started in February and involved around 60 workers. The movie stars Oscar-winning actress Rachel Weisz and Max Minghella. Oscar-winning director Alejandro Amenábar is trying to bring ancient Alexandria back to life, "allowing the audience to see, feel and smell a remote civilisation as if it were as real as today". Not only has an entire film on such a scale never been shot here before but many Maltese are being employed in roles and crew positions that are usually taken up by foreigners.

Charting the Holocene movements of the Nile at Karnak

The latest issue of Geoarchaeology includes the following article (available for purchase for 24 hours):

Stratigraphic landscape analysis: Charting the Holocene movements of the Nile at Karnak through ancient Egyptian time (Bunbury, JM; Graham, A; Hunter, MA Geoarchaeology 2008 23(3): 351-373)

Here's the abstract:

Geological analysis of 5-10-m-long sediment cores in the context of the anthropologically derived materials within them has allowed us to identify ancient landscape features in the Theban area around Luxor, Egypt. From these observations we propose a sequence of island formation and northwestward movement of the Nile from the Middle Kingdom onward in the area of the temple complexes of Karnak. The geoarchaeological techniques used appear to document the Holocene lateral migration and vertical aggradation of the Nile. Our method can be used to test postulated movements and is applicable to sites in river or coastal plains where sediments were being deposited during the occupation of the site. The sediments were sieved to retrieve sherds and numerous other small items (2 mm and larger), which included worked stone fragments, rootlet concretions (rhizocretions), desert polished sand grains, and occasionally beads. The small stone fragments can be correlated with buildings and sherds of known age within the site, while the rhizocretions and desert sand grains indicate environmental conditions prevailing at the time of deposition. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

I posted this previously, but forgot to add the abstract.

Daily Photo - More from Karnak

You may become a trifle bored with Karnak if you've seen lots of photographs before - I have nearly a week's worth to come! But for those of you who aren't terribly keen on the oases, the desert and rock art this may come as a pleasant change.

Pier - I don't include you in the above, now knowing that your passion for Karnak is only equalled by your passion for Angelina Jolie :-)

Oxyrhynchus - the dustbin of history

Guardian Unlimited (Khaled Diab)

Our collective memory of the past is mostly confined to grand figures and epic events, while the vast majority of humanity ends up in the wastelands of oblivion.

Thanks to nearly half a million papyrus fragments uncovered in Hellenic Egyptian rubbish dumps which are being gradually decoded, however, we are, quite literally, salvaging fragments of ordinary people's lives from the dustbin of history.

The rubbish dumps in question belonged to the provincial but thriving Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus (City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish), about 100 miles south of modern Cairo, which was established during the pharaonic New Kingdom and became Hellenised in Ptolemic times, but was eventually reduced to a single standing column.

Most of the unearthed documents, discovered by two Victorian archaeologists, date from the time when Egypt was part of the Roman empire, and include a treasure trove of lost classics and non-canonical gospels.

Peter Parsons, an archaeologist who spent two decades leading the team deciphering the papyri, has written a book that offers a fascinating reconstruction of life in Oxyrhynchus.

For me, the mundane aspects of ordinary life highlighted in correspondences and letters in the book are among the most enthralling of all the finds because they reveal both how familiar and how different that lost world is.

"... Write to me about your health and what you need from here," Achillion exhorts his brother, Hierakapollon. "If you do this, you will have done me a favour: for we shall have the impression, through our letters, of seeing one another face to face."

See the above page for the full story, which has attracted 19 comments so far. The book referred to, by Peter Parsons is City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish - Greek Papyri Beneath the Egyptian Sand Reveal a Long Lost World (2007). I've had it sitting on my book shelf for around a year - I'm glad that this post appeared because I had forgotten I had it and I've now excavated it and am looking forward to reading it. I posted links to a couple of reviews about the book last year, by William Dalrymple in New Statesman and Tom Holland on the Guardian.

Egypt asserts ownership of its past

Marketplace (Amy Scott)
(Slideshow - 2 images)

All the audio links appear to have moved on to other stories now, but here's an extract from the text page:

Thousands of ancient treasures have left Egypt over the centuries. Many were carted away by archeologists with official blessings. Others were smuggled out and sold on the black market.

To stem the trade, Zahi Hawass has proposed stiffer penalties for smugglers. He's also floated the idea of copyrighting Egyptian artifacts. The royalties would help pay for more than a dozen new museums under construction in Egypt.

HAWASS: I'm making big changes here, and I need money. And this money that I make of the replica, it's not for Egypt to be rich, no. It's to use in restoring these monuments that I believe . . . it does not belong to Egypt only, but belongs to everyone all over the world.

That's just the point, says James Cuno, who directs the Art Institute of Chicago. He's written a book: "Who Owns Antiquity?" Aside from sheer geography, Cuno says modern Egypt's link to the Pharaonic civilization is tenuous.

JAMES CUNO: You know, it's not in the religious practice, it's not in the language, it's not in the artistic practice, it's not in any political relationships.

And he says claiming otherwise is dangerous.

CUNO: Culture is something that always is a very fluid and mongrel thing that is made by people and not by nations. And to put political borders around culture is to falsify the history of culture as we know it.

Yet the past is one of Egypt's biggest money makers. Tourists who flocked to the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings brought in some $8 billion last season.

Hani El-Masri is an Egyptian artist. He'd like to see the Rosetta Stone stay right where it is.

LE 20 billion for developing tourism movement in Al-Fayoum

Egypt State Information Service

During his meeting in Tourism, Media and Culture Committee of People's Assembly on 17/5/2008, Tourism Minister Zoheir Grana announced that the plan of developing the tourism movement in Al-Fayoum governorate is based on establishing a world tourism zone at the north of Qaroun Lake. This plan was put forth for the investors who presented 60 demands for 20 pieces of land.

Grana added that the development plan in Al-Fayoum includes also establishing new rail and land roads to connect the new tourism zones with Cairo and the 6th of October to facilitate the tourists' movement to Al-Fayoum after establishing the new museum in Al-Haram area, and after operating the new 6th of October international airport.

Al-Fayoum Governor said that a great project is currently carried out by Arab and Egyptian investments to establish many factors for producing salt from Qaroun Lake which will contribute in reducing salt's percentage in it, increasing the fishery wealth and protecting it from pollution.

This plan escorted the tourist comprehensive development projects to return Al-Fayoum as it was a world tourism zone, especially for its closeness from Cairo and the neighboring governorates, and to encourage the internal tourism besides attracting this world tourism whether for entertainment, safari or natural world protectorate after the UNESCO listed Al-Fayoum as the most important and ancient cultural and natural museum in the world.

Travel: Taxi fares rise in Cairo

Egypt Daily Star News

Thanks to Tony Marson for this item, which I had missed.

Cairo expatriates have reported an alarmingly high rate of TSIs — Taxi Shouting Incidents — this week, as they come face to face with the frustration felt by Black ‘n’ White cab drivers over rising gas costs.

TSIs are on the rise across Cairo, already known for its traffic volatility and passionate drivers.

In a recent SMS survey, more than 85 percent of respondents said that taxi drivers were charging higher fares and that many journeys were ending in TSIs.

In the wake of reforms by the central Government and rising production costs; bread, cigarettes and fuel have all seen price increases that have hit Cairenes in the back pocket.

The most immediate impact on foreigners has been the hike in taxi fares.

The usual cause of a Taxi Shouting Incident is when a foreigner objects to the fare charged for a journey that he or she knows rather well. Add to this clash of cultures an indignant driver, who is only asking for a fare increase equivalent to a British first class postage stamp or two, and the expletives start flying.

For the expatriate, it is a matter of principal. Many foreigners pride themselves on their worldliness and are damned if they pay tourist prices in a taxi.

CAPMAS: Population reaches 78.7 million in May 2008

Egypt State Information Service

Egypt's population until May 1, 2008 reached 78.7 million according to final results of this year's census as announced Thursday by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS).

Of the population 37.2 million are males, up 22.6 percent from the 30.4 million in 1996, and 35.6 million are females which is 22.9 percent more from their count in 1996 that was estimated at 29 million.

The number of families across Egypt stood at 17.3 million in 2006 from 12.7 million in 1996 with a 36.1 percent increase.

According to the 2006 census results, Cairo is Egypt's most populous governorate with 6.8 million at an increase rate of 9.28 percent, followed by Sharqiya governorate with 5.4 million, up 7.35 percent, then Dakahliya with 5 million at a rate of 6.85 percent.

The one just above it was El-Wadi El-Gadid, also known as the New Valley governorate, whose population count stood at 187,000 at an increase rate of 0.26 percent.

The population count was also carried out in the newly-established governorates of the Sixth of October whose population stood at 2.6 million, with an increase rate of 3.5 percent and Helwan whose population was 1.7 million with an increase of 2.4 percent.

Daily Photo - Karnak

I've posted several photographs of Karnak before, but this is a new bunch scanned from old photo albums. Karnak will be the featured site for the Daily Photo for the next few days. The site is vast and incredibly complex - and is still under excavation so more will doubtless be added to our knowlege about the site in the future. Although there are many good books describing the temple complex there are surprisingly few good resources for finding out about it online. The best are probably the following, but let me know if you know of any others:

• A good summary on Su Bayfield's Karnak page on her EgyptSites website
• A useful site plan on the Tour Egypt website
• Some good photographs, and another good plan, can be found on Jon Bodworth's Egypt Archive
• The Quarryscapes annotated GIS/satellite view of Karnak (have a look - it's rather good)
  

Mummies come to Birmingham (UK)

The Birmingham Post (George Kotschy)

With photograph. This is quite interesting in the context of the discussions currently fermenting gently over at the Manchester Museum, where there are now 53 comments in response to the issue of covering the mummies.

Birmingham's residents will be given a once in a lifetime opportunity on Saturday when the 'Meet the Mummies' exhibition calls at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

The museum is able to offer visitors the opportunity to see Egyptian mummies up close, because of the redevelopment of the gallery, due to be finished in September.

Simon Cane, Head of Conservation at the museum, said that it was the first the museum has offered visitors such a chance:

"We usually do the conservation every 10 or 20 years. We don't usually get this much time but, because we've been redeveloping the gallery with the mummies out, we thought we'd offer this chance while we can."

The conservation is done to prevent the mummies from deteriorating, which they do when taken away from the climate of the desert.

The exhibition, which is only on for one day, will open at 10:30am and will be free of charge.

Travel: Noise levels in Cairo

New York Times (Michael Slackman)

This isn't a travel article but I think that it will certainly be of interest to anyone who has visited or is planning to visit Cairo. I found it fascinating. Thanks very much to Rhio Barnhart for sending me the link.

This is not like London or New York, or even Tehran, another car-clogged Middle Eastern capital. It is literally like living day in and day out with a lawn mower running next to your head, according to scientists with the National Research Center. They spent five years studying noise levels across the city and concluded in a report issued this year that the average noise from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. is 85 decibels, a bit louder than a freight train 15 feet away, said Mustafa el Sayyid, an engineer who helped carry out the study.

But that 85 decibels, while “clearly unacceptable,” is only the average across the day and across the city. At other locations, it is far worse, he said. In Tahrir Square, or Ramsis Square, or the road leading to the pyramids, the noise often reaches 95 decibels, he said, which is only slightly quieter than standing next to a jackhammer.

“All of greater Cairo is in the range of unacceptable noise levels from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.,” Mr. Sayyid said.

By comparison, normal conversation ranges from 45 to 60 decibels, a chain saw registers 100 decibels and a gunshot 140. Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, every 10 decibels equals a tenfold increase in intensity.

Noise at the levels commonly found in Cairo affects the body.

Ancient Egypt Games Online

Talking Pyramids (Vincent Brown)

Vincent has collected together a set of ancient Egypt-based games which can be played online. I had no idea how many were available. The first two games shown are online versions of genuine ancient Egyptian games and the rest are modern games based on ancient Egyptian themes. Good fun.

TV Review: The Artful Codgers, Channel 4, UK

The Independent (Robert Hanks)

From the inaccurately punning title on, The Artful Codgers played the story of the Greenhalgh family of Bolton for laughs: tee-hee, look at the uneducated working-class types putting one over on the snooty, silly art market. But by the end, the story was starting to look a lot less funny than the programme wanted to let on.

You'll remember the Greenhalghes: George and Olive and their son, Sean, who were convicted last year of making at least £850,000 from selling forged works of art. The stuff they sold covered an astonishing range – Assyrian reliefs, Egyptian statuary, a heavily decorated Roman plate, paintings by Lowry, modern sculptures – and the police expected to find a complicated operation involving several forgers. After all, most forgers specialise: they paint or they carve. Instead, they found that Sean had knocked it all up by himself in the garden shed, having done the necessary research in the local public library. George, 84, did most of the selling, and was evidently a charming and accomplished liar. He also span some impressive stories about his war record, and had the medals to back them up, but he had actually spent most of the Second World War in prison for desertion.

The high point of their success was the sale of the "Amarna Princess" to the Bolton Museum for more than £400,000. This was purportedly an Egyptian figurine depicting one of Tutankhamun's sisters – damaged, but still a graceful object.

See the above page for more details.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery - gallery closures

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (U.K.)

The BM&AG website has a list of gallery enclosures, including the Egyptian gallery. The work started last year and carries on until 2009. I only saw the notice whilst looking for something else entirely:

Birmingham Museum & Art gallery has had to undergo roof works for the past five years, owing to structural instability of the roof trusses and flat roof sections. The 5th and penultimate phase of these roof works is about to start and will take place above the Great Charles Street elevation of the museum.

The roof works create heavy vibrations that can cause serious damage to museum objects and artefacts if left on display in areas close to where the contractors are working. In this fifth phase of the roof works the museum is consequently forced to close six of its galleries for 15 months. The six galleries that will have to close are:

Gallery 32 - Greeks, Romans & the Ancient Near East gallery
Gallery 33 - World Cultures and Vibes gallery
Gallery 34 - Egyptians gallery
Gallery 35 - Birmingham Archaeology gallery
Gallery 36 - Ways of Seeing gallery
Gallery 37 - The Wonderwall display

Gallery 32, Gallery 33, Gallery 34, Gallery 35 and Gallery 36 will reopen on 30th August 2008. Gallery 37 will remain closed at that time. It is scheduled to reopen on 28th March 2009.

Daily Photo - More from Denderah

The first of these photographs was taken from the roof of the Temple of Hathor. Unfortunately the was closed to tourists a few years ago for health and safety reasons after an American tourist leaned over too far and fell off. It's a great shame (and not only for that tourist!) because the views from the roof are very good - agriculture to the east and a line in the sand beyond which there is unending desert to the west.

Rare coins of Emperor Valens found in Egypt

Al Ahram Weekly (Nevine El Aref)

Archaeologists from the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) carrying out a routine archaeological survey at Sail Al-Tofaha area, west of Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, have chanced upon two gold Byzantine coins bearing the head of Emperor Valens (364-378 AD). A number of grotto caves and fragments of clay and glass have already been found in the area.

Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the SCA, described this discovery as unique because it is the first time that objects linked to that emperor have been found in Egypt. "Coins of Valens were previously found in Lebanon and Syria," Hawass said, adding that remnants of walls along with fragments of clay, glass and porcelain dating to the same era were also unearthed.

See the above for more details, including crystal clear photographs of the obverse and reverse faces of the coin, which is remarkably well preserved.

Sacred Sina - Egyptian World Heritage Day celebrations

Al Ahram Weekly (Nevine El-Aref)

As well as announcing an injection of funding for the St Catherine's National Park(the Greek government had offered Egypt a grant of LE2 million to help restore St Catherine's Monastery and add up-to-date facilities for tourists.), this piece offers a fascinating look at the history of the management of the St Catherine's area.

In 2002 the site was described on the World Heritage List as "mixed property, cultural and natural", which means that the monastery and the area around it were on the list. The area encompasses almost some 601 sq km within the 5,750 sq km-area of the St Catherine's National Park. . . .

The first steps to conserve the natural and cultural features of South Sinai were taken back in 1996, when the St Catherine National Park was declared under the management of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA) and the commission of the European Union. The aim then was to conserve the area by laying down certain rules for visitors. These included respecting the sanctity of the land; protecting its large variety of flora and fauna (some unique to Sinai); and prohibiting the removal or interference with wild animals, plants or rocks. The aims were prudent, but they could not be fully implemented because controversy arose on the question of responsibility.

All natural reserves in Egypt, which differ in kind, are run by the EEAA, which has voiced concerns about the advisability of privatisation. However, some newspapers at that time called for privatisation, claiming that the government could not control all the reserves and that investors under the supervision of the EEAA were necessary.

Excavations will begin in the St Catherine's area in September, which Hawass says he hopes will reveal more about the history of Sinai.

Eastern Desert - new books and conference

Thanks to Hans Barnard for the news that the the Costen Institute of Archaeology volume on "The Archaeology of Mobility" finally went to press. Also Hans Barnard's own monograph on Eastern Desert Ware, pottery likely made by pastoral nomads in the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, will go to press (Archaeopress, Oxford) some time next week. He adds details about the Eastern Desert conference:

Meanwhile, our conference on the "History of the Peoples of the Eastern Desert" is taking shape. Please visit the project's website <http://www.archbase.org/ED/> to view the outline of this project, a timeline and the 18 abstracts now accepted. . . .

There may still be room for a few more participants in Cairo, all are encouraged to file abstracts for a chapter in the proceedings that will be the final product of this endeavor. Kindly keep in mind that the main perspective of this conference is from the desert outward, rather than the usual perspective of outsiders. We are interested in all data and conclusions relevant to the study of the Eastern Desert, but mostly in those pertaining to the history of the indigenous inhabitants of the region. Another angle that merits attention is the theory behind the (archaeological) research of nomadism. These could be combined into contributions on ethnicity; the comparison of historical, ethnographic and archaeological data; or the interaction between the outsiders and the natives, and their influence on the cultural or natural environment.

Travel: St Catherine's National Park

Al Ahram Weekly

Objective: The basis of the national park's rationale is the conservation of biological diversity or biodiversity. This phenomenon has increased over geological time, the world's biodiversity is richer now than at any time in its evolutionary history. At the same time, global biological diversity is being lost at a rate many times faster than ever before, largely as a result of human activities.

Geographical aspects: St Catherine's National Park occupies much of the central part of South Sinai, a mountainous region of Precambrian igneous and metamorphic rock, which includes Egypt's highest peaks (St Catherine's Mountain, Mount Moses, Serbal mountain, Um Shomer mountain and Tarbush mountain).

St Catherine's Mountain is the highest peak in Egypt, 2,629 m above sea-level. The Sinai massif contains some of the world's oldest rocks. Around 80 per cent of the rocks are 600 million years old.

Management: Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency.

Importance: The St Catherine National Park is an area of great biological interest and includes the highest mountains in Egypt. This high altitude ecosystem supports a surprising diversity of wild species; some found nowhere else in the world. The mountains are relic outposts for the Sinai rose finch from Asia, the ibex and wolf from Europe, and the striped hyena and Tristram's grackle which came from Africa. Several species are unique to the National Park including two species of snakes and about 20 plant species, such as a beautiful native primrose.

Travel: Blending with the locals in Cairo

Guardian Unlimited (Will Hobson)

"Are you an Egyptologist?" Fady, the young Copt sitting at the nextdoor table in El Bostan café in Cairo's downtown, wondered. He had seen the introductory paperback I was reading, and immediately wanted to chat. We ended up spending the next day riding round the Pyramids together - which is entirely characteristic of the easygoing sociability of Cairo's cafes.

In a city of 18 million, where the density in the poorer areas can reach 700,000 per square mile, privacy is not exactly an option - but nor is it necessarily the priority it is in the west. People would do anything to have more space, more work, to spend less time stuck in deafening traffic jams or struggling to afford the basics – but it seems as if it wouldn't make much sense to Cairenes (nor would Cairo be the amazingly safe place it is) if the city lost its personal dimension. At first the "Welcome to Egypt" you're greeted with at every turn is so unassuming it's hard to distinguish from the hustlers' pitches in tourist areas – but the genuine friendliness becomes obvious the minute you spend time in a café.

See the above page for the full story.

Snap Shot: Sites that the High Dam put under threat

Al Ahram Weekly (Mohamed El-Hebeishy)

El-Hebeishy lists the main sites that were put under threat by the Aswan High Dam, and shows a photograph of one of the beautiful painted scenes which was salvaged from Buhen, which is now under the waters of the lake:

The featured photograph captures one of the salvaged walls of the Temple of Buhen. Dedicated to Horus, this temple was completed during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut. It was built inside the walls of the fortress of Buhen, one of a series known as the Second Cataract Fortresses which were built by the Pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom. Located on the western bank of the Nile, around 50 kilometres south of Aksha, the fortress of Buhen served as an important strategic point ensuring control over this part of the river.

Travel: Fields of Valor - El-Alamein

Egypt Today (Jeff Neumann)

Along the Alexandria-Marsa Matruh Road, a plaque at kilometer 111 marks the furthest advance of the Axis armies after months of hard campaigning across North Africa. The surrounding area is the final resting place for tens of thousands of soldiers from both sides.

To put the carnage into context, visit the Alamein War Museum (9am – 5pm daily Tel: +2 (046) 410-0031). There is a collection of armored vehicles, tanks and artillery pieces, as well as detailed maps illustrating World War II battle tactics. The museum is in dire need of a makeover, but adults and children will still enjoy the exhibits, which clearly portray both the Allied and Axis perspectives.

The Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery is the largest of the area’s memorials (7,367 British, Canadian, Australian, Indian, African and other Allied soldiers are buried here), and it is perhaps the most moving of them all. A monument inside the cemetery honors an additional 12,000 soldiers whose bodies were never recovered from the battlefield, a solemn reminder of the human cost of war. The grounds are serene and well kept, and a caretaker can assist those searching for relatives buried here.

Perched on top of a breezy hill overlooking the Mediterranean, the octagonal German Memorial holds the remains of 4,280 of the battle’s casualties.

See the above page for more details.

Trivia: Harrison Ford Elected to the Board of the Archaeological Institute of America

PR-inside.com

Okay, this is completely irrelevant to anything but I couldn't resist:

After years of being identified on screen as the legendary archaeologist "Indiana Jones," actor Harrison Ford has won election to the Board of Directors of the Archaeological Institute of America. With his Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull set to hit U.S. movie theaters on May 22,

the film star commented on his real world dedication to archaeology, "Knowledge is power, and understanding the past can only help us in dealing with the present and the future."

See the above page for more.

Daily Photo - More from Denderah

On the first photo, which is a bit furry when you click to bring up the bigger image, don't miss the Bes carvings at the top of each captial of the Roman mamisi (birth-house). In the second photograph, the underside of a small pylon, have a look at the lower image - an unusual take on the theme!

West Bank dewatering

Luxor News Blog (Jane Akshar)

Jane has posted some more unusual photographs on her blog:

At a recent lecture we were told by Mansour Boraik of the SCA that they have started to look into a dewatering project for the West Bank. The proposal would be to have a pipe from Medinet Habu to Seti I. It is certainly needed. These recent photos show the situation at the Ramaseum and Seti I.

Egypt's economy

USA Today (David J. Lynch)

It's a very slow news day today, so here's a general interest piece about the modern Egyptian economy, for those whose interests extend beyond the ancient. Thanks very much to Rick Menges for sending me the link.

Four years into a robust economic expansion, this country has shaken off its history of sleepy Arab state socialism and embraced the market. A rush of construction is throwing up office buildings as fast as Western-sounding names, such as Palm Hills, can be dreamed up for them. Sluggish state-owned companies from banks to department stores are being sold to private investors, and foreign capital is flooding in, lured by the scent of certain profit.

Egypt today has all the earmarks of a gathering boom. Strange then, that most Egyptians seem so miserable. "Living conditions are difficult. Everyone is suffering because of higher prices," says a weary Gomaa Ali, a local restaurant owner.

At Ali's tiny downtown eatery one recent day, the flies outnumbered the customers. Double-digit inflation combined with stagnant wages has eaten into his business and made the government's talk of a surging economy seem hopelessly divorced from reality. "People have become more reluctant to eat out. If you'd come here two or three years ago, this place would be packed, and they'd have to line up to get a table," he says, gesturing at the empty chairs and sweating in the oppressive midday heat.

Even as the government touts a litany of impressive statistics, Ali's complaints find echoes among Egypt's long-suffering 80 million citizens. Ambitious economic reforms launched in 2004 have won plaudits from the business community but have done little for the average Egyptian.

See the above page for the full story.

Daily Photo - More from Denderah

Athens museum to show its priceless Egyptian collection

pr-inside.com

A priceless ancient Egyptian collection opens to the public Wednesday - featuring a wooden body tag for a mummy, a stunning bronze statue of a princess, and a 3,000-year-old loaf of bread with a bite-sized chunk missing.

The National Archaeological Museum in Athens is putting more than 1,100 pieces from the collection on permanent exhibition, as more of its halls open to the public following years of renovation.

The previous Egyptian display, shelved six years ago, included just 350 artifacts.

Most of the current collection - which museum officials say is one of the best in the world - has never been shown to the public before due to lack of space.

A further 6,000 Egyptian artifacts remain in underground storage.

One piece that made it into the display is the round, brown loaf of bread, which is missing a bite-sized chunk.

Baked during the New Kingdom, between 1550-1075 B.C., it was placed in a tomb for the occupant's use in the afterlife. Museum officials are unsure what happened to the missing bit.

Archaeologist Lena Papazoglou, curator of the museum's prehistoric, Egyptian and eastern collections, said Egypt's dry, hot climate helped preserve organic materials - food, wood and leather - for thousands of years.

Also on The Canadian Press, the New Zealand Herald and Egypt Daily Star News.

The Egyptian collection is featured on the National Archaeological Museum of Athens website.

More re the covering of the Manchester mummies

Thanks to Bob Partridge, Editor of Ancient Egypt magazine for his permission to publish his email and a copy of his letter, which was sent yesterday to a wide distribution list.

Dear fellow ancient Egypt enthusuiasts,

This email is for those who either may have heard, or perhaps have not heard about the recent decision by the Manchester Museum (in the UK) to COMPLETELY cover its unwrapped mummies.

I am contacting as many people as I can because the issue is one which, in my opinion, is much wider than a local issue, for the Manchester Museum collection is known world-wide and the work on its mummies and the research it pioneered is being followed by museums around the world to this day.

The museum as you may know will have its Egyptian galleries re-displayed in a year or so and has has started a consultation process with interested people and the public to plan for this. One of the subjects being discussed is the display of mummies, and one of the senior managers in the museum (but not, I understand the Egptologists) has already announced that he does not like mummies on display, in advance of any response/results from the consultation process.

The museum has asked for "comments" about the covering, which, hopefully, will be taken into consideration, and, if the comments made so far are anything to go by, should result in the museum's decision being reversed (?).

The museum has a web site where you can see a picture of Asru, covered up (but it could be a pile of Leggo bricks inside the coffin now). The Museum has asked for comments from the public about the display of mummies and their covering.

http://egyptmanchester.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/covering-the-mummies/#comment-6

PLEASE visit the site if you can and leave your own comments, whatever your own views, for or against.

I have written a letter to the University/Museum, on behalf of the Manchester Ancient Egypt Society, which was signed by most of the people at yesterday's meeting.

You might like to print this off and send a copy yourself, or write your own letter. Please read this letter anyway, as sets out a bit of background information which might be of use.

PLEASE do respond as soon as you can, for the Manchester Collection is one we all know well and the University, is to my mind at least, making itself a laughing stock in the world of Egyptology.

We can but hope that te decision taken to cover the mummies will be reversed, and the Museum will take heed of our comments. If not it will be a sad time for Egyptology in Manchester


The Address for all the people at the University, including Professor Rosalie David is

The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester. M13 9PL, with the appropriate name and Department inserted first.

Thank you..


Bob Partridge
Editor "Ancient Egypt" magazine
Chairman Manchester Ancient Egypt Society


Wording of letter follows:

To:

Professor Alan Gilbert.
The President and Vice-Chancellor, the University of Manchester.

Copies to:
Nick Merriman, Director, Manchester Museum, University of Manchester
Piotr Bienkowski, Deputy Director, Manchester Museum
Dr. Karen Exell, Curator Egypt and the Sudan, Manchester Museum
Professor Rosalie David, The KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at the University of Manchester.

Covering the Mummies in the Manchester Museum.

Dear Professor Gilbert,

This letter is written at the request of members of the Manchester Ancient Egypt Society (MAES), following our monthly meeting yesterday.

You will know that the Egyptian collection in Manchester is one of the most important in the country and has world-wide recognition. The displays have, since the museum first opened, have done exactly what we would expect a University Museum to do, to inform and educate the public, enthusiasts and experts alike.

The mummies are of course only a part of a major collection, but they too have achieved their own national and international recognition following the scientific study of them over many years and the publication of the results (two such books being published only recently).

We know that the display of the Egyptian collection is to be renewed in the coming years and that a special “consultation process” which will last a year is under way to get the opinion of the various groups of people interested in the collection and also the general public too. The second meeting was held in April and was attended by several MAES members. The matter of the display of mummies was one which was discussed and which we understand will be discussed at future meetings, before the findings can be collated, analysed and acted upon.

One of the ideas raised and discussed there was the putting up of a notice at the entrance to the galleries, in effect warning people that they would encounter dead bodies. We see this has actually been implemented in the museum already, although it could be argued that in the 21st Century there can be hardly anyone visiting an Egyptian collection who would be surprised to find mummies there.

We realise that the display of mummies is indeed a sensitive matter. In UK museums, only a handful are actually displayed, unwrapped, but the important thing is that unwrapped mummies ARE on display. In Egypt several museums display unwrapped mummies, including the most famous kings and queens of ancient Egypt in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In the Tomb of Tutankhamun, the king’s mummy was recently put on public display for the first time.

It is clear that The Deputy Director of the Manchester Museum has strong and already publicised views about the mummies and does not want them displayed.

We are somewhat shocked and amazed to find that the three of the Manchester mummies have now all been completely covered (two unwrapped mummies and one wrapped, but clearly showing the presence of male genitalia) in advance of any ‘results’ from the public consultation exercise.

We find this decision and action absolutely incomprehensible and would make the following two major observations:-

1. How can the museum cover these mummies “in line with its Human Remains Policy” when in the very same building a much publicised exhibition has recently opened which displays the uncovered body of ‘Lindow Man’? Lindow man died a violent death and it could be argued that this could be more upsetting to some visitors than the mummies.

2. According to the Museums Human Remains policy, human skeletons (or even body parts) are treated no differently from mummies, yet why are the mounted skeletons of the Egyptian “Two brothers” not treated the same way? They are still on full display.

The Museum’s policy is both astounding to us and also inconsistent.

It is clear from visiting the museum that visitors are not happy with this (and whilst not all of them will record their opinions on the comments board it was interesting to see that the great majority of the views expressed were in favour of the mummies being uncovered).

We are concerned that a truly world class museum will rapidly lose any academic credibility worldwide by the actions taken. Its Human Remains policy seems to differ from other museums (and we would have expected there to be a consistent and national policy on this). The Science Museum in Manchester recently attracted a huge number of people with its Body World exhibition, which did educate and inform people in a very real and positive way.

Non-Egyptologists at the museum may not be aware that literally hardly a week goes by when a museum somewhere in the world announces that it has studied its mummy, put it on display and made a reconstruction of its lifetime appearance. Manchester Museum was the first in the world to do this and the rest of the world is still following the example.

The Manchester Mummies have always been, and hopefully will in the future, be a main attraction at the museum. Their presence and display, is directly responsible for the huge interest in ancient Egypt. One only has to see how busy the Egyptian galleries in the museum are, to appreciate this is still the case and the unwrapped mummies play a key part in the “visitor experience”. The unwrapped child mummy shows the care, attention and love with which the dead were treated and reminds visitors in a real and poignant way that infant mortality rates were high. Asru was carefully buried as befitted her status as a Chantress of Amun and we have learnt much about her life from the study of her mummy. It is now pointless having the reconstructed head on display when the body is covered. The mummies encourage visitors think and react to the past and makes ancient Egypt “real” to people in a way that is just not possible with other objects or indeed other ancient cultures and more recent periods of history.

If the museum does not display any mummies, or even photographs of them (which also I gather is against the Human Remains policy) then the public’s “knowledge” of the appearance of mummies, is likely to be the bandage- dripping, vengeful monsters portrayed in films, and the Museum should show that the reality is very different.

It would seem that political correctness is getting in the way of good museum displays, and their important work of education and informing visitors. We would urge the Museum to

1. Review its Human Remains policy with regards to the display of ancient Egyptian remains and perhaps encourage all UK museums to work to one mutually agreed policy and to implement the policy consistently.

2. Uncover the mummies immediately and await the final results of the public consultation before any major decision on their display is taken.

It is clear from the response we have seen at the consultation meetings and from comments left in the museum and on the web site, that the great majority want the mummies on display and uncovered. We hope that the Museum will respond positively to these opinions and that its final decision has not already been made.

When I was in the museum on Sunday, there were some very disappointed visitors there, one in particular. I spoke to a nine year old boy who had visited the museum previously with his school and who had been talking about the display and the mummies in particular ever since. He finally persuaded his parents, his brother and sister and his grandparents to visit the museum with him and he was really upset to find that the mummies were covered, Asru in particular. He left a note saying “Please uncover the mummies”. I think that says it all.

Yours sincerely,
Bob Partridge
Chairman, The Manchester Ancient Egypt Society.

And the undersigned 36 members of the MAES who attended our meeting in 12th May….on the following pages

(Note: as this letter is being copied to many people, the original signatures are being sent to Professor Gilbert, with copies attached for all the other recipients).

Pi, Phi and the Great Pyramid - UPDATED

Al Ahram Weekly (Assem Deif)

UPDATE:

Author Assem Deif emailed me yesterday to ask me to post a correction that was not made in the original article

The editor of Al-Ahram wrote a sentence in line 4 of the 2nd paragraph, he said:
They worked out that 3 1/8 is less than Pi....

The original sentence in my original article was:
They can work out that....

Thanks very much to Mohamed Amin for the above link. It is an older Al Ahram article.

Assem Deif investigates the values -- not the symbols -- of the last of the Wonders of the Ancient World

We can forget all the ideas crediting Atlanteans or space aliens with building the Great Pyramid of Giza, and instead imagine ourselves travelling back in time in H G Wells's time machine to try and work out not how the ancient Egyptians built this enormous edifice, because this lies beyond our present understanding, but rather what we can best judge to be its most appropriate proportions. Then, however, there were no electronic calculators, only ropes and rods.

Constructing right angles at the four corners of a pyramid is easy. To do it, history tells us that the Egyptians were aware of the ratios 3:4:5 as the side-lengths of a right-angle triangle. Many old kingdom pyramids adhere to these ratios. The Egyptians also knew a rough value of Pi (the value, not the symbol) as the ratio between the circumference of any circle and its diameter. They worked out that 3 _ is less than Pi, and Pi is less than 3 1/7, i.e. Pi lies between the rational number 22/7 and the Babylonian value. This can be done by constructing a circle of diameter AB and laying the latter on its circumference, starting from A, once until C then D then E, to conclude that Pi is greater than 3. The remaining part EA from the circumference is laid down again on the diameter AB, so seven times EA is less than AB which in turn is less than eight times EA, or EA/AB is greater than 1/8 and less than 1/7.

To work out an Egyptian value for Pi from the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, they had a unit of length called the Royal Cubit (about 0.524m). By transforming the pyramid's height and base from western units (feet or metres) into cubits, it becomes evident that the designed height measures 280 cubits and the base 440. These figures have been worked out by Egyptologists, and in my view are the only plausible dimensions. Neither -- from the logical point of view -- were any fractions added to these values, considering the large dimensions of the structure. By dividing half the base by the height (cotangent of the slope angle) one reaches the ratio Pi/4. It then follows that the Egyptian value for Pi is 3.142857143 being equal exactly to 22/7, and this is the value, in our view, that was reported later by Archimedes, who studied in Alexandria.

What about the Egyptian value for the Golden Ratio Phi?

Repeat: Secrets of the Valley of the Kings

guardians.net

Over the last week or so I have received quite a large number of emails (with my thanks) bringing my attention to the above page. I originally posted a link to it on May 7th, but it seems that many people missed it, so here it is again. Hawass has updated his web presence "The Plateau" with details recent of investigations in the tomb of Seti I and the search for the tomb of Ramesses VIII. There are some excellent photographs on the page, and anyone who is familiar with Hawass and his writing style will recognize the autobiographical and anecdotal tone of the piece.

Daily Photo - The Temple of Denderah

I have a particular affection for Denderah - not only is it an absolute myriad of architectural features and wonderful art work, but it is the first temple that I ever visited in Egypt. Denderah was the first step on a long trail of journies into ancient Egypt which, 11 trips later, has been a fairly mind blowing experience! The next few days will feature more photographs of the site.

Denderah is c.60km to the north of Luxor (a good day trip by boat, if you're interested). It was dedicated to the goddess Hathor and was located in her chief cult centre, the 6th Nome of Uppe Egypt. Although the temple area has a long history of usage the present day temple buildings belong to the Graeco-Roman period. It is a sprawling complex, and the fact that it does not fit the model of other contemporary temples is due to the fact that construction was never completed - the hypostyle hall is a standalone building without the usual forecort, pylons or avenue of sphinxes. As well as numerous depictions of Hathor, her consort Horus the Elder and their son one of the most interesting of the other deities shown is Bes who is a strange stunted creature associated with childbirth. Amongst the pharaohs and royal family members represented some are completely anonymous but the best known is Cleopatra VII shown with her son Caesarion. The famous zodiac roof is now in the Louvre in Paris, France, but a copy has been installed in ints place.

For a good overview of the site's history and main components see Su Bayfield's Dendera page on her EgyptSites website.

Fears of Bolton's master forger in TV spotlight

Bolton News (Paul Keaveny)

The recently convicted Greenhalgh family, who forged an Amarna statue which was purchased by Bolton Museum, are apparently being given TV time on the UK's Channel 4 tomorrow evening. I won't be at home tomorrow and I've never worked out how to use the DVD recorder so if anyone watches it please let me know how it turns out.

A compulsive forger duped the art world into buying a string of realistic fake masterpieces because he feared he would never be recognised as an artist in his own right.

Shaun Greenhalgh will be seen for the first time explaining why he decided to con the art world in a TV documentary to be screened on Thursday.

Channel 4's Cutting Edge programme, called The Artful Codgers, tells the story of the Greenhalgh family from Bromley Cross, who tricked Bolton Museum into spending £440,000 on a fake ancient Egyptian statue in 2003.

See the above page for the full story.

Local gallery named in top 10 for exhibition

The West Australian

The Art Gallery of Western Australia’s Egyptian exhibit has been named in the top 10 antiquities exhibitions in the world by the prestigious arts journal, The Art Newspaper.

Culture and Arts Minister Sheila McHale said it was a great achievement which lifted the profile of the Art Gallery of WA and placed it on the world stage.

“The exhibition was an amazing collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities and for it to be recognised in the top 10 internationally by such a reputable arts journal is a great reward for the gallery,” Ms McHale said.

“(The) Egyptian Antiquities from the Louvre: Journey to the Afterlife exhibition attracted an average daily attendance of 1381 people over the 100 days it was on display, indicating the great public interest and demand for exhibitions of this calibre in WA.”

Mrs. Mubarak to open Egypt's queen exhibition in France

Egypt State Information Service

Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak will co-inaugurate on July 11 along with Prince Albert of Monaco a Pharaohnic exhibition.

Titled “Egypt's Pharaoh Queens,” the fair will display a wide array of artifacts and belongings that used to be owned by the ancient queens of Egypt.

Egyptian Ambassador in Paris Nasser Kamel said the exhibition is organized in cooperation with Monaco. The opening ceremony will be attended by a galaxy of notables and politicians from France and all over the world.

Travel: Final swing through Egypt

Jamaica Gleaner News (Laura Tanna)

Our last day with our guide, we drive to Aswan Dam, built by the British between 1898 and 1902, and then to the High Dam, built between 1960 and 1971 with the assistance of the Soviet Union, commemorated by a lotus-shaped tower. The High Dam created not only the world's largest artificial lake at the time, Lake Nasser, but necessitated the flooding and removal of some 800,000 Nubians, many of whom settled in Aswan.

We take a motorboat to the Temple of Philae, partially submerged by the dam until with the assistance of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), from 1972-1980, the temple was cut into 41,000 pieces, each numbered, and reassembled on nearby Angilika Island. Temples cannot be sited randomly. Rather, it depends on how they face the sun and the god's relevance to the local area. Here, we find a Temple of Isis from which she could watch over a nearby mythical burial site of her husband Osiris, judge of the dead. The dedication involved in saving and rebuilding this beautiful temple is remarkable, but not nearly as mind-boggling as the work that went into saving the two temples at Abu Simbel.

The Graduate Junction

The Graduate Junction

I always support the idea of new initiatives which try to connect people with common research interests. There are a number of them around at the moment, but it seems to me that there has yet to be one which really draws people in. This is a new one, and the address has only been recently circulated to academic institutions. It has a nice straight forward interface, clear and simple purpose and a thankfully simple registration process. You can then search for other members with similar interests using a number of keywords. If you're a graduate student it is worth having a look at it - it looks like a promising and helpful venture.

Like all these ideas it only works when people join, so because the site is such a new venture most of the searches come back empty. But don't be put off if you think that the idea might work for you - just sign up, add your details and check back in a few weeks time. You never know - you might be one of the founder joiners of a landmark research site! And no, I don't know any of its creators :-)

Here's their introduction from the "About Us" page.

Hello and thank you for visiting our site. We set up The Graduate Junction because we were frustrated by a feeling of isolation in our respective projects. We wanted to know who else was doing similar work and might be interested in ours.

The Problem

Postgraduates have three sources of information about work done in their chosen field.

- Published literature

- Conferences and seminars

- Their supervisor

The problem is that literature reviews can only ever reveal completed work, conferences don't happen every week and supervisors mostly rely on the same sources as you do.

So we thought, wouldn't it be great if there was a common point for graduate researchers in all disciplines to come together and meet other people working in their fields. By making it easy to find each other we hope to promote collaboration, generate new ideas and prevent duplication of effort.

Follow the link at the top of this page to learn about our plans to develop the site into a really useful tool.

Not a member yet? Click here to register now

We need your help to tell people about this site. It can only work if people sign up.

Weekly Websites - Dakhleh Oasis

Dakhleh Oasis Project (Monash University)

The Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP) is a long-term regional study of the interaction between environmental changes and human activity in the closed area of the Dakhleh Oasis, Western Desert of Egypt, but including the larger area of the Palaeoasis. The study includes all the time since the first incursion of humans in the Middle Pleistocene, perhaps 400,000 years ago, down to the 21st century oasis farmers, and all the human activity and all the changing environmental conditions for which there is evidence within the time period.

To achieve such an assessment, it is necessary to gather data on the modern environment and all past environmental conditions. The environment is seen as one of the most important influences on all human activity. The evidence for this is sought in the geological, geomorphological, the botanical and the faunal records. These data are collected by various field workers, specialists in their particular fields, who ultimately will provide a consensus of the environmental history of the region. The DOP environmentalists to date are Professor R. F. Giegengack, Jr., Dr. Jennifer Smith, Professor C. S. Churcher, Dr. Ursula Thanheiser and Mag. Johannes Walter. Formerly, there have also been Professor J. C. Ritchie and Professor I. A. Brookes.

Man's activities within these environmental settings must be investigated by a wide range of expertise. The settling and development of cultural evolution within the oasis area, the expansion into and from other Saharan regions and, of course, connections with the Nile Valley are all of interest. These studies are performed by geoarchaeologists, Old Stone Age African specialists, Holocene-Neolithic archaeologists, historical periods specialists - Pharaonic, Ptolemaic-Roman-Christian archaeologists, Islamic archaeologists; by physical anthropologists, and by linguists.

Dakhleh Trust

Surrounded by the sands of the Sahara, the Dakhleh Oasis lies approximately 500 km south west of Cairo and 325 km due west of Luxor, with an area of 1,500 sq.km.

A broad based study of the Oasis has been in progress since 1977 when an international team of natural scientists, archaeologists, and anthropologists began research on the interaction between environmental change and human activity and its impact on the landscape.

Findings that can help to deal with the major challenge of climate change.

The Oasis lies 600 kms south west of Cairo and 250 kms due west of Luxor. With an area of 2000 sq. kms, it is surrounded by the sands of the Sahara.

Click here to view our interactive map.

Over 500,000 years ago nomadic hunter-gatherers came to the Dakhleh area in pursuit of prey and to collect material for their tools. Since 6000 BCE the Oasis has been continuously inhabited.

When the Ancient Egyptians came from the Nile Valley in about 2300 BCE they altered the landscape by introducing crops and farming practices from the valley. In Greek and Roman times the population increased with the establishment of several sizeable towns. The area flourished during the Christian times and on into the Islamic medieval period. It declined somewhat during the Ottoman period but is now again a significant centre.

Preliminary Report on the Study Season 2004 of the ACACIA Project in the Western Desert (Rudolph Kuper, Heiko Riemer, Karin Kindermann, Olaf Bubenzer)

The 2004 season of the ACACIA project focussed on the study of material from Prehistoric, Protohistoric and Pharaonic sites excavated or surveyed during the last three years in theWestern Desert north and southwest of Dakhla Oasis. Despite the material from the Prehistoric and Protohistoric sites of the Egyptian Limestone Plateau, the Pharaonic material

is related to the Abu Ballas Trail that were the object of the 2002 and 2003 ACACIA reports for ASAE. The new evidence fromdifferent sites of the Trail adds a number of details, however, it does not change the general scenario that was drawn in the former reports as well as in other preliminary publications (KUPER, R. 2001; KUPER 2003; FÖRSTER/ KUPER 2003). For that reason, the following paper will concentrate on the new evidence derived fromthe study of the Prehistoric and Protohistoric material of the Egyptian Limestone Plateau. There a hugh number of archaeological sites can be dated to the Holocene wet phase, c. 9500-5000 BC (calibrated). These sites were surveyed and excavated between 1998 and 2002, and the 2004 study campaign is hoped to be the last session on material before the final publication forthcoming. Only very little material can be dated to the period between 5000 BC and the beginning of the Egyptian occupation in the oases in the 4th Dynasty, because the desert then was dried up and the people concentrated in the oases and the Nile Valley. However, a valuable assemblage of pottery, stone artefacts and other archaeological remains was collected fromthe El Karafish desert area north of Dakhla Oasis. It might represent a desert outpost of the Sheikh Muftah cultural unit that is dated to the period from the Late Predynastic to the end of the Old Kingdom.

The last objective to which this paper should point, is the great role that remote sensing cartography and digital elevation models of satellite data can play for survey and reconnaissance programmes in field archaeology. Moreover, it helped to classify the physiographic landscape units and topographic features of the remote desert territories for

which useful maps do not yet exist. These is a fundament for archaeological survey interpretation that has to include the relations and adaptational patterns of human settlement activities as a response to past environment.

NYU Excavations at Amheida

The excavations undertaken at the ancient city of Amheida (known as Trimithis in the Roman period) are a unique combination of archaeological fieldwork and educational program. Although primarily a modern, multidisciplinary excavation, the project also offers undergraduate students the opportunity for a study-abroad semester in Egypt that combines fieldwork with classroom study and visits to archaeological sites and museums. We make our ongoing work on site available internationally to both scholarly and public audiences via the web as well as through printed work.

The Amheida project was started at Columbia University in 2001. Since 2008, New York University is the primary sponsoring institution, with Columbia University continuing as a partner in the project.

The excavations at Amheida collaborate with other participating groups in the Dakhleh Oasis Project, an international venture now three decades old dedicated to studying the interaction between human settlement and the environment over the long span from the earliest human presence in the oasis to modern times. Amheida itself has remains spanning nearly three millennia, and paleolithic material is found along its fringes.

The first five years of excavation have focused on three areas of this very large site: an upper-class fourth-century AD house with wall paintings, an adjoining school, and underlying remains of a Roman bath complex; a more modest house of the third century; and the temple hill, with remains of the Temple of Thoth built in the first century AD and of earlier structures. Architectural conservation has protected and partly restored two standing funerary monuments, a mud-brick pyramid and a tower tomb, both of the Roman period.

Impact glass at the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt: evidence for a cratering event or large aerial burst? (G. R. Osinski, A. F. C. Haldemann, H. P. Schwarcz, J. R. Smith, M. R. Kleindienst, J. Kieniewicz, C. S. Churcher)

Impact cratering is an important geological process that affects all planetary objects with a solid surface. Hypervelocity impact craters (or meteorite impact craters) are the most visible product of hypervelocity impact. They form when a projectile is large and coherent (~20 m for an iron object and ~50 m for a stony body) enough "to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere with little or no deceleration and to strike the ground at virtually its original cosmic velocity (>11 km/s)" [1]. At smaller diameters, the projectile is slowed down by passage through the Earth's atmos-phere and penetration craters are formed (e.g., the Sikhote-Alin crater field in Russia, formed from a me-teorite shower in 1947). Large aerial bursts, or air-bursts, are not well understood, but they represent an important class of impact event that either do not form craters, or which form very shallow structures that are easily erased [2].

In this study, we report on the discovery of unusual silicate glasses – the Dakhleh Glass (DG) – from the Dakhleh Oasis, Western Desert, Egypt. Recent work indicates that the Dakhleh Glass formed from an im-pact event ~150 ka during Middle Stone Age occupa-tions [3]. However, no source crater has been recog-nized to date. Importantly, the glasses are not tektites, which leaves two possible explanations: (1) the glasses represent the proximal ejecta from an unknown source crater somewhere in the Dakhleh Oasis region, or (2) the glasses formed from a large aerial burst.

Spaceborn Radar Image - SIR C/X SAR (NASA)

This spaceborne radar image shows the eastern edge of the Dakhla Oasis in the Western Desert of Egypt, about 600 kilometers (370 miles) south of Cairo. The bright white stripe running from the lower left to the upper right of the image is created as the radar signal bounces off the eroded cliff faces of the Kharga Escarpment. The diagonal purple and yellow stripes in the upper left are rock outcrops of limestone, shale and chalk from the Cretaceous period. The villages of Balat, Bashindi and Tineida, built on recent dry lake deposits, are shown in the lower center and lower left of the image. Although parts of these villages date back to 2000 B.C., agricultural practices have expanded greatly in recent years as part of a development known as the "New Valley." The white features below and to the right of the villages are outcrops of Nubian sandstone, the construction material used to build many of the Pharaohs' temples. Scientists are using radar imaging in desert areas to study structural geology, mineral exploration, ancient climates, water resources and archaeology. This image was acquired by Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) onboard the space shuttle Endeavour on April 14, 1994. The image is 50.0 kilometers by 43.5 kilometers (31.0 miles by 27.0 miles) and is centered at 25.5 degrees north latitude, 29.3 degrees east longitude. North is toward the upper left. The colors are assigned to different radar frequencies and polarizations of the radar as follows: red is L-band, horizontally transmitted and received; green is L-band, horizontally transmitted, vertically received; and blue is C-band, horizontally transmitted and received. SIR-C/X-SAR, a joint mission of the German, Italian and United States space agencies, is part of NASA's research program called Mission to Planet Earth.

Images of Deir el Hagar (Alain Guilleux)

Excellent collection of photographs of the Roman temple.

Le temple de Deir el Hagar (ou Deir el Haggar) , le "monastère des pierres" a été construit sous Néron, Vespasien, Titus et Domitien.

Page's Dakhleh Dakhleh excavation snapshots

I don't know Page's last name, but she kindly sent me links to her website which records the time she spent working on an archaeological excavation in Dakhleh Oasis.

Egypt Sites - A guided tour of Dakhleh Oasis (Su Bayfield)

In ancient times Dakhla was known as Zeszes, the ‘Place of the Two Swords’, because it is divided into two distinct areas. It has also been called el-Wah, the ‘Inner Oasis’ and is an area of around 2000 square kilometres, bounded on the west by the Great Sand Sea, on the north by a high limestone escarpment and on the east by the Abu Tartur Plateau. From el-Kharga, the trip to the eastern edge of the Dakhla Oasis, covers 150km travelling along the ancient Darb el-Ghubari desert track, through some spectacular dune-fields. If coming from the north and Farafra, the distance is around 230km. Although smaller than Kharga Oasis, Dakhla is the most highly-populated region in the Wadi el-Gedid, or ‘New Valley’ - the name, since 1958, by which the oases of Kharga, Dakhla and Farafra are known. The government of Egypt is working to unleash the full potential of these desert areas, with plans to further develop agriculture, mineral resources, industry and tourism.

Daily Photo - Deir el Bahri (Djeser Djeseru)

I have posted other photographs of Deir el Bahri in the past, but here are some different ones taken in 1996.

Covering the mummies

Egypt at the Manchester Museum Blog

I stumbled across this blog more or less by accident. I had no idea that it existed, but it looks like a very good idea. The same sort of thing has been set up and maintained by several U.S. universities, which have worked out very well.

This particular post looks at the controversial decision to cover mummies which are on display in the museum's public-facing collections. There is a photograph on the blog of how this has been implemented, and I personally don't find it remotely sympathetic. I had heard that this was going to take place and already there are rumbles of disaproval from both the general public and professionals working in the field of Egyptology and/or museology, although most people would agree that handling the remains of the dead with sensitivity is an important issue to address. The comments that follow on from this post (scroll to the end of it) are particuarly interesting, and include reactions from some well known names.

The museum is looking for your reactions on its blog, so if you feel strongly about this subject please visit and leave a comment.

Last week, the unwrapped mummy of Asru, and the partially wrapped mummy of Khary, and the loaned child mummy from Stonyhurst College, were covered. The covering was carried out in order that the human remains be treated with respect and to keep the bodies on display in line with the Manchester Museum Human Remains policy.

The covering of the mummies coincides with the opening of the year-long exhibition of Lindow Man: A Bog Body Mystery, where the Museum has interpreted the bog body through the opinions of seven individuals involved with his discovery and analysis.

Back on the Egypt gallery the uncovered skeleton of Khnum-Nakht poses alongside the newly covered mummies. Opinions on the covering of the mummies have begun to come into the Museum…

A couple of other comments followed my February post about a suggestion on the BBC News website that Manchester was considering the removal of its mummies from display. I was so upset with the idea at the time that I went a bit over the top in my response, but I've left my comments there because they may not have been well expressed but they were heartfelt. I think that this is a very difficult issue, and one not to be tackled lightly.