Friday, October 30, 2009

Field Work

Austrian archaeologists discover Babylonian seal in Egypt
Austrian Times
Lisa Chapman

A seal has been found in Tell el Dab'a in Egypt's eastern Delta. It dates to the period of the Hyksos occupation in the second millennium BC. Irene Forstner-Müller, the head of the Austrian Archaeological Institute’s (ÖAI) branch office in Cairo, said that together with a recently discovered cuneiform tablet the seal points to a Hyksos connection with Babylon.


Video: The New Inscribed Finds from the Valley of the Kings
Discovery News
Rossella Lorenzi

Dr. Hawass finds new evidence about the lives of the workmen who built the tombs.

"One very interesting object we found is a piece of limestone that shows the plan of a tomb, sketched by a workman over 3000 years ago. Another piece bears an inscription containing the title weret hemet netjer, which means the “great god’s wife.” The title is of an unknown queen, Tiy. We hope to find more evidence of this queen through our work here," Dr. Hawass said.

Dr. Hawass' team also found new clues about the destruction of Hatshepsut’s monuments after the female pharaoh's death

Mapping Kom el-Hisn
ArchaeoBlog
Tony Cagle

Tony talks us through mapping the site of Kom el-Hisn in Egypt's Delta for publication. Here's an extract but go to the above post for the illustrations and photographs.

We’re assembling the monograph for Kom el-Hisn which was explored and excavated several times through the last hundred years or so. Mapping has been something of an issue; lots of survey points were shot in over the three years of the current work, but only one real map has been produced, by me, using some odd XYZ points created. It’s complicated, and I did it all in a surface mapping program called Surfer. So I can pretty well create a good topo map with all of our excavation units and major landmarks on it:

Now, two things we’d like to do with this is first, overlay our excavation units on a sat photo, either an older LandSat one or a just plain Google map shot

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