Japanese mission finds wooden sarcophagi

drhawass.com

With photographs.

Four anthropoid wooden coffins, three wooden canopic jars, and four ushabti boxes have been unearthed inside an unidentified burial shaft located in the northern area of the Ramesside tomb of Ta in the Dahshur Necropolis, south of Giza plateau.

Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni announced that this discovery was made by a Japanese mission from the Institute of Egyptology at Waseda University.

Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) said that although these coffins are empty now, due to looting by tomb raiders in antiquity, their original features remain intact.

He continued that preliminary study of these coffins has dated them to the Ramesside Era or the Late Period. The coffins are divided into two sets, each consisting of multiple coffins covered in black resin and decorated with yellow inscriptions. The two sets belong to two persons, previously unknown, called Tutpashu and Iriseraa.

Dr. Sakuji Yoshemura, head of the Japanese mission, said that the first set bears the images of its owner and various ancient Egyptian gods, while the other is decorated more simply.

The names of both persons are written on the canopic jars and ushabti boxes, which contain at least 38 partly broken wooden statuettes.

Reuters Africa

Thanks to Tony Marson for sending the link to me.

Japanese archaeologists working in Egypt have found four wooden sarcophaguses and associated grave goods which could date back up to 3,300 years, the Egyptian government said on Thursday.

The team from Waseda University in Tokyo discovered the anthropomorphic sarcophaguses in a tomb in the Sakkara necropolis, about 25 km (15 miles) south of Cairo, the Supreme Council for Antiquities said in a statement.

Sakkara, the burial ground for the ancient city of Memphis, remains one of the richest sources of Egyptian antiquities. Archaeologists say much remains buried in the sands.

The tomb also contained three wooden Canopic jars, in which ancient Egyptians tried to preserve internal organs, and four boxes for ushabti figures, the miniature statues of servants to serve the dead person in the afterlife, the statement said.

The sarcophaguses did not contain mummies because the tomb was robbed in ancient times but have the original black and yellow paintwork showing ancient Egyptian gods, it said.

Bloomberg

The coffins were in excellent condition, with their original features and colored reliefs of deities in black and yellow, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a faxed statement today. They date back to either the Ramesside Period or the Late Kingdom of ancient Egypt, making them between 2,300 and 3,300 years old.

The archaeologists from Tokyo’s Waseda University also found jars that the ancient Egyptians used for human entrails, as well as 38 wooden figurines, the statement said. Most of the figurines are in a state of disrepair and have been put into storage before they will be reconstructed, it said.

Sakuji Yoshimori, the head of the Japanese dig, said the coffins belonged to two men named Tut Bashu and Ary Sara. No further details about the lives of the owners could be gleaned on initial inspection.

Red Orbit

Beware the unconnected video, with audio, which starts automatically when you hit the page.

Most of the 38 wooden figurines inside the ushabti boxes were broken, but one of them was unopened and reportedly in excellent condition. It belonged to a man by the name of Tut Bashu, who was the original owner of one of the coffins.

A man called Ari Saraa was the owner of another sarcophagus.

The report said the burials dated from the Ramesside period or the Late Dynastic Period -- anywhere between about 1300 and 330 BC.

Poles discover a necropolis in Saqqara

Nauka w Polsce

The last season of the mission lead by Prof. Karol Myśliwiec, from the University of Warsaw's Mediterranean Archaeological Center, in Egypt ended with spectacular discoveries, that will help scientists understand procedures in preparing graves in the time of the Old Kingdom. The archaeologists also have found new aspects of burial rituals. The excavation zone is located about 150m. west of the oldest Egyptian step pyramid, that was built for Pharaoh Djoser (27th century B.C.). Poles began excavations in 1987. This was land untouched by other archaeologists. Nobody predicted that Prof. Myśliwiec will achieve success. Jean-Phillipe Lauer - one of the most famous Saqqara experts, who in the 70's spent time on examining and restoring Djoser's complex, didn't think that the Poles would find anything more than a quarry or an ancient rubbish dump.

W 1987 geophysical examinations were carried out. They showed that under the sand's surface there are a lot of artifacts. In the beginning it was decided to make three survey digs, each of the dimension 5x5m.

So far the area of almost 2400 sq. m. has been examined. Archaeologists managed to establish that the necropolis existed in the time of the Old Kingdom (2686-2160 B.C.), and later burials were situated there 2000 years later in the Ptolemy era (332-30 B.C.). Scientists suspect that before Alexander the Great's body ended up in Alexandria, it was buried for a while in Saqqara. This would explain the creation of a new necropolis. From the beginning of Egyptian civilization, it was a dream to be buried close to the Pharaoh, who was the incarnation of god.

"Each grave of an Egyptian dignitary is made up of two parts. The underground could be reached by a shaft in rock that could be even 20m. deep. At the bottom of this shaft, normally on the west side a chamber, in which the sarcophagus was placed, was cut out" - says Prof. Myśliwiec. He added that in cases of very rich people it was a stone casing,, in other peoples cases it was a wooden or even reed sarcophagus. The shaft leading to the burial chamber was securely filled in with sand and covered with a mastabah (Arabic for bench). The construction was similar to a cut pyramid.

Video: Treasures discovered in Egypt

BBC News (Christian Fraser)

Thanks to Vincent Brown's Talking Pyramids blog for highlighting this video. It lasts for over two minutes and offers a short overview of some recent discoveries and some ongoing problems in Egyptian archaeology. There's some nice footage, if brief, of some of the Saqqara sites including the shaft beneath the newly discovered pyramid and the interior of the Step Pyramid of Djoser.

Sinai's turquoise goddess

Al Ahram Weekly

A comprehensive restoration and documentation scheme is underway at a major temple and mine complex in Sinai, as Nevine El-Aref reports

From pre-dynastic times, early Egyptians made their way to the Sinai Peninsula over land or across the Red Sea in search of minerals. Their chief targets were turquoise and copper, which they mined and extracted in the Sinai mountains.

Archaeologists examining evidence left 8,000 years ago have concluded that some of the very earliest known settlers in Sinai were miners. In about 3,500 BC these mineral hunters discovered the great turquoise veins of Serabit Al-Khadim. Some 500 years later the Egyptians had mastered Sinai and set up a large and systematic mining operation at Serabit Al-Khadim, where they carved out great quantities of turquoise. They carried their loads down the Wadi Matalla to the garrison port at Al-Markha, south of the present village of Abu Zenima, where they set about loading them on board boats bound for the mainland.

The turquoise was so valued that it became an important part of ritual symbolism in ancient Egyptian religious ceremonies. They used it to carve sacred scarabs and fabricate jewellery, or ground it into pigments for painting statuettes, bricks, reliefs and walls.

To mine the turquoise, the Egyptians would hollow out large galleries in the mountains, carving at the entrance to each a representation of the reigning Pharaoh who was the symbol of the authority of the Egyptian state over the mines.

A temple dedicated to Goddess Hathor was built during the 12th Dynasty, when Serabit Al-Khadim was the centre of copper and turquoise mining and a flourishing trade was established. One of few Pharaonic monuments known in Sinai, the temple is unlike other temples of the period in that it is composed of a large number of bas-reliefs and carved stelae showing the dates of various turquoise-mining missions in antiquity, the number of team members, and the goal and duration of each mission. From dynasty to dynasty, the temple was expanded and beautified, with the last known enlargement taking place in the 20th Dynasty.

See the above page for the full story.

Royal splash to highlight museum

Al Ahram Weekly

The Mohamed Ali family jewels are to be placed on display at the Royal Jewellery Museum in Alexandria after spending nearly six decades locked in the treasury of the Central Bank of Egypt, Nevine El-Aref reports

The jewellery, which has been preserved in 45 wooden crates since the 1952 Revolution, will be handed over to a committee of experts from the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), which in turn will inspect and if necessary restore it.

The Royal Jewellery Museum is housed in a two-storey palace built in 1923 in an Italian architectural style for Princess Fatma El-Zahraa, a member of the Mohamed Ali family. The foyer is a grandiose affair with soft, deep burgundy, carpets and carved and gilded ceilings. A marble staircase sweeps up to the first floor.

The walls are decorated with portraits of members of the Mohamed Ali family with a brief description of each personality. The ceilings of each room are painted by Egyptian, Italian and French artists and depict tales from Greek mythology, while the ceilings on the second floor depict details of famous French and Italian love stories.

Even the bathrooms on both floors are true works of art.

Exhibition: The Gates of Heaven

Design Taxi

Louvre Museum, Rue de Rivoli, Paris

6 March - 29 June 2009

In the Ancient Egyptian language “The Gates of Heaven” meant the doors of a sanctuary housing the statue of a divinity.

Symbolizing the passageway into the afterworld this expression also applies to other points of contact between the different elements of the universe as conceived by the Egyptians.

Containing about 350 artefacts spanning three millennia, from the Old Kingdom to the Roman Period, the exhibition endeavours to place everyday objects in their social, religious and artistic context.

KMT Spring 2009

KMT

Thanks very much to John Rauchert for letting me know that noticed that details of the new issue of KMT (cover and table of contents for Volume 20, No. 1 ) have been posted on their site. Hopefully it will be available in outlets soon.

The seven feature articles are listed as follows:

• French-Egyptian Excavations at the Opet Temple, Karnak by Multiple Authors
• Mounument closeup: The Temple of Khonsu, Karnak by Dennis Forbes
• Under the Disk & Crescent: Use of Khonsu-Related Elements in a Tutankhamen Pectoral by Earl L. Ertman
• History of the Tomb of Ramose (TT55) Revealed in the Workmanship of Its Reliefs by Arielle Kosloff
• Photo Essay: The Oases of Egypt’s Western Desert by Aidan Dodson & Dyan Hilton
• Ancient Egyptian Table Manners by Sonia Focke
• Ancient Egypt & the Hawaiian Language by Donald P. Ryan

Exhibition: Byzantium at the Royal Academy

Byzantium exhibition, Royal Academy

I went to the Byzantium 330-1453 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London (UK) yesterday morning. I'm not going to do a full review of it but I thought I'd note down a couple of things.

There are a couple of logisitcal points worth highlighting.

I had pre-booked tickets for the 10am time slot (they are split by the hour). I arrived a little early hoping to collect them without a queue but the doors weren't opened until 10am on the dot, so there was instantly three queues - one to buy tickets, one for prebooked tickets and one for the cloakroom. In spite of the confusion at the pre-booked ticket machine (and you need the card with which you paid for your tickets, which was causing some people headaches) the queues went down quite quickly.

The RA now have strict rules about what sort of baggage they will accept in the galleries and in the cloakrooms. These are shown on the wesbite. My friend, who put his coat into the cloakroom, says that there is an airport-type baggage frame and if your case/rucksack/bag will fit into it they will take it and if not they won't and you are pretty much stuffed at that point. Only small handbags are permitted in the main galleries.

Photography is not permitted at the Byzantium exhibition, which is just as well because it was far too busy to cope with people trying to get images.

In spite of having bought the earliest tickets of the day it was busy. Thanks to the RA for selling tickets in hourly rather than half-hourly slots it was certainly manageable, but I am very glad that we didn't try for a later viewing as my experience of London exhibitions is that the earlier you arrive the less busy it will be.

There were audio guides, as you would expect these days, but fortunately not many people were using them, which meant that there was less of the zombie factor than I have become accustomed to dreading in exhibitions of this size.

It was a much richer and more varied selection of items than I expected, representing the period from 330 to 1453. The gallery information boards were excellent, with some good maps, and the exhibition was laid out and ordered in a very practical and helpful way. Galleries were organized by themes, which helped put them into context and break up the sheer assault on the senses. It took us two hours to walk around. I am notorious for taking my time, but I found that the same people were with me in each room, meaning that many of us were moving at the same pace and taking the same time to see the exhibition.

The quality of each individual item was remarkable. Ivories, manuscripts, micromosaics, items of intricate jewelry and delicate icons were on display along with bigger items like a full mosaic floor, church bells, huge icons from Sinai and elsewhere and pieces of massive church furnishings. The micromosaics were new to me and one of the labels said that there are only around 50 known in the world. Each of the mosaic pieces on some of them is little larger than a pin head.

The exhibition is only on until 22nd March 2009. If you're interested there's an excellent adult educational pamphlet available for download from the RA site (21 pages long, PDF format, 3.3mb, lots of pictures from the exhibition and a very useful introductory summary of the Byzantine period). There is also a junior version available (12 pages, PDF format).

I didn't buy the big glossy catalogue, available in hard back and paperback, but it looked lovely.

I am currently reading the book Byzantine Art by Robin Cormack (Oxford) which I find a helpful compliment to the exhibition and which examines the question of the extent to which the art work represents continuity with the pagan past and the relationship with the development of art of the western world.

There have been several reviews of the exhibition at the RA which can be found online. Here are a couple of the better ones, which offer both positive and less positive remarks:

Culture24 by Graham Spicer
BBC Newsnight (video - over 7 minutes long and well worth viewing)
The Independent, UK by Charles Darwent
The Telegraph, UK by Richard Dorment


Thanks to Tony Judd, who I last saw in the Eastern Desert in 2006, for an absolutely excellent morning.

BM heads visitor numbers in London, UK

BBC News

Several key London attractions saw increased visitor numbers in 2008, despite the economic downturn.

The British Museum proved to be the most popular, with 5.9m visitors, an increase of almost 10% over 2007.

But the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA) said many of its members were anticipating a difficult year in 2009 due to the recession.

The biggest draws were some of the city's range of free admission museums and galleries.

Daily Photo by Bob Partridge (Ancient Egypt Magazine)

Thanks to Bob for pointing out that there is a really good virtual reconstruction of the the tomb of Menna, the topic of yesterday's photo, on the Discovery Channel website. It is interactive, so you can examine different parts of the tomb by clicking on different areas of the page. Excellent stuff.

Medinet Habu, mortuary temple of Ramesses III, west bank at Luxor

With many thanks to Bob Partridge, Editor of Ancient Egypt Magazine.
Copyright Bob Partridge

Daily Photo by Bob Partridge (Ancient Egypt Magazine)

I am off into town to see the Byzantium exhibition today. As I hate going into town, and rarely do so, I may as well go and do some errands whilst I'm there so I am not sure what time I'll be back. This means that the blog won't be updated until tomorrow. To keep you going here is a lovely photograph by Bob, from the tomb of Menna.

Tomb of Menna (TT 69)

The tomb has its own website, put together by the team who worked there for several seasons.

If you have a VRML browser you can view a 3D reconstruction of the tomb at the Manchester Metropolitan University website (for technical info see their website)


With many thanks to Bob Partridge, Editor of Ancient Egypt Magazine.
Copyright Bob Partridge

4000 year statue discovered at Giza

Reuters

With a photograph of the statue in situ.

Maintenance workers at Egypt's Giza Pyramids have found an ancient quartzite statue of a seated man buried close to the surface of the desert, the culture ministry said on Tuesday.

The statue, about life-size at 149 cm (five feet) tall, was found north of the smallest of Giza's three main pyramids, the tomb of the fourth dynasty Pharaoh Mycerinus, who ruled in the 26th century BC, the ministry said in a statement.

The man was wearing a shoulder-length wig and was seated in a simple chair, his right hand clenched on his knee and holding an object. His left hand was resting on his thigh.

The culture ministry said the statue had a number of cracks in a shoulder, its chest and base, and some facial features had been worn away. The head of the statue was only about 40 cm (16 inches) below ground level.

The statue bore no inscriptions, making it hard to identify, though the style suggested it might date to the early years of the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, close to Mycerinus's time.

Earth Times

Cairo Egyptian archeologists discovered a 4,000-year-old statue as they carried out routine cleaning work at one of the Giza pyramids on Tuesday. The 149-centimetre-long statue was found buried just 40 centimetres below the surface of the sand in the northern part of the King Men-Kau-Re's pyramid (2551-2523 BC).

The statue is of an unidentified person wearing a medium-length wig, sitting on a chair with his right arm stretched on his knee and holding an unidentified object in his fist, Zahi Hawas, secretary general of the Egyptian Higher Council for Antiquities, said.

Bloomberg

Thanks Rhio.

Egyptian archaeologists digging around the Pyramids of Giza have discovered a statue of a man that may date back 4,500 years to the Old Kingdom of Pharaohnic rule.

The 149-centimeter statue is of a sitting man wearing a wig down to his shoulders, with his left hand on his thigh and his right hand holding his right knee, Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archaeologist, said in a statement today.

The statue was discovered 40 centimeters below the ground near the pyramid of Menkaure, the fourth dynasty ruler of Egypt who has the smallest pyramid of the three on the Giza plateau, according to the statement.

Also in Spanish at El Universal:

El Consejo Supremo de Antigüedades de El Cairo informó hoy que la estatua de cuarcita se encontraba muy cerca de la pirámide de Micerino. Estaba en la planicie de las pirámides, por la que pasan a diario miles de turistas, a sólo 40 centímetros bajo la arena.

El presidente del Consejo, Zahi Hawass, explicó que la estatua muestra a un hombre sentado con peluca y no tiene inscripciones. El estilo de la pieza, de 1,5 metros de alto, indica que se trata de una obra del Imperio Antiguo, cuando se construyeron también las pirámides de Giza, refirió DPA.

La pirámide de Micerino, contruida en torno al año 2520 antes de Cristo, es la más pequeña de las tres en Giza, en las afueras de El Cairo. La estatua no se halló en una excavación arqueológica, sino en el marco de la reorganización de las visitas turísticas.

See the above pages for more.

More re Turin Canon

Suite 101 (Robyn Gillam)

There's a good summary of the recent story about the Turin Canon on the above page, putting the new discovery into the wider context both of the importance of the Canon itself and the purpose and value of king lists as a whole.

Travel: Feeling safe in Cairo

New York Times (Jennifer Conlin)

An interesting article, and reassuringly positive. A family visiting Egypt were in the Cairo square where the bomb went off only days before. The writer's daughter had a photograph which showed the bench where the bomb is thought to have exploded. But in spite of that feeling of shock which always accompanies this sort of near-miss experience, the author's main point is that they felt safe in Egypt. What is more, they plan to go back in the future.

What is most disconcerting now, oddly, is how safe we felt while we were there. And not just in Hussein Square, but everywhere in Egypt. In Cairo, there seemed to be police carrying machine guns on nearly every corner. No one could enter a hotel without first walking through the kind of security machines found in airports. There were dogs sniffing cars for explosives, and in Luxor, where we visited numerous tombs and temples, bags had to go through X-ray machines before you could even reach the ticket booth.

I can’t pretend that concerns of a terrorist attack did not go through my mind, given the recent events in Gaza. That much security, everywhere, can’t help but make one wonder about the dangers that make it necessary.

And certainly, while walking through the Hatshepsut Temple in Luxor — the scene of a horrific terrorist attack in 1997 that left 58 tourists dead — it was impossible not to imagine the devastation of that day.

But the Egyptians we met were so accommodating to us, and so appreciative of our presence with the global economy in such disrepair, that we felt nothing but welcome in their country. Sure, we were hassled at times by guides and merchants desperate for us to part with our money, which we often complied with out of sympathy.

See the above page for the full story.

Jane was saying on her Luxor News blog that she had four bookings after the Cairo attack, which is more good news. In Jane's words:

people know that these incidents are minority acts of idiots and not the genuine loving attitude of the Egyptian through the ages who loves (and protects) his tourist.

Of course not everybody feels the same, as this Reuters article observes, but it does point out that the existing trouble in the area of tourism in Egypt is more about the economic downturn than fears of terrorism:

Tarek el-Sayyed had no customers at his gift shop in a 14th-century Cairo market where he sat contemplating a difficult future.

Instead of buses ferrying tourists to the Khan el-Khalili market, the plaza outside Sayyed's shop on Monday was filled with police officers, a day after a bomb attack in the area killed a French teenager and wounded at least 20 people.

"Of course it will affect us," he said in front of his shop that sells replicas of ancient Egyptian artefacts. "At this time of the day buses would be bringing tourists here ... but today things are as you can see."

Tourism in Egypt was already feeling the pinch of the global financial crisis as tourists have stayed home.

See the above pages for the complete stories.

Book Review: City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria

Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Edward J. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (First paperback printing, originally published 2006). The Transformation of the Classical Heritage; 41. Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 2008.

Reviewed by Jerker Blomqvist

The Table of Contents is available from the above page.

The volume under review is the paperback edition of a book that appeared in hardcover in 2006. It is an enlarged and considerably reworked Yale University Ph.D. thesis of 2002. No changes have been made between the 2006 and 2008 editions.

The main theme of the book is the relationship between teachers of rhetoric and, in particular, philosophy with the political and religious powers of the surrounding late antique society. Watts has chosen to compare the situations developing in two centers of learning of the period, viz. Athens and Alexandria. The choice of these two cities for closer investigation is a natural one, given that, beside the emerging rival Constantinople, they were the most important providers of advanced teaching in the period under scrutiny. But a comparison between precisely these two localities proves to be particularly rewarding, since the conditions for philosophical activities in them developed in different ways in the final stage of antiquity. In Athens, philosophy was in conflict with the Christian ambiance and could, after AD 529, lead only a highly precarious existence, whereas in Alexandria, although conflict was not unheard of, the coexistence of philosophy with the new religion was more peaceful; the Alexandrian philosophical school (or schools) flourished for more than a century after the fateful year of 529 and came to an end only after the Arab invasion of Egypt in the 640s. Broadly speaking, the purpose of Watts' study is to define the differences between Athens and Alexandria in this context and to establish the causes of those divergences. But Watts offers much more: the book becomes a detailed study of nearly all aspects of higher education in the two cities in the relevant centuries and will have a lasting importance as an authoritative reference book for anyone interested in late antique cultural life.

The book consists of nine chapters, plus a short conclusion. The first chapter discusses the general conditions for advanced studies and academic life in the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire. The pages of the eight following chapters are equally divided between the two cities under discussion, ch. 2-5 being devoted to Athens and 6-9 to Alexandria. The bibliography (pp. 263-279) is rich, although it includes only such scholarly publications as are explicitly cited in the footnotes; the numerous editions of ancient texts from which Watts must have excerpted most of his data are not listed there. A usable index (pp. 281-288) concludes the work.

See the above page for the entire review.

New issue of PalArch's Journal of Archaeology of Egypt/Egyptology

PalArch

A new issue of PalArch's Journal of Archaeology of Egypt/Egyptology (ISSN 1567-214x) is published at www.PalArch.nl. It contains one paper: R. Krauss. Der Berliner „Spaziergang im Garten“ – antiker Murks oder moderne Fälschung? Mit einem Exkurs über Heinrich Schäfers Ägyptenaufenthalt 1898-1901 and four book reviews. Forthcoming is a paper by J. de Haan as well as the Newsletter.

Abstract:

The relief slab Berlin 15000, popularly known as ‘the stroll in the garden’, which depicts a royal couple in Amarna style, was acquired around 1900 in Egypt on the art market, and thus lacks an archaeological provenance. Features in favour of its authenticity include the physical proportions of the figures, the anatomically ‘correct’ depiction of their feet, and their costume in general, though not in detail. Other features suggest the relief could be a forgery – for example, the fact that the figures are not typically ‘top-heavy,’ the use of the line customarily indicating the kilt for drawing the king’s lower left leg, the absence of compositional unity in a scene purportedly of the Amarna period, and iconographically unparalleled details of the queen’s sash and cloak. These and other factors, both pro and contra authenticity, are reviewed and considered.

Forthcoming papers are also detailed. Book reviews are as follows:


Haarlem, van, W.M. 2009. Book review of: Bard, K.A. 2007. An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt (Malden/Oxford/Carlton, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing). (Date of publishing: 20 February 2009).

Haarlem, van, W.M. 2009. Book review of: Bonnet, Ch.D. & D. Valbelle. 2006. Pharaonen aus dem schwarzen Afrika. (Mainz, Philipp von Zabern). (Date of publishing: 20 February 2009).

Ikram, S. 2009. Book review of: Vermeersch, P.M. Ed. 2008. A Holocene Prehistoric Sequence in the Egyptian Red Sea Area: The Tree Shelter. (Leuven, Leuven University Press). (Date of publishing: 20 February 2009).

Moje, J. 2009. Book review of: Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart. Ed. 2007. Ägyptische Mumien. Unsterblichkeit im Land der Pharaonen. (Mainz, Philipp von Zabern). (Date of publishing: 20 February 2009).


All are available for download from the above page.

Conference: Tourism, Heritage and Cultural Change in the Middle East and North Africa Region

International Conference. Tourism, Heritage and Cultural Change in the Middle East and North Africa Region. 4-7 April, 2009, Amman, Jordan. Under the Patronage of Her Royal Highness Princess Sumaya Bint Al Hassan

Dear all,

I am writing to inform you of the above major international conference which will be the largest of its kind organised in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region. The Conference is being organised by the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change (CTCC) based in the UK, and the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) based in Jordan. The Conference is supported by the Greater Amman Municipality. The patron of the conference is Her Royal Highness Princess Sumaya of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The event will be held in the King Hussein Cultural Centre in the heart of Amman. Dr Taleb Rifai, Deputy Secretary General of the United Nation’s World Tourism Organisation will be a keynote speaker.

The aims of this innovative and multi-disciplinary conference are to critically explore the major issues facing the MENA region with regard to the development of tourism and its relationships with heritage and culture, to draw upon best practice from international scholars and, to help develop new research capacities amongst the region’s scholars, policy makers and professionals. The conference will bring together over 150 international delegates, all with an interest in sharing research relating to the changing relationships between tourism, heritage and culture in the Middle East and North Africa. The conference will provide an important occasion for exchanging ideas about tourism, heritage and culture which we recognise as an important mechanism in generating inter-cultural dialogue. UNESCO and ICCROM will be represented.

I would like to invite you to attend this major international event. I highly encourage you to attend and register for the Conference. The conference will provide an occasion where scholars can present and discuss Middle Eastern and North African tourism, which I know to be a growing and important phenomenon. It is, I believe, important that the ‘west’ learns more about the MENA heritage and tourism.

Alternatively, if your organisation would like to be a sponsor of the conference, or of any of the conference activities, then please contact us to discuss sponsorship opportunities. We will be happy to discuss ways in which we can profile your work. Please do not hesitate to contact me.

We believe this event to be a very worthy initiative and we wish to make it a great success with a lasting agenda to build capacity in the region. I hope you will be able to support this conference in some way and I look forward to hearing from you. Please find the Brochure and Registration Form for the conference which has been sent out worldwide on the following link:
http://www.tourism-culture.com/64/C-MENA/C-MENA%20brochure%20&%20registration%20form_final.pdf


I do hope you will be part of what promises to be an important event which explores both the challenges and the opportunities for the MENA region.


Lina G. Tahan
Conference Convenor

Trivia: Egyptastic

Egyptastic

Thanks to Chris Naunton of the EES for pointing out this site to me. As they say in their disclaimer, the site is a piece of fiction and its objectives are confined to Egyptology-based satire. Good fun - a sort of esoteric version of The Onion or The Spoof (the latter of which is running a spoof Egyptology story today, with thanks to Kat for sending it to me!). I particularly like the fact that they chose the font in their banner because it is called "papyrus" in spite of the undeniable fact that it is truly ugly.

Daily Photo - Anubis, Mit Rahina

Thanks to the anonymous person who suggested that my post attempting to clarify the situation re the discoverer of a statue in Luxor was probably giving out duff information. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I've simply deleted that post because it seemed to be doing more harm than good!

Anubis
Detail of granite sarcophagus, Mit Rahina

Can Egypt bring Cleopatra's palace back to life?

The Guardian, UK (Jack Shenker)

With a four photograph slideshow.

Ancient Alexandria was one of the world's great centres of civilisation, and since excavations in the eastern harbour began in 1994, divers have unearthed thousands of historical objects. These have included 26 sphinxes, several vast granite blocks weighing up to 56 tonnes each, and even pieces of what is believed to be the Pharos of Alexandria lighthouse, one of the seven classic wonders of the world.

Remnants of Queen Cleopatra's palace complex are also submerged beneath the waves, after the island on which it stood fell victim to earthquakes in the 5th century.

Now ambitious but controversial plans are under way to open up this unique site via an immersed fibreglass tunnel which would enable close-up viewing of the underwater monuments. The designs were drawn up by the French architect Jacques Rougerie, a veteran of water-based construction projects, and have been backed by the United Nations cultural agency Unesco.

Next month a detailed technical survey will be launched. "If all goes according to plan, construction will begin in early 2010 and be completed within two and half years," says Ariel Fuchs, a scientific director at Rougerie's firm.

The idea is also being promoted by the high-profile marine archaeologist Franck Goddio, who is currently touring Europe with a selection of artefacts already dredged up from the Alexandrian coastline.

Yet the project is running into obstacles. Funding for the museum, which will cost up to $140m (£98m), has not yet been secured.

The government is hoping private companies and organisations will foot the bill, but a member of the architectural team admitted that "nobody is clear about where the financing will come from".

Even if money does come through, a series of formidable technical challenges await the museum's builders, including the question of how to combat the bay's notoriously murky waters to improve visibility in the tunnel, and the problem of ensuring the structure is strong enough to withstand underwater currents.

More worryingly, the project has been accused by sceptical locals of being little more than a ''corporate theme park'' with many doubting it will be built at all.

See the above for more.

More re Saqqara mummy discovery

Al Ahram Weekly ()

Intact wooden and limestone sarcophagi housing dozens of mummies have been discovered inside the Sixth-Dynasty tomb of Sennedjem in the Saqqara necropolis, reports Nevine El-Aref

On Wednesday of last week, the Gisr Al-Mudir area located at the south-western corner of King Djoser's Step Pyramid complex in the Saqqara necropolis was brimming with archaeologists, workmen and media representatives as Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) Secretary-General Zahi Hawass and his team prepared to give members of the public, the first glimpse of the latest discovery of ancient Egyptian treasure to be found in Saqqara.

Two weeks ago, during a routine excavation work at the mastaba of the Sixth-Dynasty lector-priest Sennedjem, archaeologists from the SCA stumbled upon what is believed to be a cache of mummies of the 26th Dynasty, Egypt's last independent Kingdom before it was overrun by a succession of foreign conquerors.

The mummies, most of which had deteriorated to little more than skeletons, were found inside an 11- metre deep burial shaft excavated inside the Sennedjem mastaba. Although the mastaba dates from a much earlier period, the shaft is intrusive, having been dug during the 26th Dynasty -- almost 2,000 years later. Two sarcophagi of fine white limestone and four wooden coffins were found on the floor of the shaft. The remainder of the mummies was placed in five niches within its walls and on shelves along its western wall. One of the newly-discovered, 2,600- year-old wooden coffins was still sealed, untouched since the days of the Pharaohs. On opening the coffin the team uncovered a body mummified in the style typical of the period, covered with linen and resin. Hawass believes that there are probably funerary amulets hidden among the wrappings. From the finely carved inscription on the coffin, Hawass was able to determine that the mummy belonged to a man named Padi-Heri, the son of Djehuty-Sesh-Nub and the grandson of Iru-Ru.

A limestone sarcophagus also remained sealed with mortar until last Wednesday when Hawass and his team opened it up before the public. Inside the dark burial shaft in the Sennedjem mastaba, illuminated only with torches and camera lights, workmen with their crowbars and picks succeeded in lifting the heavy lid off the sarcophagus to reveal a perfectly preserved, unidentified mummy wrapped in dark- stained canvas.

See the above for more.

How deceit won a beautiful woman

Al Ahram Weekly

Can a 1924 document charging German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt with cheating to secure the Nefertiti bust for Germany guarantee its return to Egypt? Nevine El-Aref investigates
Bust of Queen Nefertiti

The conflict between Egypt and Germany over the 3,400-year-old iconic bust of Queen Nefertiti has again come to the fore following the discovery of a 1924 document revealing the mysterious story behind Germany's possession of the Nefertiti bust.

The latest edition of the German magazine Der Spiegel, published last week, contains a report that the German Oriental Association (DOG) had discovered a 1924 document claiming that Ludwig Borchardt, the discoverer of the Nefertiti bust, used a trick to smuggle the bust to Germany. According to the magazine, the document's authenticity is currently being analysed by experts.

The newspaper also said that the document was written by an eyewitness who claimed that Borchardt, who was keen on reserving the bust for Germany, intentionally disguised it by covering it with a layer of gypsum to ensure that the committee charged with supervising the distribution of new discoveries between Egypt and foreign mission would not see how beautiful the bust was or realise that it was actually made of exquisitely painted limestone.

See the above page for the full story.

EES Newsletter 3

The Egypt Exploration Society's newsletter dropped into my Inbox yesterday. Here it is, minus photographs (with the permission of the EES):

Dear EES member,

A very belated happy new year from the EES! 2009 has already been a busy year for us and there is much to tell you about since the last e-newsletter.

FIELDWORK

As you will know by now the Society awarded grants from its Excavation Fund to four fieldwork projects for 2009: the epigraphic survey and conservation of wall paintings at Ismant el-Kharab (directed by Professor Olaf Kaper), geophysical survey around the Great Temple of Bastet at Tell Basta, (Dr Daniela Rosenow), topographical and geological survey at Sesebi, Sudan (Dr Kate Spence) and an investigation of the Christian church and settlement in the area of the North Tombs at Amarna (Dr Gillian Pyke).

Dr Spence has already completed her field season and members who attended the BISI/EES/Birkbeck event recently have already been given a tantalizing glimpse of the results. Dr Spence and the other Excavation fund directors will be presenting the results of their work in full at the Society’s annual conference on 20/21 June this year (see below under ‘Events’).

Several other teams will be going into the field in the next few weeks including two of the Amelia Edwards projects (see below), a team working on excavated material from Qasr Ibrim now kept in Aswan, and two Delta Survey projects, at Yitwal wa Yuksur and Sais respectively. Dr Penny Wilson, director of the work at Sais, will be holding an open day at the site for EES members on 4 April. For further details please contact Mrs Faten Saleh in the Cairo office: ees.cairo@britishcouncil.org.eg.

AMELIA EDWARDS PROJECTS

The response to the launch of the first round of Amelia Edwards Projects has been overwhelming. The presentations and reception following the Deir el Medina study day on 25 October (photos here), were well-attended and very successful (despite the absence of Angus Graham, director of the Karnak Land and Waterscapes’ Survey, through illness; his recorded message to the audience was very well received!).

The Society received a number of generous donations on the night, and several of those present became members of the Amelia Edwards Group by donating £250 or more. In the weeks following the launch an appeal leaflet was mailed to members, and the project directors were again on hand at the Christmas party at SOAS on 13 December to chat to guests and answer questions. Donations continued to arrive throughout the last few weeks of 2008 and into 2009, and we are now delighted to report that all three projects now have enough funding to undertake their work in 2009. The Society is most grateful to all those who contributed to the projects; without your generosity the project directors simply would not be able to undertake their work.

Joanne Rowland (Gebel Ramla) and Angus Graham (Karnak) will be going into the field in March, and as with the Excavation Fund projects, members will be able to hear about the results of the work at the summer conference.

The Oral History Project had received a good proportion of its funding soon after the launch and no time was wasted in making best use of the funds that had arrived. John Johnston and I travelled to Liverpool to interview Kenneth Kitchen in November 2008, and filmed over 8 hours of discussion of various aspects of Professor Kitchen’s life and career.

The material has been deposited in the Society’s Oral History Archive, and once a few technical issues have been ironed out we hope to have a sample of the video footage available online – we’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready. Arrangements have also been made to interview Professor Harry Smith in March 2009, and a report on all the work undertaken so far will be presented at the conference in June.

Amelia Edwards Group members have been invited to a special event on 21 May, when the results of the work will be presented for the first time. This will also provide Group members with the opportunity to talk to project directors and staff about possible future work.

A NEW TREASURER AND BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Several important changes to the governance of the EES were approved at the AGM on 13 December 2008 which followed the well-attended study-day on technology (‘Every Beautiful Thing’). As a result, the Memorandum and Articles have now been revised to take account of new legislation, and in order that the Committee could be recast as a Board of Trustees. Board members were elected at the AGM and include a number of non-Egyptologists, with legal, financial and administrative backgrounds. We believe that the new blend of Egyptologists and others puts the Society in the strong position to succeed in meeting its aims over the next few years. The EES also has a new Treasurer, Mr Paul Cove, an experienced financier currently working for Deutsche Bank. Paul’s financial expertise will no doubt be invaluable as the Society seeks to reduce the deficit projected for 2009-10, in the most challenging of circumstances.

EVENTS

Our autumn and winter events proved very popular. The Deir el Medina study day, ‘The Men of the Gang’ was attended by over 200 members and others, and the Museums seminar led by Karen Exell and Ashley Cooke was so oversubscribed that a repeat performance has been scheduled for 21 March this year. Furthermore, the forthcoming seminars on Tell el-Balamun (Patricia and Jeffrey Spencer) and the First Intermediate Period (Glenn Godenho), and the members’ private view of the new Nebamun galleries at the British Museum, have all sold out. We’re really pleased that you have signed up for these events so enthusiastically; we try to offer as diverse a programme of events as possible and hope you will continue to vote with your feet by getting involved this way.

As announced in the autumn mailing, the conference this year, ‘New Explorations’ (20/21 June 2009), will focus on the Society’s current fieldwork and research, and is intended to be a statement of where we are in 2009, in our first year since the withdrawal of the British Academy grant. We are very excited about the current work and hope to see as many of you as possible at SOAS in June. A much greater proportion of our work is funded through members’ subscriptions and donations than was previously the case, and we hope that you will be pleased with the way your money has been spent!

Tickets are not yet available but full details of the conference and other events for Spring and Summer - including a seminar on statues from Karnak and a lecture on letters from Qasr Ibrim - will be mailed to members in the next few weeks, and posted online.

MEMBERSHIP AND SUBSCRIPTION VOLUMES

The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 94 (2008) was mailed during December to members who had paid the relevant subscription. Any members who believe they should have received a copy but have not yet done so should contact Roo Mitcheson (roo.mitcheson@ees.ac.uk). A list of the contents is available here.

Roo is currently preparing subscription renewal forms for mailing in March as the new sub year starts on 1 April. We hope you will all want to renew your subscriptions of course and that Egyptian Archaeology 34 which will also be mailed during the next few weeks will be a good incentive!

JSTOR

Roo’s renewal forms will include details of a new add-on to membership which will be available from 1 April onwards. JSTOR is an online archive of scientific journals and contains all back issues of JEA (excluding the three mostly recently published volumes). For an additional £10 you will be provided with a password allowing you to download an unlimited number of articles from the Journal as pdf files. If you have any questions about this please do not hesitate to contact us.

THE EES on the WWW

The overhaul of the Society’s website has unfortunately taken longer than anticipated, due in part to other pressures on staff time, but mainly to the sheer amount of material we want to make available. This has not discouraged people from using the present site which, at the moment, receives over 3,000 visitors each week. The news page (Tumblr) has remained similarly busy with over two and half thousand views in the last few weeks of 2008, and the Facebook group now has just under 950 members, which gives us confidence that we will reach 1,000 by the time of its first birthday in April!

LIBRARY: DUPLICATES SOLD, NEW BOOKS BOUGHT!

As you will know by now, the Society received a very generous donation of over 900 books from Edwina Iredale in spring last year. A good number were added to the library but the Society already had copies of most of the books in the collection and it was decided that the duplicates should be sold to raise funds for new acquisitions. In December the Society ran an online auction of the most valuable titles on eBay. It was our intention by doing this to involve as many members as possible in the sale - including those outside the UK - and to maximize revenue. Almost all the titles listed were sold, to members and others throughout Europe and further afield, raising approximately £1,700. This money has made a significant difference to the library’s acquisitions budget and a number of new titles have already been added to the collection. A list of new titles is available here.

In addition, a new exchange agreement was struck with the Università degli studi of Milan in the autumn. The Society sent a number of its publications to Milan for the library in the department of Egyptology and a very heavy box full of new titles, many of them the publications of the University’s very active programme of research into Egyptological archives, arrived at Doughty Mews last week. The Society’s Junior Administrator, Tina Paphitis, has been cataloguing the books, and a full list will be made available in due course.

ANCIENT EGYPT MAGAZINE

At the suggestion of the Editor, Ancient Egypt Magazine will be running a series of articles on the Society throughout 2009. The first in the series, an article on the history of the Society by the Society’s Director, Patricia Spencer, appeared recently in volume 9, issue 4 (Feb/Mar 2009).

In addition a special issue of Current World Archaeology will be devoted to the Society later in the year.

WHO WAS WHO

The Editor of Who Was Who in Egyptology, Dr Morris Bierbrier, can now be found at Doughty Mews on a regular basis, updating the database. Members who have additional information on the individuals included previously or would like to suggest new entries should contact Morris at morris.bierbrier @ ees.ac.uk [Andie: I have added spaces before and after the @ symbol to reduce spam to the EES - you will need to remove the spaces when you email].

SPREAD THE WORD!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this third EES e-newsletter. The mailing list now stands at over 1,500 and is still growing. Please feel free to pass the message to anyone you feel might be interested in our work, and if you are receiving this message ‘second-hand’ please do contact us – contact @ ees.ac.uk – so that we can add your address to the list for the fourth installment! [Andie: I have added spaces before and after the @ symbol to reduce spam to the EES - you will need to remove the spaces when you email].

Best wishes,

Chris Naunton

Thanks very much to Roo Mitcheson for untangling my subscription for me yesterday with such patient good will and efficiency.

Armenian Egyptology Centre Newletter No.10

Egiptomania

The Egiptomania site has made the Armenian Egyptology Centre's most recent newsletter available for download at the above address (in PDF format).

Inside this issue:

• A new history philosophy
• The Times article on history
• BM oil pigments discovery!
• KV63 pigments discovery!
• Ochre in Erebuni
• Glue in Ancient Egypt
• Thanks & help us!

Arcade, a New Shared Catalog, Positions Three Major New York City Art Museum Libraries

Art Daily

More than 800,000 records representing the holdings of The Frick Art Reference Library and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art are now accessible via Arcade, a new catalog developed with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The catalog, at http://arcade.nyarc.org, unites the distinguished resources of each library into a virtual collection. Arcade is the gateway to a trove of rich and varied material, much of it unique, on art and cultural history spanning the spectrum from ancient Egypt to contemporary art. Exhibition and art collection catalogs, monographs, periodicals, rare books, photograph collections, artist and vertical files, auction sale catalogs, artists’ books, archival materials, digital resources, and specialized databases may now be easily located. “We are very pleased to have participated in the creation of this collaborative catalog, which promises to transform the nature of research services at these libraries,” comments Anne L. Poulet, Director of The Frick Collection. “Arcade facilitates discovery of our collections in new ways and allows collective development of ever more useful access and services.”

Arcade, based on the Millennium system from Innovative Interfaces, Inc., allows users to search all three libraries’ combined resources through a unified interface, while also providing collection-specific searching using Dadabase (MoMA’s catalog), FRESCO (Frick Research Catalog Online), or Brookmuse (the Brooklyn Museum Libraries & Archives catalog). Searches may be limited not only by location, but by format specifications, including auction catalogs, artist books, archival materials, and e-resources.

Giza Occasional Papers volume 2

AERA

Available for download in PDF format from the above page or open directly by clicking here. Here's an extract from the introduction:

The 2005 season of the Giza Plateau Mapping Project at Giza, Egypt, took place over two periods: January 8th to May 31st and September 13th to December 13th. During the first period we carried out major clearing, mapping, and excavation. We worked on two Pyramid Age settlements, the extensive Worker’s Settlement in Gebel Qibli, designated as Area A (the main focus of our work since 1988) and the Khentkawes Town. Between January 21st and March 17 th we conducted the Giza Field School for Supreme Council of Antiquities inspectors. We reopened the season in September and devoted this period to analysis and study of collections in our storeroom and to work on two areas of the Workers’ Settlement: the conservation pilot work on the Eastern Town House (ETH) and limited excavations of House 3 in area Soccer Field West (SFW) (fig. 1).

Our work focused on four arenas: clearing and mapping, intensive excavation, mapping Late Period burials, and conservation. Since 1999 our excavation seasons in Area A have included large scale clearing of sandy overburden and mapping the ruins of an underlying ancient settlement over broad areas, as well as intensive, detailed excavations of selected, specific parts of the site.

Mummification Museum Lecture - Search for the 3rd cache

Luxor News Blog (Jane Akshar)

Thanks to Jane for her ongoing efforts on our behalf. Here's an extract from her lecture notes:

Mummfication Museum lecture - Search for the 3rd cache – Prof, dr hab. Andrezej Niwinski

Search for the 3rd cache – Prof, dr hab. Andrezej Niwinski

A mysterious tomb at Deir el Bahri – Revelations of the excavations of the Polish Egyptian Cliff Mission above the temple of Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III

For the 30 years he has been pursuing this subject, in fact his PHD dissertation was on 21st dynasty coffins. The period 1800-1000 BC is poorly represented by coffins, from the Late Period we have 400 coffins but missing is the 21st dynasty High priest King Herihor who was almost a king. It is quite possible that his burial is also a royal cache and might be the location of the burial of Amenhotep I. Dr Andrzej believes that they are still to be found at or near Deir el Bahri. It is the centre of the whole necropolis and although the temple and courtyard are well researched there is little that has been done in the cliffs above the temple.

In 1891 the royal cache was discovered TT320 but largely the cliffs are unknown. In 1972 as a member of the polish team he concentrated on the upper floor which is on a centre line with Karnak. The Ancient Egyptians would not have ignored this as it was an important area. In 1991 a joint polish and Egyptian team started the cliff mission of which he is co director. Their aim was 1) to check there is no danger to the Hatshepsut temple and 2) to see if there is anything there.

Jane says to keep an eye on the website as well. At the moment the site is in Polish but an English version is coming out in a few weeks. It can be found at www.herhor.org.pl.

See the above page for the rest of Jane's notes.

Canada's Indiana Jones in Sudan

Financial Post (Heidi Kingstone)

Dr. Krzysztof Grzymski doesn't immediately strike you as an Indiana Jones type. But I can tell you that accidentally stumbling across the Royal Ontario Museum's senior curator by the 6th Nile Cataract in windswept Sudan was just as exciting as running into Harrison Ford's character -- the romance of archaeology, I suppose. There Dr. Grzymski was, wearing a Maple Leaf T-shirt and dusting off some shards of ancient pottery, somewhere between Khartoum and Port Sudan. All I could think of was, what are the odds?

About 200 miles northeast of Khartoum are Sudan's pyramids, smaller than their well-known Egyptian counterparts, a few dozen significant ruins from the Meroitic kingdom that lasted between 300 BC and AD 300.

Not far from this royal burial ground, on a dusty plain with dry acacia and hostile thorn trees, sits an inauspicious looking site that costs US$10 to enter. There is no one around. A short walk from the gate you discover Dr. Grzymski-- an unexpected piece of Canada in this desolate spot. On the outside of his house, his wife, who died last year, had painted a bright red Maple Leaf and a palm tree.

Dr. Grzymski was excited when I bumped into him as it had been an eventful time. UNESCO had just sent a delegation to determine whether the remains he is excavating should be deemed a world heritage site. The process, which has to be proposed by the local government, takes approximately two years.

"Ancient Nubia, or Kush as it is called in the Bible," he explained, "is after Egypt the second-oldest literate civilization in Africa. It had two main cities, Napata and Meroe. The traditional view is that the Kingdom of Kush arose around the town of Napata (modern Karima) near the 4th cataract, a town founded by Egyptian pharaohs around 1400 BC. Thus the stimulus for the development of Kush would have come from Egypt."

Dr. Grzymski believes, and his expedition seems to support his theory, that "the quest for the origin of Kush points to Meroe." He thinks we will reverse our idea that this culture was more native than Egyptian. "Last year I discovered a wall fragment dated by C-14 method to 1000-800 BC," he says. "This year we continued the exploration uncovering more of what is the oldest Kushite building found so far."

See the above page for the full story.

Up to 2,000 tourists witness sun perpendicular on Ramses II face in Abu Simbel

Egypt State Information Service

Up to 2,000 tourists saw in the morning on 22/2/2009 the unique international event to the Sun perpendicular on the face of the King "Ramses II" in his great temple in sanctum in Abu Simble tourist city the rare astronomical and engineering phenomenon are repeated on February 22 and October 22 each year.

The director of Abu Simble antiquities said that "The perpendicular fall of the sun started at 6:25 am this morning and lasted for 24 minutes, the sun reached during this time 60 meters distance inside the temple to reach the sanctum hall announcing the beginning of "Shamo " month, which is the beginning of the harvest season at the ancient Egyptians.

Book Review: The Way of Herodotus

International Herald Tribune (Tobin Harshaw)


The Way of Herodotus. Travels With the Man Who Invented History. By Justin Marozzi. 348 pages. Da Capo Press.

Sometimes the trip that starts out on the wrong foot can prove to be the most rewarding. You know, showing the fortitude to overcome the initial hassles (missed connection! lost luggage!) and disappointments (tiny cabin! tainted seviche!) can turn a vacation into a journey, leisure into fulfillment. Such is the case in tagging along with the travel writer Justin Marozzi in "The Way of Herodotus," as he follows in the footsteps of one of the world's first travel writers and, yes, "father of history." Marozzi starts with a solid plan: to wander the limits of what was Herodotus's world and look at its nations and people through classical eyes. Thus the book is one long digression - exactly what Marozzi rightly considers Herodotus' "Histories" themselves.

First the missteps. Marozzi starts his journey in the tourist trap of Bodrum, Turkey, which was called Halicarnassus when Herodotus was born there around 480 B.C. It's a digression too far: Herodotus had little interest in his hometown, possibly because he put on his traveling sandals and skipped town decades before the completion of its Wonder of the World, the tomb of Mausolos. Marozzi goes farther astray with two America-bashing chapters set in Baghdad, a city built more than a millennium after Herodotus died. Then to Babylon, which Herodotus described in detail but may not have visited; if so, he inexplicably failed to notice the Hanging Gardens.

Off to Egypt, thank the gods. Herodotus had the time of his life in the Nile valley, and Marozzi is infected by his enthusiasm

See the above page for the rest of the review.

Book Review: The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Aksum

Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Roger D. Woodard (ed.), The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Aksum. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Reviewed by Mark Weeden, School of Oriental and African Studies, London

The present volume presents a relatively affordable, paperback collection of articles from Woodard's massive and extremely useful Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the World's Ancient Languages (abbreviated WAL, Cambridge/New York, CUP, 2004), apparently selected according to geographical criteria. The book contains chapters on ancient languages from the areas mentioned in the title (Aksum is old Ethiopia), adopted directly from the original WAL, with prefatory and introductory remarks by the editor. Other volumes have appeared in a similar format, picking up the ancient languages covered by WAL belonging to other geographical areas (Asia and the Americas, Asia Minor, Europe, Syria-Palestine and Arabia, all detailed on pp. 238-242). The purpose of these publications is to make the essays they contain more widely available to scholars and students. The problem is that they are now largely out of date.

The chapters are all organised according to a consistent structure with sections on (section 1) Historical and Cultural Contexts; (section 2) Writing Systems; (section 3) Phonology; (section 4) Morphology; (section 5) Syntax; (section 6) Lexicon; (section 7) Reading List. Not all chapters have all sections, however.

See the above page for the entire review.

Daily Photo - The Royal Mosque in Cairo

. . .
.

..The Royal Mosque, Al-Rifai

Cairo bombing

BBC News video

There are many accounts about this atrocity all over the web. The above is just one, by a respected news source,

Unfortunately my PC's speakers chose tonight of all nights to fail, so I haven't heard this report but the above link takes you to a BBC News report about the bombing. A short text report accompanies it.

My heart goes out to those effected by today's horrors.

Netherlands-Flemish Institute newsletter No.9

From Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo

To subscribe to the newsletter email info@nvic.net.eg or go to
Institute's newsletter page for more information.

Issue 9 of the newsletter gives details of planned excavation work in Egypt:

NVIC's excavations in Saqqara: From the seventh of February onwards, the NVIC is participating in the Dutch RMO/UL expedition with the aim of excavating below the New Kingdom tombs at Saqqara South. The project is a continuation of last year's successful identification of the 'archaic' structure below the tomb of Maya (Raven et al. 2001, 62, pl. 3) as the burial place of a high official of the late Second Dynasty.

Qasr Dakhleh Project: The Qasr Dakhleh Project (QDP) started in 2002 with two objectives: 1. To document and restore some of the unique mud brick architecture of the little oasis town of al-Qasr in the Dachla Oasis. 2. To try to find out as much as possible about the history of al-Qasr. Supported by the University of Groningen and the Netherlands Embassy in Cairo they were, over the years, able to restore or reconstruct five rather large houses, some of them four stories high.

Giza Plateau dig diary

AERA Blog

The season at Giza is getting underway with staff arriving and opening up different areas of the operation:

AERA’s Giza Lab officially opened for the season on Sunday, February 1st, 2009. This funny place doesn’t look like much from the outside – a low, one story brick-and-cement bunker painted a yellowish dung color – and of little consequence nestled amongst Giza’s imposing pyramids.

When the rusty metal door opens with its loud clang, however, a different impression emerges as one’s eyes adjust to the light, and especially as one descends into the heart of the lab. The space is much larger than imagined and everywhere, boxes! These, stacked high on floor to ceiling shelves, are all labeled with the details of their contents and of their origin.

These six rooms contain the narrative of the nearby settlement of the Giza pyramid builders, the traces left behind by the inhabitants of this Lost City. Our large and diverse lab team hails from 12 nations and it’s our job to recover stories from the pottery, objects, human bone, animal bone, plants, mud sealings, chipped stone tools, pigments, plaster, wood charcoal, roofing material, mud brick.

There is much to do before the lab crew begins to arrive this week and, as ever, our Egyptian inspector and my team of local workmen are on the job.

See the above page for more, including details of team members.

Kelsey Museum of Archaeology Dig Diary

Kelsey Dig Diary

The Abydos project dig diary has now been kicked off by the teams conservators. There is a useful general entry about the type of information will be possible to write up on the blog:

Our postings are grouped by project week, so please click the most recent week at left to read more.

But while you're here...we want to tell you something unique about our blog entries from the Abydos project. Egypt, specifically the Supreme Council of Antiquities (S.C.A. for short - and isn't Supreme Council a great name for an organization?), has some special rules concerning foreign archaeological missions. Some of these have to do with our favorite topic, conservation! But the rules pertinent to our blog involve how archaeological discoveries are announced in Egypt.

Basically - all archaeological teams must first report discoveries to the S.C.A. And the S.C.A. then in turn reports discoveries to national and international media. What this means for all of us, is that we won't be bringing you news of specific discoveries, nor will we be showing you photos of objects coming out of the ground. But don't worry, there is PLENTY of fascinating stuff happening on the project that we can talk about, so if you're interested in how it all works, this blog is for you.

These S.C.A. rules might seem like kind of a bummer, but they exist for a good reason. There is a lot of hype surrounding everything archaeological in Egypt, and crazy stories can spread wildfire. To illustrate this point, below we have a quote from the head of the S.C.A., Dr. Zahi Hawass.

"Week 1", which is the first blog post, is now available on the above site. The dig has been underway for around two weeks so far.

Lost fragments of the Turin Canon have been found

Enemigos de la Egiptología (EDE) (Teresa Soria)

Pieces of the Turin Canon have been rediscovered. Here's a rough summary of the first few paragraphs: Bridget Leach and Richard Parkinson, British Museum experts, are meeting in the Egyptian Museum in Turin to study papyrus fragments discovered in a cabinet in the basement of the Turin museum. Last summer, Nial Mc Gregor, Director of the British Museum, announced that the British Museum had made available some of its specialists to restore the papyrus. What was not expected, hwoever, was the discovery of new pieces of the papyrus in the museum itself. The discovery was made following the observation that the restored papyrus was missing sections which had been published in 1959. It was concluded that the missing fragments must still be stored somewhere in the museum. After obtaining all the appropriate permits, they performed an extensive search of the museum's basement, the pieces were found in a cabinet, carefully stored between two sheets of glass. Eleni Vassilikos, director of the Egyptian Museum of Turin, explained the importance of the discovery: "They may have to revise the dates of the dynasties of pharaohs and add names." The current reconstruction is incorrect and needs to be revised.

HALLADOS FRAGMENTOS PERDIDOS DEL CANON DE TURÍN

Richard Parkinson y Bridget Leach, expertos del British Museum se reúnen en el Museo Egipcio de Turín para estudiar nuevos fragmentos del papiro descubiertos en un armario de los sótanos del Museo de la ciudad italiana.

El pasado verano, Nial Mc Gregor, Director del British Museum, anunció que pondría a disposición del Museo Egipcio de Turín los mejores de sus especialistas para restaurar este papiro, uno de los documentos de mayor importancia para conocer la historia de Egipto que alberga. Lo que no se esperaban era hallar nuevos fragmentos en el propio museo.

Mientras repasaban la publicación del papiro que hizo Gardiner en 1959, se percataron de que éste, en la Tabla IX, había reproducido algunos fragmentos que no habían sido incluidos por Giulio Farina en la reconstrucción final del mismo, quizás por no casar correctamente con los vecinos. De la misma pensaron que, si el papiro había ingresado íntegro en el Museo de Turín, allí debían seguir los restos perdidos. Tras solicitar todos los permisos oportunos, pudieron realizar una extensa búsqueda por los sótanos del museo, donde aparecieron en el interior de un armario, meticulosamente guardados entre dos láminas de vidrio.

See the above page for the full story, with photos and links to more information.

Crown jewels from Mohammed Ali dynasty to go on show

Strait Times

EGYPT said on Wednesday it plans to put on public display crown jewels belonging the dynasty that ruled the country for 150 years until the fall of the monarchy in 1952.

The jewels have been kept under lock and key in 45 crates in the vaults of the Central Bank and will go on show in a museum in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, officials said.

Culture Minister Faruq Hosni said the jewels will be displayed to the public for the first time a museum where restoration work was launched three years ago but did not say when the exhibition would open.

Mr Hosni did not give details about the treasures that will be seen by the public for the first time, nor did he give any estimated value.

'These jewels, which were put in the central bank at the time of the 1952 revolution, will be shown at the Royal Family Museum of Jewellery,' a former royal palace that was transformed into a museum in 1986, Mr Hosni said.

See the above page for more.

Video: Social Programming A Pyramid

InfoQ

In this presentation filmed during OOPSLA 2008, Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist, talked about ancient Egyptian cultures as seen through the discoveries made on the Giza Plateau and made some connections with software engineering.

Watch: Social Programming A Pyramid (1h 30 min.)

ZA, a hieroglyph representing the cattle’s four legs tight together by a rope. It was traduced by ancient Greeks with “phyle” which means “tribe”. They represent “a social unit that seems modular, replicable, which you can encapsulate in larger organizations.”

There are similarities between Egyptian work organization and software. A phyle was made up of 200 men or 20 men according to other sources. There was hierarchy with a commander over a phyle, and a higher commander over 5 phyle commanders. There also was encapsulation, each phyle being able to perform their own set of tasks without needing the help of others. Modularity was expressed by having separate phyles for the 5 different types of tasks. Polymorphism was manifested by using the phyles for different types of projects: temples, boats, pyramids.

Lehner’s presentation continued with their search for the “great city” buried beneath the sand. It was supposed to be a city inhabited by pyramid workers, and the findings showed life sustaining elements like a bakery. A bakery would have fire places where the bread was baked and a number of vessels used to prepare the dough. In order to feed an estimated 20 to 30 thousands people, they had to scale and they did that not by creating one large bakery, but rather replicating the small one into many placed into close proximity.

In the rest of the presentation, Lehner’s talked about uncovering the great city and in the end answered questions from the audience.

Lecture Notes: 'Egypt guy' discusses pilgrimages, graffiti

The Brown Daily Herald - Campus News (Matthew Klebanoff)

Issue date: 2/19/09 Section: Campus News

Known in his field as "the Egypt Guy," Eugene Cruz-Uribe, a professor of history at Northern Arizona University, discussed Egyptian pilgrimages before a small audience in Salomon 001 Wednesday night.

In his lecture, "Valley of the Kings to Philae: Ancient and Modern Pilgrimages," Cruz-Uribe explained that people often went on pilgrimages for medical reasons, both physical and spiritual.

"A pilgrimage would be a journey of at least a day, if not multiple days, and it had to have some sort of significance," he said.

The sites that Cruz-Uribe discussed included the Temple of Seti I at Abydos, the Colossi of Memnon and Philae - the three main pilgrimage destinations for Romans traveling through ancient Egypt, he said.

Cruz-Uribe discussed research he conducted primarily after receiving a Fulbright scholarship to teach at Egypt's South Valley University for the 2006-07 academic year.

Much of Cruz-Uribe's talk focused on ancient graffiti covering the sites. Written in the third person, the graffiti often served as prayers for individuals who were deemed gods after their deaths.

"I always wonder about what kind of society allows people to write on the sides and walls of their church," he said, adding that he believes people etched graffiti onto churches once they were no longer in use.

One inscription, which read "Djedhor forever," will serve as the title for a book Cruz-Uribe plans to write on ancient Egyptian graffiti, he said.

More re scroll of Amenemhat at ROM

The Torontoist

With photograph.

The ROM is kicking off Egypt Month on Saturday, February 28 with a new attraction: the Book of the Dead (and no, it’s not the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead series—that demonic text was Sumerian). The seven metre–long scroll, which is part of the ROM’s Out of the Vault Series, has recently been restored to its full beauty. Written in 320 BC for a wealthy Ptolemaic Egyptian named Amen-em-hat, the text of the scroll contains numerous spells, hymns, and instructions to help guide the deceased through the underworld. The scroll also depicts Amen-em-hat fishing, farming, and standing in judgement before the Egyptian gods.

In Ptolemaic Egypt, the scroll was usually written on papyrus and placed in the tomb or coffin of the dead. It was believed that the various hymns and spells would grant the dead magical powers, protection against fire and water, new body parts, and a voice with which to speak. All of these abilities were thought to be necessary to reach the Hall of Judgement, where the heart of the deceased would be weighed on a scale against a feather, the symbol of Maat, goddess of truth and justice. If the deceased led an honest life, the scale would balance and they would be granted eternal life; if not, a monster would eat their heart.

See the above page for more.

Fiction: Egypt, a seven-issue graphic novel mini-series

Comic Book Resources

I loved the cover, which Kat brought to my attention. There's a big version of it on the above page.

Today we’re looking at Egypt, a seven-issue mini-series from 1995 Milligan did with artists Glyn Dillon and Roberto Corona, Dillon doing only the first two issues and Corona filling in thereafter.

The series chronicles with the time-hopping adventures of one Vincent Me, a self-loathing, charming but completely irresponsible and utterly untrustworthy British slacker; the type who shacks up with any willing woman (and he apparently finds plenty) long enough to get a hand on her wallet.

After being thrown out into the street for the umpteenth time, Vincent gets meets up with a bunch of self-absorbed college students who it turns out are fascinated with Egyptian history and, more significantly, religion.

It turns out they’re conducting some experiments in after-death experiences a la the Pharoahs of old, and Vincent is their latest guinea pig, trussed up and sealed alive in a tomb. Apparently the experiment doesn’t go too well for Vincent however, because the next thing he knows, he’s actually back in ancient Egypt, inhabiting the body of one Vin Centhotep.

Vincent tries to figure out what exactly happened to cause this backward reincarnation, but there are … obstacles in his way. Centhotep apparently is even more of a bastard than Vincent, acting as a bit of a double-agent, fluttering between the city’s rebels who seek to overturn the authoritarian power structure and the high priests who would prefer everything to stay just like it is, led by one Soter, a “boo-hiss” villain if there ever was one.

Oh, and then there are the gods. Seems our archaeologists were wrong about a lot of Egyptian mythology, as Seth, Osiris and at several other members of the pantheon are alive and running around, at times laying waste to whoever gets in their way.

Trivia: More re pharaoh floating down Thames

Yahoo! News

Thanks to Geoff Carter for letting me know that there's a photograph accompanying the above piece about the Lego pharaoh which was transported down the Thames earlier this week. The photograph shows the pharaoh in front of Tower Bridge. I would have loved to have seen it! That joins a large list of fun things I've missed being moved up and down the Thames including the vast Anubis for the Tutankhamun exhibition and Concorde.

Daily Photo - Cairo Museum

. . .

Lion in the Cairo Museum garden

I didn't take note of the label and neither of my books about the museum
is forthcoming on the subject, but if anyone has the details about this statue
let me know and I'll add them to this post

I haven't run out of Bob's photos, by the way, but I've been in complete airhead mode all week and cannot find where I've stored them on this machine. There's backup set on my laptop so I'll dig them out over the weekend.

I'm on a training course tomorrow (surveying historic places of worship) so I probably won't update the blog until Sunday.

. . .

Egyptian archaeologists uncover ancient statues in Luxor

xinhuanet

Egyptian archaeologists on Wednesday uncovered a statue of pharaoh and a bust of the famous woman pharaoh Hatshepsut in the southern city of Luxor, the state MENA news agency reported.

The three-meter Amenhotep statue was "dug out with only one damage in the nose and one in the teeth," said Moustafa el-Waziri, director of the archaeological mission, adding that more antiques would be unearthed in the future.

Video: Meresamun

Discovery News

See the above page for the video.

The face of Meresamun, a priestess who sang in the temples of Ancient Egypt hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, has been revealed to the world for the first time thanks to a X-ray with a light ten billion times brighter than the sun.

Known as Joint Engineering, Environmental and Processing beamline or Jeep, the cutting edge technology uses intense radiation known as synchrotron light to see through solid objects.

The Jeep beamline showed astonishing 3D images of the a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy, still wrapped in her linen bandages.

According to an inscription on the casket, Meresamun (whose name means “She Lives for Amun”) served as a “Singer in the Interior of the Temple of Amun”. She was in her late twenties or early thirties when she died.

An exhibition featuring the mummy is running at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum ("The Life of Meresamun: A Temple Singer in Ancient Egypt”, until December 6, 2009)

Here is a video showing the virtual unwrapping of the mummy. One roughly oval-shaped amulet covers each of Meresamun's eyes. Her eyeballs are shrunken but intact.

Tourism in Egypt suffers crisis

FT.com (Heba Saleh)

Tourist buses line the street in front of the Egyptian Museum (above) in downtown Cairo, and visitors cluster in groups around their guides as they prepare to enter the pink neoclassical building that houses the treasures of Tutankhamun and other world-famous pharaonic artefacts.

Despite the hustle and bustle in the courtyard, and the presence of hundreds of tourists, Walid Abdel Razek, a salesman in one of the museum gift shops, laments what he says is a serious drop in the number of visitors.

He reckons his shop is taking half the money it made last year. It is, he claims, the worst crisis to hit Egyptian tourism since 1997 when Islamic militants slaughtered dozens of foreign visitors during an attack in Luxor.

Tourism is an industry that is crucial to the health of the wider Egyptian economy, providing direct and indirect employment to 12.6 per cent of the workforce, according to official figures. After foreign direct investment, it is the country’s largest source of foreign revenue, bringing in $10.8bn in 2007-08 and accounting for 6.5 per cent of gross domestic product.

Last year brought unprecedented growth, beating analysts’ expectations. Arrivals reached a record 12.8m visitors, according to the ministry of tourism, up 15 per cent on the year before.

The sector, however, now faces the threat of a slowdown as a result of the global recession.

“There is a decline in tourist numbers in comparison to last year,” says Adela Ragab, an adviser to the tourism minister. “Those who lost their jobs won’t travel and neither will those who are anxious about their job security. There will be a problem – but how severe and for how long no one can tell you right now.”

Economic conditions have been deteriorating in most of the countries from which tourists come to Egypt. The top four – Russia, Britain, Germany and Italy – all have weakening economies and falling currencies.

See the above page for the full story.

Trivia: Pharaoh floats down the Thames

Press Association

It is always a shame to hear about these events after they have passed. I live a two minute walk from the Thames and would have loved to have seen it. It must have been somewhat surreal.

An unusual royal procession has sailed serenely down the Thames as river traffic made way for a 16ft Egyptian Pharaoh made entirely of Lego.

Weighing one tonne and comprising more than 200,000 building blocks, the enormous statue - one of the largest Lego models yet built - will be part of a new £3 million attraction at Legoland Windsor.

It was the end of a long voyage for the model, which has travelled 1,395 miles by truck and boat from the Czech Republic to the theme park's Kingdom of the Pharaohs, which opens on March 21.

New Fiction: Spies of Sobeck (Amerotke 7)

Monsters and Critics

A short review about Paul Doherty's latest nove.

Paul Doherty's brilliant new Amerotke novel will take you on a compelling journey into the glory, splendour and corruption of AncientEgypt. 1477 BC and once again treacherous forces are on the rise inEgypt. Fresh from her victories in the north, Pharaoh Queen Hatusu has returned toThebes to find sinister threats emerging from neighbouring provinceNubia. The Arites, a secret murderous sect, are waging bloody war against the Pharaoh. Imperial messengers and members of the Medjay,Egypt's elite army, are disappearing around the Oasis of Sinjar and now Imothep, formerly chief scout for the Spies of Sobeck, has been found strangled in a fortified room at his mansion.

Daily Photo - Cairo Museum

. . .

Particle accelerator may shed new light on ancient Egypt

The Times Online (Mark Henderson)

A scientific instrument is to transform research into the Ancient World by using a light ten billion times brighter than the Sun to reveal the secrets of statues, mummies and sarcophagi.

The imaging facility at the Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire will allow objects weighing up to two tonnes to be examined in brilliant X-ray light, to expose clues to their construction and contents. Three Egyptian bronze figurines from the British Museum will be among the first treasures to be investigated by the Joint Engineering, Environmental and Processing beamline or Jeep. It uses intense radiation known as synchrotron light, generated by the Diamond Light Source, which allows scientists to see through solid objects and to show structural details that cannot be seen by standard X-rays.

The Diamond synchrotron has been running since 2007, but had been able to examine only small objects. The new Jeep beamline, designed for detecting stresses in aircraft, can cope with larger and heavier targets — including ancient artefacts.

Jen Hiller, a scientist working on the beamline, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago: “Heritage scientists are able to apply to use this unique beamline to delve deep inside precious ancient artefacts to unravel their secrets in a non-invasive way. Never before has it been possible to scan and image such large relics with such precision.

“The second stage is big enough to take an aircraft turbine, which Rolls-Royce were very interested in, but the other people who are interested are the British Museum, because they’re going to let us look at some of their life-size bronzes from Egypt. They’re not sure how they were manufactured. They’re also not sure how many times they were repaired.

“It might give us the chance to look at the contents. The Egyptians used to stash things inside their statues. We also get very fragile inner sarcophagi or mummy wrappings.”

soitu.es

If you prefer Spanish, there's a summary of the story on the above page.

Londres.- Una luz 10.000 millones de veces más brillante que la del Sol, obtenida gracias a un acelerador de partículas, puede ser la herramienta esperada por los científicos para conocer detalles hasta ahora ocultos del antiguo Egipto.

Sarcófago de madera hallado junto a otros féretros, momias y esqueletos de la XXVI dinastía en la necrópolis de Saqqara, al sur de El Cairo (Egipto), el pasado 11 de febrero.

Se trata de un haz de luz producto de la intensa radiación que genera la llamada Fuente de Luz Diamante (DLS por sus siglas en inglés), una tecnología que forma parte del sincrotrón situado en Oxfordshire (sur de Inglaterra) y por la que ya se han interesado los responsables del British Museum de Londres para poder realizar exámenes exhaustivos, y no invasivos, de sus tesoros egipcios.

Tres pequeñas estatuas del British serán las primeras a ser sometidas a una sesión de este potente aparato de rayos X y les seguirán momias y sarcófagos, según se anunció durante la conferencia sobre el Avance de la Ciencia que se celebra en Chicago (EEUU).

See the above page for the full story.

Special online feature: Priestess of Amun

Archaeology Magazine (Eti Bonn-Muller)

There is a great online feature about Meresamun on the Archaeology Magazine website. See the above page for a number of different sections which look at different aspects of Meresamun.

ARCHAEOLOGY's March/April 2009 cover story, "A Mummy's Life," tells of new research on the mummified remains of an Egyptian priestess named Meresamun who lived in Thebes around 800 B.C. Ensconced in a skintight coffin made of linen and plaster for almost 3,000 years, the issue's "cover girl" is also the highlight of an exhibition, The Life of Meresamun: A Temple Singer in Ancient Egypt, on view at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute Museum through December 6. In advance of the show, Meresamun was scanned using a state-of-the-art Philips Healthcare 256-slice Brilliance iCT scanner. She is the only mummy ever subject to such advanced technology.

Exhibition: Out of the Vaults

Art Daily

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) launches Egypt Month at the ROM on February 28, 2009 by inviting visitors to journey into the afterlife with its newest exhibit Out of the Vaults: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. The recently conserved Book of the Dead of Amen-em-hat, seen in its full beauty for the first time in over 2,300 years, contains a collection of hymns, spells and instructions for the after-life. Part of the ongoing Out of the Vaults series that brings notable objects on view for a limited time, the iconic Book of the Dead, and rarely seen Egyptian artifacts from the ROM’s collection, will be displayed on the Third Floor, Centre Block until Sunday, May 10, 2009. For the entire month of March, families will also enjoy a special line-up of Egypt-related hands-on activities every weekend and during March Break (March 14 to 22, 2009).

“This is the very first time this captivating document will be on public view since its pieces were brought together during a lengthy conservation process at the Museum,” said Krzys Grzymski, Curator, Egypt and Nubia, at the ROM. “The ROM’s Book of the Dead is probably the finest of its kind in the world for its date and will be a true highlight of Egypt Month.”

The ROM’s seven metre-long scroll is an ancient Egyptian funerary text dating back to 320 B.C., the early Ptolemaic period. Written on papyrus and containing four coloured vignettes and many elegant line drawings, the lavish and beautifully executed book was acquired by Charles Trick Currelly, the ROM's first Director, in Egypt in the early 20th century.

See the above page for more, including a photograph.

Mrs. Mubarak inaugurates Sadat museum

Egypt State Information Service

Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak the chairperson of the board of trustees of Bibliotheca Alexandria, opened on Tuesday 18/02/2009 the museum of late president Anwar Sadat.

The museum, which was established by Bibliotheca Alexandria, was sponsored by Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak and backed by Jehan Sadat, the widow of the late Egyptian leader.

Meantime, Mrs. Mubarak launched a website for the late president covering his biography and displaying 200 rare documentaries.

The museum, which is part of a plan to document Egypt's modern and contemporary history, covers an area of some 200 square meters. Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Library of Alexandria, said that the project was undertaken under the auspices of Mrs. Mubarak. He said Mrs. Sadat gave full support to the project since its inception and donated to the Library a rare collection of Sadat's personal belongings, in spite of their high personal value.

The project collected thousands of rare photographs, documents, documentary films as well as other rare unpublished material related to President Sadat.

Visitors to the museum will get a glimpse of the life of Sadat in a culturama show consisting of nine interactive screens each displaying a specific period of the life of Sadat.

The project team documents 1,116 written speeches of President Sadat, as well as 35 audio-video ones, including the very famous speech delivered in the Knesset in 1977.

More than 14,000 rare photographs of Sadat are posted for the first time on the Internet, covering a great number of official events, visits and meetings between 1952 and 1981.

Moreover, the digital archive also comprises more than 200 documentary films, as well as more than 940 rare Egyptian and American documents.

Travel: Alexandra to Siwa

analysis-online.cn

A peculiar piece of travel writing - I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It is an absolute monologue of thoughts and feelings, about both Siwa and the people the author was traveling with. In general he is more intersted in his fellow travellers than in the landscape. I'm not saying that that is a bad thing necessarily - the entire experience of travel in a group involves the dynamic between different members of the group. If you're not British and middle aged many of the allusions to UK television programmes may be utterly confusing. There's no formatting on the page, so it is presented as one vast block of text. Here's an extract from one of the segments that focuses on Siwa:

We hammered down a few dunes as you might in a sand buggy, but we were in a 4x4 tank. I hadn’t signed up for the adrenalin, but the peace and beauty so found this a rather tedious diversion.We didn’t have to head out too far into the desert as you get away from the Oasis and it is proper desert. I took a video panorama at one point and for about 270 degrees all you get is sand being baked by the sun, but then you see the oasis: it gave me a slight feeling of what it must have been like for those lost, ragged, thirsty souls when they saw it and ran down the dune to it. Of course this is the only oasis for miles and miles and miles, so most of the ragged souls never got to it.We started at a hot spring 10km away and I would say it was serious desert after less than a quarter if that distance.Some of the dunes were picture postcard stuff Scenes like this made it obvious why it had been dubbed the Great Sand Sea, which starts around the hot springs. Cool as this name is, it is worth stating that the Great Sand Sea is part of the Sahara, the number one name in deserts and clear market leader. It is an appropriately movie looking desert. Even day tripping with 2 and a half litres of water and a 4x4, you realise this is not your environment and you need to be careful to be safe.After dinner I chose the tent option-I’ve two nights coming up Al FrescoDay 62 SiwaWith a day to explore the sights in and around Siwa, I hired a bike and headed off to the Temple of the Oracle. Didn’t ITV’s teletext used to be called Oracle? It classical for them. Anyway, Siwa used to have a famous oracle. Famous enough for Alexander the Great to have made a special trip here to consult it; he never revealed what was said, but it is rumoured it told him he was the son of Zeus (and Sid Waddell would memorably reference him in his Bristow’s only 27 commentary). The Persian King Cambyses sent a force of 50,000 men to destroy the Oracle after it foresaw his downfall. They were consumed by the desert and no trace of them has ever been found.In itself there wasn’t so very much to see, but there were some great views over the oasis.I passed the temple of Umm Ubayda, which is in a pretty bad state after an Ottoman governor blew it up for building materials, and made my way to the Cleopatra spring.

See the above page for the full story.

New fiction: The secret of the sacred scarab

iUniverse

Thanks to Fiona Ingram for letting me know that her new children's book has now been released. Here's a precis. See the above page for more details:

Cousins Justin and Adam are ecstatic about accompanying their aunt to Egypt. Both love adventure and know the work of James Kinnaird, an archaeologist searching for the tomb of an ancient Egyptian ruler, the Scarab King. Some dismiss the tomb as legend, but Justin and Adam believe differently.

From the moment their plane lands, Justin and Adam bounce from one mysterious event to another, starting from the moment a street peddler gives Adam an ancient scarab. Dr. Khalid, head of the department of antiquities and research at the Egyptian Museum, shows excessive interest in the cousins and their relic. Then, when the boys learn that James Kinnaird is missing, they realize something sinister is afoot.

Kidnapped and taken across the desert, the boys are plunged into serious danger and chased by ruthless enemies. Dr. Khalid will stop at nothing to discover the Scarab King's tomb and claim its treasures. But he has underestimated the boys' ingenuity.

Join Justin and Adam as they evade their captors and unravel the secrets of the Scarab King. Relying on their wits, courage, and each other, the boys must solve the mystery of the sacred scarab and rescue James Kinnaird before time runs out.

Conference: Pre-Modern Climate Change

University of Copenhagen

This may be of interest to anyone who is looking at the impact of climate change on ancient civilizations and prehistoric socieities.

Climate, and human responses to it, plays an integral part in the formation of society. Thus when climate change occurs, the result of either natural or human causes, societies should react and adapt – but do they? If so, what is the nature of that change, and are the responses positive or negative for the long term survival of society and its peoples?

Archaeology, steeped in interdisciplinary studies and dealing with a longue durée view of society, offers detailed and verifiable insights into climate changes in the past: causes, responses and consequences.

This conference, held under the umbrella of the University of Copenhagen’s Climate and Sustainability initiative, is held in memory of Stine Rossel, archaeozoologist and member of the Department of Cross Cultural & Regional Studies, who had a keen research interest in climate and past societies.

More re bird life of Nebamun courtesy of John Wyatt

These lovely quails (Coturnix coturnix) are being trapped by nets.
John Wyatt says that they are still trapped like this in Egypt today.

John believes that they are probably all the domesticated version of Greylag geese
(Anser anser). However there are patterns and colours in some of the geese
which suggest that other specis may be present - including Spur-winged Goose
and White-faced whislting duck

The biggest of the birds with the orange colouring are Egyptian Geese and they are
accompanied by three goslings. To the left are two ducks which John suggests
are Common Teal (Anas crecca). The fish are Tilapia.

Daily Photo - Pyramids at Giza

The pyramids of Giza seen from the Meridien Pyramids hotel in Cairo.

Travel: The Faiyum oasis

Al Ahram Weekly (Amira El-Naqeeb)

Good travel article which looks at many of the main features of the Faiyum oasis, from the world's oldest paved road to the lovely site of Dimeh. With photos.

For me Fayoum has always been a destination at arm's reach, and I won't hesitate to drop by for a one-day trip whenever there's a chance. My visits had one of two purposes. I would either make for Wadi Al-Rayyan, a protected area, for quick landscape refreshment, enjoying the little bit of everything the scenery provides, be it the solitude of the desert, the breeze of the greenery or the purity of the water running through the verdant landscape. Or, I would visit the rural part of Fayoum and watch the fishermen spreading their nets in Lake Qaroun, walk in the fields or play with a herd of sheep. I never knew there was a mystical part of Fayoum yet to be discovered. Places where time stood still.

Egypt's largest oasis, Fayoum, is located only 80km from Cairo. My guide and co-adventurer on this trip was desert veteran and the owner of Desert Adventures safari company, Hani Amr, with whom I share a passion for the desert -- which I am sure is my natural habitat. Also accompanying us was Klas Lindberg, a Swedish friend and freelance photographer, and Am Ahmed, a driver and a guide in his own right. Our plan was to explore some long-abandoned relics.

Centamin mines pharaohs’ gold

FT.com (William MacNamara)

A mine known to the pharaohs has re-entered service as modern Egypt’s only large gold producer.

A papyrus map indicates that the Sukari gold deposit, in Egypt’s eastern desert near the Red Sea, was mined during the time of the pharaohs more than 2,000 years ago. Later, the Romans mined gold there, literally scratching the surface of a deposit that modern surveys show to extend deep into the earth.

Centamin, the Aim-listed miner, opened the mine last week. It will produce 200,000 ounces of gold per year as the mine enters its first phase of full-scale development, Josef El-Raghi, chief executive, said during the Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town.

The wildlife of Nebamun's mortuary chapel

Following on from my post about my last visit to see the Nebamun panels, my sincere thanks to John Wyatt for a recent guided tour of the new Nebamun galleries at the British Museum. It was a fascinating morning. John is a professional ornithologist who has specialized in the bird life and other wildlife of Africa, and has become fascinated in the depictions of birds in Pharaonic Egypt tombs, chapels and temples. He lectures extensively and is writing his first book on the subject, using photographs which he has taken all over Egypt, together with detailed illustrations by professional artist Jackie Garner.

This is something of an exclusive, because John's work has not yet been published. I am very grateful to him for his permission to publish a summary of some of his hard work here.

In this post I've posted my photographs of the scene which show Nebamun hunting in the marshes (the scenes shown at the top of this post). Each of the birds and animals shown in this particular scene have been examined by John and his ideas about their identification are noted in the following paragraphs.

As usual, if you want to see a more detailed version of the photograph just click on it to see the bigger image.

The feline is a marvellous creation, and although he is balanced on a papyrus stem there seems nothing precarious about his position. If you visit in person look out for his eye, which is gilded. John says that this is certainly the wild cat Felis sylvestris and not the swamp cat Felis chaus, but the subspecies is still in doubt and could be tristrami rather than libyca on the basis of the colouring and markings. His jaw is clamped firmly down on one bird as his claws imprison two others.

The bird in his mouth is almost certainly a Pintail Duck, Anas acuta, with its thin neck, the colour of its bill and the colouring of its head.

The one in his front claws is often identified as a shrike, as are other similar examples in the composition, but John Wyatt believes that they are actually doves. The two possibilities are Laughing Dove, Streptopelia senegalensis or Collared Dove, Streptopelia decaocto. On the basis of the shade of the underwing he thinks that the latter is probably the most likely candidate. There are similar examples at Amarna and Beni Hasan.

The identification of the one in the rear paws is rather more difficult. At first glance it looks, to my British eyes, like an oversized wagtail and others have suggested that it might be either a wagtail or a shrike. He believes, however, that it is indeed a wagtail but not the British Pied Wagtail because this does not migrate. Instead he suggests that it is far more likely to represent the African Pied Wagtail, Motacilla aguimp, which has similar markings to the British variety but is larger and can still be found in southern Egypt. I particularly like the way in which its legs and claws are shown and the way in which the cat's tail curves over it as the claws hold it in place, pinning its wings.


Beneath the cat and to the left, standing on the end of the skiff, is a beautifully rendered goose. John says that it is the Egyptian Goose, Alopochen aegyptiacus. There have been a number of discussions about its position on the front of the skiff and the role that this might imply - for example a pet or a decoy. The goose is lovely in its own right, its plummage picked out with detailed brush strokes and fine colouring.


In his hands Nebamun is holding three birds who attempt to fly free from his grasp. John believes that these are the Cattle Egret, (Bubulcus ibis), which are so often seen in Egypt. He makes this case on the basis of beaks and tails. They are lovely paintings but are located in part of the scene which has been damaged, and from which much of the original colour has been lost. I found the way in which Nebamun grasps the birds to be rather reminiscent of the way in which New Kingdom pharaohs are shown holding groups of prisoners aloft by their hair. Apologies that this photograph is so blurred. I need to re-take it.


The scene immediately in front of Nebamun's outstretched arm clearly shows four birds, with a fifth less easy to make out. The birds on the far left are standing over nests with eggs in them which, as John pointed out, could scarcely survive on the papyrus blooms but are a lovely feature of the composition.

From right to left John believes that we are looking at the redder Egyptian race of the Little Bittern (Ixobrychus minutus), a female African Finfoot (Podica senegalensis), a female Pintail Duck (Anas acuta) and a Little Egret (Egretta garzetta). John says that he would have been somewhat reticent about the identification of the African Finfoot, an elusive nocturnal bird which inhabits very large rivers, except that he found another representation in the Tomb of the Nobles in Aswan last year.

More re Finnish work in the Valley of the Kings

Science Daily

If you missed the University of Helsinki article at the end of January you will find it repeated at the above Science Daily page. The team is directed by Jaana Toivari-Viitala, Docent of Egyptology at the University of Helsinki.

Her research group wants to find out why the hut village was built on the slope of a mountain, halfway between the construction site and Deir-el-Medina. They are also interested in how many workers lived in the village at a time, when they lived there, and what their role was in the construction work.

“Comparing the names found in the village and in Deir-el-Medina provides useful information. Judging from the construction methods, settlement in the village can be divided into two separate periods: the initial settlement and a later one.”

For the time being, much is up to speculation, but Toivari-Viitala believes that the coming four field seasons, three months each, will see results.

“The working conditions are not nearly as difficult as I thought they would be. The cool winds in the mountains nicely alleviate the heat.”

The research group working on the “Workmen’s huts in the Theban mountains” project is planning to return to the Valley of the Kings in October.

See the above page for the full story.

Egyptian National Action Program To Combat Desertification

United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification

I stumbled across this whilst looking for something else and thought that it might be of interest to some visitors.

Egyptian National Action Program To Combat Desertification June, 2005

Here's an extract from the introduction, for those who are interested:

Egypt has a total area of about one million km2, under arid and hyperarid climatic
conditions, of which only a small portion (3% of total area) is agriculturally productive. The country is endowed with four main agro-ecological zones having specific attributes of resource base, climatic features, terrain and geomorphic characteristics, land use patterns and socio-economic implications. Therefore, it is found appropriate to formulate a programmes comprised of subcomponents geared to address the specific attributes in each of the agroecological zones distinguished as follow:

1. The Nile Valley: encompassing the fertile alluvial land of Middle and Upper Egypt, the Nile Delta region and the reclaimed desert areas in the fringes of the Nile Valley.
2. North Coastal zone: including the coastal area stretching east ward from North-Western coast to North coastal area of Sinai.
3. The Inland Sinai and the Eastern Desert with their elevated southern areas.
4. The Western Desert: encompassing oases and southern remote areas, including East Uweinat, Tushka and Darb El-Arbian areas.

Since significant variations in the environmental characteristics are apparent in each agroecological zone, the active factors and processes of desertification and their impacts are necessarily variable. Accordingly, it is not appropriate to formulate a unified programme to combat desertification in such zone. To address and focus on the varied natural attributes, priorities of actions and specific processes of desertification, sub-components of the action programme are figured out to facilitate investigation and identification of appropriate techniques, suitable -indicators, monitoring, capacity building, awareness needs, participating stakeholders, required legislations, economic tools, incentives, finance, institutional setup, responsible parties, ongoing and future projects for combating desertification as well as social implication, geared and tailored for the needs of each agro-ecological zone to ensure the achievement of the Convention objectives.

Egypt ratified the United Nation Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), in
1995 and ratified in 1995, with the active participation of Egypt, gave emphasis for combating the major threats to sustainability of dry lands. This convention defined desertification and also combating desertification as activities that aimed at:

a) Prevention and / or reduction of land degradation.
b) Rehabilitation of partly-degraded lands.
c) Reclamation of desertified land .

In this regard, the first commitment of the countries that ratified the UNCCD is the
preparation of National Action Programmes (NAP) to combat desertification, which identify the factors contributing to desertification and prescribes environmentally practical and sound measures to combat desertification.

To ensure the success and achievement of the NAP of Egypt, a National Coordination
Committee, (NCC) was formulated according to the Ministerial Decree No.2356 for the year 2001 to substitute the former steering committee previously formed. This committee is headed by the Deputy prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture and Land Reclamation as high level decision maker, with active representatives of concerned ministries including:

Agriculture and Land Reclamation, Water Resources and Irrigation, Foreign Affairs, Local Development, Higher Education and Scientific Research, Environmental Affairs, Planning and International Cooperation , in addition to representatives of parliament, NGO`s as well as a group of professional experts in the concerned fields. This newly formulated committee 2 was entrusted with ; (a) formulation of general policies in accordance with commitments of Egypt towards the implementation of the UNCCD, (b) endorsement of local, regional and international agreements and projects and, (c) coordination among ministries, authorities, NGO`s and stakeholders concerned with combating desertification .

A Scientific Committee (SC) was also established to be affiliated to the National Coordinating Committee for Combating Desertification (NCCCD). The Scientific committee is headed by the president of the Desert Research Center who is the National Focal Point for UNCCD. The other members of the Scientific Committee are high level experts from various institutions and recognized expertise in the fields of combating desertification. The Scientific Committee is entrusted with the following :

(a) Survey, compile and analyse previous and ongoing activities to combat desertification.
(b) Assessment and monitoring of desertification processes.
(c) Coordination of activities with the various stakeholders.
(d) Follow up the implementation of commitments of Egypt towards the UNCCD agreement.
(e) Follow up the implementation of the NAP and assessment of the impacts of its activities.

Egypt is endowed with a multitude of academic and research institutions, as well as central and local governmental institutions and authorities . It would be very wise to benefit from the previous studies, plans, data, research outcomes and reports. Each of the agro-ecological zones has had its share of previous studies and investigations.

Processing and compiling these previous activities would be very useful as a database. The required basic and thematic maps, aerial photographs, satellite imageries, GIS facilities and interpretation expertise in various institutions, ministries and research centers are available.

Basic tools for planning could be acquired or jointly used from the various sources and
institutions provided proper collaboration plans and suitable incentives are assigned . Ample consideration will be given to the documentation and compilation of indigenous knowledge and experience which are a wealth in itself and of great value for appropriate planning of NAP’s activities.

Three national reports were submitted to UNCCD during the period 2000 - 2004 . These reports were mainly concerned with the general information overviews on desertification factors and processes together with the previous and ongoing activities, institutional aspects, basic features of the identified agro-ecological zones with particular emphasis on climate, physiography, natural and human resources and specific desertification aspects of each agroecological zone. Moreover, the basic features of the NAP were preformed.

See the above page for the rest of the introduction and the complete document (128 pages).

Daily Photo by Bob Partridge (Ancient Egypt Magazine)

Wadi es-Sebua
Click image to see a bigger version of the image

With many thanks to Bob Partridge, Editor of Ancient Egypt Magazine.
Copyright Bob Partridge

Egyptian mastaba had its own afterlife

LA Times (Thomas H Maugh II)

In Egypt, apparently even pyramids can be recycled.

Archaeologists from the country's Supreme Council of Antiquities said this week that they had discovered a cache of 30 mummies dating from the country's 26th Dynasty in a tomb constructed during the 6th Dynasty nearly 2,000 years earlier.

The 26th Dynasty was the last period of rule by Egyptian pharaohs before the country was conquered by the Persians and other foreigners, a time when it was becoming more difficult for rulers to muster the manpower necessary for more grandiose burial sites.

The 6th Dynasty pyramid is actually a mastaba tomb -- a simpler precursor to a pyramid -- of a man named Sennedjem. It is located in Saqqara, about 12 miles south of Cairo, the final resting place of most of the Egyptian rulers who lived in the Old Kingdom capital of Memphis.

The new cache was discovered at the end of a 36-foot shaft drilled into the side of the tomb during the 26th Dynasty. Zahi Hawass, head of the council and director of the expedition, said the team had found 24 mummies in niches along the walls of the chamber and on shelves along one wall. Some of the mummies were of children and one was of a dog. All were badly decomposed, indicating that they had not been adequately prepared for burial.

Zahi Hawass website

With photographs.

About a year ago, my team conducted a survey and began excavations in an area known as the Gisr El-Mudir at Saqqara. “Gisr El-Mudir” means “bridge of the director” – the name refers to the fact that, many years ago, an expedition director used to pitch his tent nearby.

There is a large, Early Dynastic stone enclosure under the desert in this area, and it is very exciting to learn that there has also been an undiscovered Old Kingdom cemetery lying below the sand all these years, waiting to be discovered. A few months ago, we announced the discovery of two new tombs. One belonged to a man named Iya-maat, who directed missions sent to retrieve materials for the construction of the pyramid of Unas (ca. 2353-2323 BC). The other belonged to a 5th Dynasty woman named Thinh, whose title was “chief of all the singers.” We also recently discovered the 6th Dynasty mud-brick mastaba tomb of a man named Sennedjem. Behind the chapel of this tomb, which contains an inscribed false door, a shaft about 11 meters deep and 2.75 meters square was dug into the rock of the plateau. This shaft ends in a sizeable burial chamber. To the east, inside the chapel itself, another shaft was dug into the same burial chamber during the 26th, or Saite, Dynasty (ca. 2353-2323 BC).

To reach the burial chamber, you have to either climb down a narrow ladder, or ride a simple rope lift. Either way, it is dangerous, and quite thrilling!

See the above pages for more.

Book Review: Islamic Civilisation - History and Treasures

Al Ahram Weekly (Gamal Nkrumah)

Islamic Civilisation: History and Treasures
Francesca Romana Romani

The author makes clear that Arabia was not always so iconoclastic. Arab culture was originally just as decadent as its polytheistic neighbours, even in its austere parched desert surroundings. Yet, traces of the pre-Islamic decadence remained, albeit subdued, and were transferred in hidden forms to other cultures that embraced Islam such as the Mesopotamian, Persian, Turkish and Indian versions of Islam.

"Bedouin society is unpolished and even wild, and its only art is constituted by the words of the poet," Romani postulates. "Muruwwa (manliness, courage and loyalty) formed the basis of the ethical code of the desert. It was the sense of honour which replaced faith and encapsulated ideals."

And, to distinguish the true Arab Islam from its simulacrums in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, Anatolia, Andalusia, Persia and beyond, she pinpoints what differentiates the forbidding seat of passion of Arabian culture from its more flamboyant sister cultures that thrived in more bounteous surroundings. "The desert was, and still is, the reign of the nomad."

The true flowering of Islamic art took place elsewhere, first on the fringes of Arabia and then towards the periphery of the then known world. "The Arabian Peninsula was inhabited by nomadic and sedentary tribes that had a close symbiotic relationship" with the barren nature of the region, the author extrapolates.

See the above page for the full story.

Exhibition quiz: Unearthing the Truth

Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum have put a a quiz online for website visitors to test whether they can spot the fake and the genuine out of 9 items from the exhibition Unearthing the Truth: Egypt's Pagan and Coptic Sculpture. Thanks to Lin Wang for pointing me at this.

Exhibition: Tutankhamun now in Atlanta

myrtlebeachonline (Joan Leotta)

David Silverman, an Egyptologist from the University of Pennsylvania and one of the curators of the King Tut exhibit's national tour, said, "What we can learn from [the tombs] is that they practiced hygiene, used makeup for protection as well as enhancement, and ate a diet high in grains and vegetables."

The poorer classes ate little meat and more grains and vegetables. The Bible tells us that leeks (with folic acid, vitamin C and more) were a staple in ancient Egypt. Meat seems to have been a funeral food.

"There is a scene in a museum in Philadelphia that shows a butcher preparing a leg of beef for a funeral," he said.

Today, many physicians endorse such a diet - low in meat, high in grains and vegetables. Diets such as the Mediterranean diet are widely recommended as a way to remain healthy into a long life.

But didn't the Egyptians die young? Tut's death at 19 is shrouded in mystery, but a high infant mortality rate and a life span of 40 years was normal in ancient Egypt.

It was not their diet that did them in, however. The culprits were diseases found in the water, and the effects of ever-present sand that eroded their teeth and brought about a host of other problems, including pneumonia. Ramses II died suffering from abscesses in his teeth.

See the above page for more.

Conference: The Duke Symposium on Archaeology, Politics, and the Media

Biblioblogs

The Duke Symposium on Archaeology, Politics, and the Media
Duke University
April 23-24, 2009

The Duke Symposium will explore the often-strained relations between archaeologists and the media and the concomitant impact on local communities in the United States and the Middle East. Specifically, the conference will investigate the methods and values of media representation and those of archaeological investigation, as well as the effects of archaeological excavation and media coverage on the scholarly world, local inhabitants, and American faith communities. Ultimately, the symposium intends to outline better methods of communication between archaeologists, media representatives, and non-specialist audiences.

Participants include experts in all areas of Near Eastern archaeology, cultural property, and the media.

See the above page for more.

Travelogue: Western Desert, March 2008 - Day 3

I hadn't had the chance to visit Luxor since 2002, so waking up to see Luxor Temple an the pale pink and blue hills on the other side of the Nile was a seriously good moment.

At breakfast I met the other tour members - Harry, Rosemary, Kathryn, and Liz. Harry was a most welcome sight, bearing in his hand an envelope containing the second GPS. It is a rather battered entity, held together with sellotape, but I very much needed some of the co-ordinates from the poor little device to add to mine. Poor Harry was given the news that he was the only man on the tour after a last-minute cancellation. He looked stoic. After breakfast bottles of water were purchased for the trip down to Aswan via El Kab.

The departure from the Nile into the desert was due to take place just north of Abu Simbel from the Aswan road, so we still had a way to go before arriving in the general area. We weren’t due to pick up the four-wheel drives and our desert crew until Aswan, so we had a Traveline mini bus and a guide whom Harry knew from a previous tour for the trip to El Kab and the Nubia Museum. He approved of my name because it is short and easy to remember.

We passed through this checkpoint without delay and headed south towards El Kab. I sat next to Harry and it became very clear that although he has been nearly everywhere else in Egypt (and dozens of other places on the planet) he was absolutely dreading the prospect of camping. He hates bottled water when it isn’t cold, particularly hates water from gerrycans, dislikes tinned sardines and cooked fava beans and cannot imagine surviving without diet Pepsi. His own packing included a case full of sweets and snacks to soften the blow of desert travel, but I thought the most telling fact of all was that his wife had sent him to us with an emergency supply of valium! But he wanted to see the rock art of the Egyptian deserts, so there he was.

The visit to El Kab was a very good start. We first went up to visit the tombs carved into the rock. There is a good view from the tombs of the vast late mudbrick walls of the old city of El Kab, ancient Nekheb. Over the water one could almost see Hierakonpolis, ancient Nekhen.

El Kab is near the modern village of El Hilal on the east bank of the Nile, c.85k to the south of Luxor, 32km south of Esna and 120 km north of Aswan. It was in the third Nome of Upper Egypt, and comprises a number of sites over a large area. It was first excavated in the Nineteenth century by Quibell. A concession was granted to a Belgina team in 1937 and has been working there ever since.

The first clear records of occupation at El Kab date to the Epipalaeolithic – c.8500bp. The sites were discovered in 1967, and consist of eight temporary campsites. The economy was based on the exploitation of wild animals (auroch, Dorcas gazelle, wild sheep, soft shell tortoise, hippo, hartebeest, jackal and porcupine) and fishing (tilapia and catfish). It is thought that the groups who occupied the area on a temporary but frequent basis used Nile-side locations during the winter and desert areas in the rainy summer periods. The toolkit was based on microlithic chipped tools and ground sandstone items. There are clear links with sites in other areas including the Eastern and Western Deserts, and the industry as a whole is known as the Elkabian.

The first traces of permanent settlement date to the Late Predynastic, although Hierakonpolis, the well known site opposite, was occupied on a permanent basis much earlier. From the Early Dynastic period there is evidence of a Second Dynasty cemetery found only a few years ago, and a Third Dynasty mastaba cemetery.

In the Pharaonic period El Kab was known as Nekheb, named for the protector deity. The vulture goddess was the counterpart of the cobra goddess Wadjet and together they represented dominion over Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt. Middle Kingdom tombs are located in the area but are not open to the public. There was a lot of activity in the Eighteenth Dynasty, when many of the rock-cut tombs that we saw were constructed. We visited four tombs: Paheri (Mayor of Nekheb and grandson of Ahmose Son of Ibana), Setau (a Priest of Ramesses III), Ahmose Son of Ibana (Captain of Sailors who fought in the siege against the Hyksos for which he was rewarded by the king, and the grandfather of Paheri) and Renni (Mayor of Nekheb and priest of Nekheb). The tomb of Renni is one of the only ones known from the reign of Amenhotep I, and is stylistically rather different from its neighbours. The best reference that I know of for the El Kab tombs are the El Kab pages on OsirisNet.

More photos of El Kab can be found on this blog at:

• Tomb of Paheri (1)
• Tomb of Paheri (2)
• Tomb of Renni (1)
  
• Tomb of Renni (2)
• Tomb of Setau
  
• Tomb of Ahmose, Son of Ibana
  

Two temples were constructed during the New Kingdom – one to the deity Nekhbet and a later one to Thoth (under the reign of Ramesses II). The main visible feature of the town of El Kab is the enclosing wall erected during the Late Period (dating to the 30th Dynasty, 747-332 BC). The walls are 12m thick. The site was then occupied continuously until the end of the Late Period. There is also a Coptic monastery in the vicinity.

The area of Vulture Rock (also known as Locality 64) is the focus of rock art which is both prolific and varied. The rock art on Vulture Rock at El Kab may have dated to the Predynastic periods as well as later times and it obviously remained important for 100s if not 1000s of years. The rock art came to light during the survey of 1979 to 1983. 500 figures are represented in 11 areas and there are 100s of hieroglyphs. Dirk Huyge published an article in 2002 which analyzed 350 of the rock drawings. He detects 7 phases based on superimposition, patination, iconography and archaeo-zoology. He believes that the earliest of the rock art images date to Naqada I c.3800BC and that 53% of the images date to Naqada II to the Early Dynastic, c.3600 – 2700BC. He divides these up into five main horizons defined by key themes.

More photos from Vulture Rock. Sadly I don't have many photographs because I was busy at the time that everyone was visiting the site

• Vulture Rock (1)
  
• Vulture Rock (2)
  

On arrival in Aswan we piled out of the minibus and went directly to the Nubia Museum. The museum is very fine, modern and well thought out, with an outdoor collection in attractive gardens. Inside most of the collection is on display in the basement, but the ground floor galleries have some excellent displays dedicated to the UNESCO rescue missions of Nubian archaeology which followed the decision to build the Aswan High Dam. There is an excellent collection of black and white photographs which show well known sites like Abu Simbel and Wadi Es Sebua in their original locations together with more unusual images including excavation work on A-Group and C-Group burials. The photographs give a very vivid idea of just how much archaeology was present in the area now submerged under Lake Nasser. There is also a new display of rock engravings which were removed from Nubia prior to the flooding. There are some very nice examples.

The basement display is organized chronologically and takes in everything from earliest prehistory to reconstructed Nubian village homes and gardens. Some of the artefacts are first rate and all are accompanied by labelling which is far superior to that in most Egyptian museums.

Unfortunately for me on our arrival at the Hotel Basma I dropped my camera, breaking the lens. Matters could have been worse – the camera body itself, an expensive piece of kit, was in once piece and was still working perfectly. The lens was gaping open part way along its length, and looked very sorry for itself. Worse indignities were to follow.

At the Basma Hotel we were greeted with kakade.

We tried to visit the Old Cataract Hotel, which was built in 1889 and is very much of a landmark. The plan was to take drinks on the lower terrace, and to visit the bookshop in the New Cataract and find out when the bank was open. We were refused access at the New Cataract entrance because we weren’t resident and were turned away at the Old Cataract entrance because they had reached their daily quota of visitors. I now wonder whether it wasn’t half closed for refurbishment, because there had been some discussion on the subject when I stayed there in March 2007.

After a brief discussion, we decided to return to our own hotel for a bite to eat, and wound up on the sunny outside terrace restaurant with a splendid view over the First Cataract, with feluccas and little motor boats pottering about on the river, the island of Elephantine close by, the mausoleum of the Aga Khan on the pink scarp opposite, and the Old Cataract below us. So we didn’t actually feel terribly short-changed by our failure to break into the grounds of the Old Cataract (although the thought of the bookshop existing without my custom did sting somewhat).

The most conspicuous aspect of the Nile’s First Cataract, in which splendid bird life can be seen, are the granite boulders which proved a hazard to navigation throughout historic times, and into which hieroglyphic inscriptions have been inscribed. Since the creation of the Aswan dams the First Cataract has been un-navigable by anything other than small vessels. The area was occupied from the Old Kingdom onwards. The Pharaonic settlement at Aswan, on the frontiers of Egypt and Nubia, was of considerable strategic importance throughout the Pharaonic history of Egypt, and there are some super sites in the area, including the Pharaonic tombs of the nobles, visible from all over Aswan on the west bank at Qubbat al-Hawa under the small tomb of Sidi Ali Bin al-Hawa, for which the hill is named.

After photographs had been taken and drinks had been ordered, we reviewed the options offered by the Basma’s snack menu in order to both deal with short term hunger (or full-on impending starvation in the case of Harry) but leave room for dinner later. In the event, some of the food that arrived was not quite as anticipated The omelettes selected by Rosemary and Liz turned out to be just the sort of thing we had all expected – nicely cooked gap-fillers. Kathryn’s Nicoise salad, however, was distinctly vast and the Croque Monsiers ordered by Harry, Emma and myself were simply enormous – stuffed with cheese and ham and apparently deep-fried in batter, accompanied by French fries. It was impossible to do justice to the Croque Monsieurs, although wise Emma took some of hers back to her room in a serviette. A full group dinner later was rejected.

Kathryn and Emma managed to find time for a dip in the large blue pool which was officially closed for the evening but which they gained permission to use anyway.

I found the shopping area where I bought postcards and stamps, and went back to my room, and sat on its small balcony to write them and review the plans for the following day. Answering a phone call to my room I found Maged on the other end of the line and was simply overjoyed, having travelled with him before, to find that Pan Arab had allocated him to us for the remainder of our journey. Much happiness. He had said to be ready for 7.30 but not to be surprised if he and the drivers didn’t turn up much later because of bureaucratic problems. No bother. Travel in Egypt is all about bureaucratic problems.

I don’t know about Emma, but I woke up feeling as though I had been in Egypt for weeks – Cairo, Luxor, el Kab and Aswan all in the space of a couple of days.

Day 1 and Day 2

Daily Photo by Bob Partridge (Ancient Egypt Magazine)

. . .

Wadi es-Sebua, looking out towards Lake Nasser
Click image to see a bigger version of the image

With many thanks to Bob Partridge, Editor of Ancient Egypt Magazine.
Copyright Bob Partridge

. . .
.

In Search of the Truth about KV64

http://dr.hawass.com/

Zahi Hawass has a new website. There are various articles which may be of interest, both recent and archival, but the above is probably one of the most interesting. Here's an extract:

My excavations have also allowed us to pinpoint the location of buried electrical wires in the central valley, in the same area where Reeves’s radar survey showed “Feature 5.” According to the experts from the Dash Foundation, these electrical wires could have produced the anomaly that Reeves has interpreted as a possible KV64. What we have learned from comparing the results of our work with Reeves’s interpretation of his 2000 radar data is that radar can only hint at what lies below the ground. In order to discover the truth, we must use archaeological methods to investigate each site layer by layer. The recent radar survey that my team and the Dash Foundation have conducted used a 200 MHz radar. Although our preliminary results only illuminate the upper levels of the valley, with a radar of this strength, we can refine our results digitally and see much deeper than Reeves’s 2000 study was able to. Perhaps we will soon spot the real KV64 deep below the paths where tourists walk today. Only archaeology will tell.

See the above page for more. The website has been designed so that all articles must be navigated to from the above URL. You cannot navigate directly to the story. At the time of writing the story is very prominent on the above page. In the future you will probably need to find it in the archives.

Egypt's first history book

Al Ahram Weekly (Jill Kamil)

With photograph and illustration

The historical importance of the Palermo Stone has long been overshadowed by the famous Rosetta Stone, but Jill Kamil says it is now being reconsidered as a legitimate historical record of ancient Egypt

The so-called Palermo Stone is the largest and best preserved fragment of a rectangular slab of basalt known as the Royal Annals of ancient Egypt's Old Kingdom. Its origin is unknown, but it may have come from a temple or another important building.

The stone has been in Palermo in Sicily -- hence its name -- since 1866, and is now in the Museo Archaeologico. Other fragments of the same slab appeared on the market between 1895 and 1963, and are now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Petrie Museum at University College London.

The extract from the Royal Annals, the "King List" of predynastic rulers, is in the upper register of the Palermo Stone. It is followed by the annuals of the kingdom of Egypt from its inception up to the kings of the Fifth Dynasty. Below each name, the years are named by important events, most of a ritual nature, and the height of the Nile inundation is noted at the bottom.

Some 13 major studies have been undertaken on the fragments of the stone, and ever since the first was published by Heinrich Schöfer in 1902 scholars have been divided as to how to interpret the implications of the text. Some have insisted that the predynastic kings listed on the stone indeed existed, although no further evidence had yet come to light. Others held the view that their inclusion on a King List was only of ideological value -- which is to say, in order to show that before the unification of the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt by Narmer/Menes there was chaos. Disorder before order. Strange to say, outside of scholarly circles, the stone was not widely known. Or maybe not so strange in view of the fact that the stone was in fragments and of no artistic value.

Now, however, we know the truth at last, because archaeologists have identified as many as 15 predynastic kings listed on the Palermo Stone. They were real. They existed. And the Palermo Stone, with its apparently cryptic series of notations, can be given its historical worth.

The stone reveals that the earliest kings, before the beginning of the historic period, travelled widely and with some regularity. It also records that, in the Early Dynastic periods, which is to say between 2890 and 2686 BC, copper smelting was already taking place and statues in this medium were being fashioned. Also that military campaigns carried out in Nubia resulted in the capture of 7,000 slaves and 200,000 head of cattle. There were quarrying expeditions to the turquoise mines of Sinai; and 80,000 measures of myrrh, 6,000 units of electrum, 2,900 units of wood, and 23,020 measures of unguent were imported from Punt on the coast of modern Somalia. This was no primitive struggling community on the threshold of civilisation. This was an already established society that was forging its own character and establishing an identity.

When Toby Wilkinson of the University of Cambridge, author of Early Dynastic Egypt, presented a paper on the Palermo Stone at the International Egyptology Conference held in London in December 2000, he resuscitated interest in the stone. In fact, it is astonishing that in this day and age of computer technology, he was the first scholar to bring together and examine all seven fragments of the stone as a whole. He cited early arguments for and against the significance of the text, and concluded that it was carved for display purposes (somewhat like the Rosetta Stone) to register an ancestor cult, and to chart an unbroken line of succession up to the reign of the Fifth-Dynasty king Sneferu, which came at a great peak of prosperity; a period when great monuments were built and when no fewer than 40 ships brought wood from an unknown region outside the country.

See the above page for the full story.

Mummfication Museum lecture -Tuthmosis III funerary temple

Luxor News Blog (Jane Akshar)

Thanks to Jane for publishing her notes from the most recent Mummification Museum lecture on her blog.

Mummfication Museum lecture -Tuthmosis III funerary temple
Egyptian Spanish Funerary Temple Tuthmosis III – Dr Miriam Seco Alvazez

The dig started in Sept 2008 for 6 weeks. It was originally excavated by Devesy 1888 and 1906 by Vigel. It is a terraced temple which is actually dug into the bedrock at the back (west). There are 2 parts one dedicated to Amun and the other dedicated to Hathor. The first court has never been excavated as it is under the road.

The team firstly looked at the storehouse built by Vigel at the west edge of the temple. It contained lots of fragments many with colour. They show nice decoration and Amarna damage. There are pictures of Tuthmosis as a young prince with a forelock of youth. Some is unfinished and was just painted and not sculptured. They are concentrating of epigraphic work of these blocks and preservation by putting them on blocks of wood to keep them away from the ground. Outside the store house they classified 4,000 fragments. They had to draw some in situ and then they removed then to allow for further excavation. . Colour fragments are in the store house but the others are stored on matting and sailcloth in the temple area. Excavation of the Hathor temple revealed the lines of the walls on the floor.

See all of Jane's notes on the above page.

Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead Exhibit at Royal Ontario Museum

Suite101 (Stan Parchin)

The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead" at the Royal Ontario Museum displays its recently conserved religious scroll and some 130 related artifacts usually in storage.

This third installment of the ROM's Out of the Vaults series, which highlights rarely seen objects from its collections for a limited period of time, is part of the museum's Egypt Month festivities and on view in the third-floor Centre Block from February 28 to May 10, 2009. The exhibition includes funerary masks and portraits, protective amulets, a stone coffin lid's head, a complete sarcophagus, a Roman Period child's mummy and shawabtis or carved statuettes assigned to perform the daily work of the deceased in the afterlife.

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

Roman baths at Karnak

Luxor News Blog (Jane Akshar)

Jane has posted the latest photograph of the recently discovered Roman baths in the northwest corner of the Karnak temple complex. See the above page for the photo.

Found in Iraq: 'King Tut'

Earth Times

The following is currently under discussion on EEF's email forum. Thanks to Rhio Barnhart for the links. There are photos on the AK News site, which look very dubious.

A Kurdish archaeological expedition announced on Thursday that it had found a small statue of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen in northern Iraq, a Kurdish news agency reported. Hassan Ahmed, the director of the local antiquities authority, told the Kurdish news agency Akanews that archaeologists had found a 12-centimeter statue of the ancient Egyptian king in the valley of Dahuk, 470 kilometres north of Baghdad, near a site that locals have long called Pharaoh's Castle.

He said archaeologists from the Dahuk Antiquities Authority believe the statue dates from the mid-14th Century BC.

Ahmed said the statue of Tutankhamen showed "the face of the ancient civilization of Kurdistan and cast light on the ancient relations between pharaonic Egypt and the state of Mitanni."

See the above page for more.

AuthorMapper - Egypt

AuthorMapper, Egypt

Neat online application which searches the Springer website for articles which are available for download, sorted by geographical area. The above link produces results for a search on Egypt. Here's the site's introduction:

AuthorMapper, an online tool for visualizing scientific research, enables document discovery based on author locations and geographic maps. Integrating content and mapping technology, AuthorMapper provides an easy-to-use, dynamic interface that allows you to:

* Explore patterns in scientific research
* Identify new and historic literature trends
* Discover wider relationships
* Locate other experts in your field

Begin a search by entering keywords in the search box, or browse by subject collections. Advanced search features offer additional refinement options, including a filter for displaying open access articles. Search results are complemented by graphs, timelines, and keyword tag clouds that visually summarize the data and can also be selected to further refine your search terms.

AuthorMapper searches the Springer Journals collection and offers access to nearly one hundred fifty years’ of articles from more than 1,900 journals available on SpringerLink. Comprehensive coverage includes both current and archival content in all major subject areas including life science, medicine, engineering, mathematics, computer science, business, and law, contributed by the world’s best academics, including many Nobel Prize winners. AuthorMapper is a powerful knowledge discovery tool that provides unique insights into scientific literature.

Journal of Near Eastern Studies Volume 68, Number 1

Thanks Kat

The Journal of Near Eastern Studies Volume 68, Number 1 (January 2009) is now available at
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/jnes/68/1

1 relevant article:

On the Identification of the Ships of kzd/ry in the Erased Customs Account from Elephantine Oren Tal Journal of Near Eastern Studies January 2009, Vol. 68, No. 1: 1-8.

Book reviews:

Ulrich Hartung, Umm El‐Qaab II: Importkeramik aus dem Friedhof U in Abydos (Umm el‐Qaab) und die Beziehungen Ägyptens zu Vorderasien im 4. Jahrtausend vor Chr Bruce Williams Journal of Near Eastern Studies January 2009, Vol. 68, No. 1: 56-59.

Peter Der Manuelian, Slab Stelae of the Giza Necropolis Hratch Papazian Journal of Near Eastern Studies January 2009, Vol. 68, No. 1: 59-60.

Wadi es-Sebua, looking out towards Lake Nasser
Click image to see a bigger version of the image


With many thanks to Bob Partridge, Editor of Ancient Egypt Magazine.
Copyright Bob Partridge

Happy Valentine's Day!

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More re Saqqara mummy discovery

World Bulletin

The identity of the main mummy found in the tomb was not known, but Hawass said he would have been wealthy. The lid of his sarcophagus was cracked, but Hawass said it had been sealed with mortar in antiquity, preserving the mummy.

"If a mummy is inside the limestone sarcophagus, it means this person is rich," he said.

Of the roughly 30 mummies found inside the burial chamber alongside the limestone sarcophagus and its mummy, Hawass said some would have been poor and some wealthy. They may have been relatives of the original owner.

Most of the additional mummies were found in niches in the walls of the burial room, about 11 metres (34 feet) below ground level, and they included four mummies buried with a dog. But the finds also included two anthropoid wood coffins with hieroglyphic inscriptions.

Hawass found a 26th dynasty mummy in one of the wood coffins when he opened it on Wednesday after brushing away loose sand. The other wood coffin was deemed too fragile, and would be opened later after conservation efforts.

The Associated Press

Inside the chamber, 22 mummies lay covered only by sand in four niches dug into the chamber's walls. Most were badly decomposed, showing only skulls and parts of skeletons, with decayed mummy wrappings. The sarcophagi were placed throughout the room.

A dog's mummy — possibly of a pet — was also found along with mummies of children, prompting speculation the chamber holds the remains of a large family, with the richer, more prominent members, buried in the sarcophagi.

Secret note reveals how Germany smuggled Queen Nefertiti bust from Egypt

Times Online (Roger Boyes)

German archaeologists cheated Egyptian customs officers in order to smuggle the 3,400-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti to Berlin, according to a secret document unearthed in archives.

The document is sure to stoke the row between German and Egypt over the removal of antiquities at the beginning of the 20th century.

The face of Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships; the head and shoulders of the beautiful wife of Sun King Akhenaten look set to launch a thousand angry petitions from curators in Cairo.

The document, discovered in the German Oriental Institute, shows that the archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt deliberately hid the true value of the Nefertiti bust when he submitted the inventory of his finds to the Egyptian authorities in 1913.

Written in 1924, the document is the account by the secretary of the German Oriental Company of a meeting he attended on January 20 1913 between Borchardt and a senior Egyptian offical.

The agreement was that Germany and Egypt would divide the spoils equally between them. But, says the witness, Borchardt "wanted to save the bust for us". So it was tightly wrapped up and placed deep in a box in a poorly lit chamber to fool the chief antiquities inspector, Gustave Lefebvre.

A photograph of the bust was deliberately unflattering. The specifications state that the bust was made of gypsum, which is almost worthless, although the queen's features were painted on limestone.

It was enough to get Nefertiti out of the country into Germany.

Spiegel Online

The Egyptian Museum in Berlin is concerned that it may face fresh demands from Egypt that it return the world-famous bust of Queen Nefertiti following the emergence of new information on how Germany got the priceless ancient artwork.

SPIEGEL has seen the contents of a document written in 1924 in which the secretary of the German Oriental Company (DOG) gave an account of a meeting on Jan. 20, 1913 between a senior Egyptian official and German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt, who found the bust during a dig in 1912.

The secretary had been present at the meeting which was called to divide up the spoils of the dig between Germany and Egypt on a 50-50 basis. Borchardt, the witness noted, "wanted to save the bust for us" and to that end presented a photograph that didn't show Nefertiti in her best light.

Spiegel Online

Egypt may renew its official demand for the return of the famous Nefertiti bust after a newly-surfaced document claims German archaeologists tried to trick Egyptian experts about its importance in 1913. A chief archaeologist in Cairo is leading the charge.

"This time I mean it very seriously," is how Egypt's chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, characterized his fresh demand for the bust of Queen Nefertiti, which German archaeologists brought home in 1913. He was reacting to SPIEGEL magazine piece that suggested the Germans had tricked Egyptian experts about the true nature of the now-legendary bust.

The Earth Times

German officials have rejected claims that the bust of the pharaonic queen Nefertiti, hailed as the world's most beautiful woman, was smuggled out of Egypt using a ruse nearly a century ago. "The claim that the division of treasures did not take place by the rules is untrue," said the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which has possession of the painted limestone carving.

Media reports claimed Wednesday that Nefertiti's obvious value was concealed during a 1913 meeting to legally apportion the treasures from a German-led archaeological excavation with half for each side.

The foundation denied the German archaeologist had deceived Gustave Lefebvre, Egypt's inspector of antiquities, who checked the finds at Amarna.

See the above pages for more.

Exhibition: Masterpieces of Ancient Jewelry: Exquisite Objects

Chicago Tribune (William Mullen)

When it came to dying, wealthy people living in the world's earliest civilizations saw no reason not to take their most precious possessions with them. They arranged to have their favorite silver and gold rings, necklaces, pins and pendants, many encrusted in precious gems, buried or entombed with their remains.

A small but dazzling exhibit, featuring priceless and breathtakingly beautiful objects recovered by archeologists from tomb excavations during the last century, opened Wednesday at the Field Museum. The temporary show, "Masterpieces of Ancient Jewelry: Exquisite Objects from the Cradle of Civilization," was organized by the National Jewelry Institute and will remain in Chicago through July 5.

It includes more than 150 pieces, many as shiny and crisply detailed as they were when new. They range in age from 1,000 to more than 7,000 years old, representing the cultures and customs of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Persia and the Islamic Middle East. The region in which these civilizations thrived is the birthplace of three religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The objects were fashioned in the very places and times when humans were developing the wheel, the written word, music, astronomy and medicine. To satisfy a developing taste for the beautiful and expensive adornments featured in the exhibit, early craftsmen invented and refined their own technologies.

See the above page for the full story.

Exhibition: Unearthing the Truth

Brooklyn Museum (Edna R. Russmann)

Thanks to Lin Wang for the above link.

Unearthing the Truth opens on Friday, February 13th. Now that this rather unusual exhibition is ready to go, I am glad to have this opportunity to talk about it a little. Most of the Late Antique Egyptian stone sculptures in the Brooklyn Museum were acquired between the late 1950’s and the early 1970’s. We now know that, along with the genuinely ancient pieces that came on the art market and were acquired by the Museum during these years, there were also several forgeries. A few of these are ancient carvings that were apparently badly damaged when they were discovered in modern times, and were recarved to make them more salable. On about eight other examples in the Museum’s collection, however, the carving appears to be entirely modern.

The ancient examples in this group of sculptures were made during the Late Antique Period in Egypt. I use the term “Late Antique” to describe the centuries that came between the gradual end of the ancient culture of Pharaonic Egypt and the Arab conquest of Egypt, because so many artistic remains of that time include pagan motifs, which were clearly intended for believers in the religions of the Greeks and Romans. These people had come to Egypt as officials and soldiers under the Greek-speaking dynasty of the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors who succeeded them. The Late Antique Period is often called the Coptic Period, after the prevalent form of Christianity in Egypt in ancient times, as it still is today. This religion did come very early to Egypt; for several centuries, however, it was limited primarily to Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, and to monasteries located in the desert or the countryside, together with the nearby villages from which the monks drew supplies and new recruits. Only gradually did Coptic Christianity become established in the cities, for whose wealthy citizens the Christian funerary carvings were made.

See the above page for the full story.

Qurna - The undesired tomb dwellers in egypt

Documentography

Thanks very much to Ingeborg Waanders for this link. It is accompanied by some stunning photographs of Qurna (click on the link at the bottom of the above page to scroll through them).

We are standing in the interconnecting tombs beneath Mohammed Ismail’s house when he mentions the mummies, as one knew he would. The story of how the Abd el-Rassoul brothers discovered the “cachette” (everyone uses the French word) of bandaged pharaohs and flogged them off, confounding the authorities, is the defining narrative of this romantic and renegade community. “They are clever, they not tell anybody they find,” says Mohammed admiringly. “Forty mummies, necklaces, gold.”Mohammed Ismail, a congenial gent in a grey gallibayah and white headdress, and his neighbours are the last of a unique breed. They live in a village called Qurna, just a donkey dash from the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Their houses are pharaonic-era tombs and they once traded in stolen antiquities and were experts in the manufacture of fake pharaonic treasures. Under cover of more legitimate touristic pursuits - the village receives a steady stream of Westerners visiting the 3,000-year-old Tombs of the Nobles, which are interspered among Qurna’s houses - some still cling to such practices. This year, after wishing them gone for a century or more, the Egyptian government finally decided to put an end to their anachronistic way of life by destroying their bizarre habitat and frogmarching them into the 21st century.

By the time you read this, almost the entire village of Qurna will have been razed to the ground and the villagers moved to an estate of brand-new bungalows three miles away on the edge of the Sahara Desert which has cost US$20 million. The houses they are leaving are strange, ramshackle affairs, sprouting from ancient tombs in agglomerations of mud-brick that barnacle the mountainside in shades of ochre and aquamarine. The ones they are going to are laid out in geometrical lines and have modern amenities - in particular, running water, a right denied the old village because piped water would have damaged the tombs.

See the above page for the full story.

Book Review: The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt

Bryn Mawr Classical Review

John Ray, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt. Wonders of the World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Reviewed by Marc Pierce, University of Texas

The Rosetta Stone, a stele with an inscription recording "the text of an agreement issued jointly by a king and a synod of ancient Egyptian clergy" (2), written in three different scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek, the scripts used for religion, daily purposes, and administration, respectively), was discovered by a French soldier in el-Rashid (also known as Rosetta) in the summer of 1799. After the British defeated the French in Egypt, the Stone was brought to the British Museum in 1802, where it has remained ever since. The Stone is perhaps the most famous object to be found in the British Museum, and is, according to the British Museum itself, the most popular item displayed there (2). One sign of its popularity is the wide range of Rosetta Stone paraphernalia available at the British Museum and elsewhere; a postcard of the Stone has been the best-selling item available in the museum shop for "as long as museum staff can remember" (2). While the contents of the Stone are perhaps not as exciting as one might wish from a literary point of view, it led to the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and as such, its importance to Egyptology (as well as to fields like historical linguistics) cannot be underestimated.

The book under consideration here, written by John Ray, currently the Sir Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge, pursues two different, albeit related, scholarly issues. On the one hand, it tells the story of the Rosetta Stone; on the other hand, it traces the growth and development of Egyptology as a scholarly pursuit, with a special emphasis on the decipherment of the hieroglyphs. The book contains nine thematic chapters, an introduction, and a translation of the text of the Stone, in addition to the usual extras (lists of suggested further readings and illustrations, and a detailed index, among others).

See the above page for the full review.

Exhibition: Egyptomania

Bolton News

For the town’s Museum, Aquarium and Archive is staging a new exhibition showing the influence of Egyptian art and culture on other civilisations.

The exhibition — called Egyptomania — shows a range of material from Roman sculpture and Victorian china and silverware to modern costume jewellery, tourist souvenirs and smoking paraphernalia, all influenced by Egypt.

See the above for more.

Latest issue of Ancient Egypt magazine now available

The February/March 2009 issue of “Ancient Egypt” magazine (published in the U.K.) is now available.

This issue is also available as an electronic version which can be found at the web site. This may be useful for anyone with a broadband connection who may have difficulty in getting hold of a paper copy of the magazine, or who might want to see a copy before subscribing.

Contents of this issue include;

News from Egypt and the World of Egyptology: ‘From the Editor’ and our regular ‘From our Egypt Correspondent’ brings you all the latest news and information on the world of Egyptology. Our Egypt Correspondent, Ayman Wahby Taher’s report includes news of a Queen’s pyramid discovered at Saqqara, a visit to the Agricultural museum in Cairo, and to the sites of Gebelein, Armant and Esna plus reports on excavations in the Valley of the Kings and at Karnak temple.

Three restored statues in the Luxor Museum: AE looks at the remarkable restoration and conservation work needed to be able to put three impressive statues of warrior pharaohs, Thutmose III, Sety I and Ramesses II, of the New Kingdom on display in the Luxor Museum.

Egypt’s Sunken Treasures: A brief report on the exhibition currently showing in Turin, Italy.

Woven History: the Coptic Museum’s Tapestries and Stonework: Jill Kamil visits the recently refurbished and enlarged Coptic Museum in Cairo and examines some of the artistic and cultural treasures to be found there.

Hadrian, Pharaoh of Egypt and the birth of Egypt’s Last God, Antinous: The exhibition in the British Museum last year did much to revive interest in the Emperor Hadrian and his important role in the history of the Roman Empire. Egypt played a major role in the life of Hadrian as Dylan Bickerstaffe explains.

Bonaparte et l’Egypte: A brief report on the exhibition currently showing at the institute du Monde Arabe in Paris.

The Egypt Exploration Society: In the first in a series of articles on the work of the Egypt Exploration Society, Dr. Patricia Spencer looks at some of the highlights from over one hundred and twenty-five years of work in Egypt.

PerMesut: in our regular feature for younger readers, Hilary Wilson looks at getting a good night’s sleep and beds in ancient Egypt.

Net Fishing: our regular look at Egyptology on the Web. This issue Victor Blunden, in a series on the history of Egypt, looks at the reign of Merenptah and the end of the Nineteenth Dynasty.

New Books featured

• Cleopatra and Egypt, by Sally-Ann Ashton.
• The Royal Mummies: Immortality in Ancient Egypt, by Francis Janot, introduction by Zahi Hawass.
• The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Edited by Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson.
• The Thrones, Chairs, Stools and Footstools from the Tomb of Tutankhamun, by M. Eaton-Krauss.
• Ancient Egyptian Gardens, by John Bellinger.
• Draw Like an Egyptian, by Claire Thorne.
• Egyptian Scarabs, by Richard H. Wilkinson.
• Napoleon in Egypt, by Paul Strathern.
• Cleopatra the Great, by Joann Fletcher.
  

Plus full Egyptology Society listings and UK lectures from February to April 2009 and listings of exhibitions and Egyptological events.

New(ish) Book: The Tree Shelter

Leuven University Press

A Holocene Prehistoric Sequence in the Egyptian Red Sea Area: The Tree Shelter

Edited by: Pierre M. Vermeersch

Multiple apologies for failing to post this before, because not only have I known about this book for months but I own a copy. Better late than never, I hope!

The prehistory of the Eastern Desert of Egypt is not well understood. A Holocene Prehistoric Sequence in the Egyptian Red Sea Area: The Tree Shelter is an important contribution to our knowledge of the Epi-Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Predynastic occupation of the area. It presents the results of an excavation of a small rock shelter near Quseir, Egypt, which is one of the rare stratified sites in the Eastern Egyptian desert. The stratigraphic sequence starts around 8000 bp and continues until about 5000 bp. The archaeological material attests clear connections with the Nile Valley and the Western Desert during the wet Holocene period. Topics covered in the book include the site’s lithics and ceramics, microwear analysis of the lithic artefacts, and the woody vegetation of the Neolithic period.

A table of contents and author information are also available on the above page.

Daily Photo by Bob Partridge (Ancient Egypt Magazine)

Thanks to everyone for bearing with me over the last couple of days. Normal service has been resumed!

Wadi es-Sebua, looking out towards Lake Nasser
Click image to see a bigger version of the image


With many thanks to Bob Partridge, Editor of Ancient Egypt Magazine.
Copyright Bob Partridge

Video: More re chamber of mummies found at Saqqara

BBC News

A video news report and footage from the chamber on the BBC News website.

Egypt Discovers 2,600 Year-old Mummy at Saqqara Burial Site

Google / Associated Press

Inside the chamber, 22 mummies lay covered only by sand in four niches dug into the chamber's walls. Most were badly decomposed, showing only skulls and parts of skeletons, with decayed mummy wrappings. The sarcophagi were placed throughout the room.

A dog's mummy — possibly of a pet — was also found along with mummies of children, prompting speculation the chamber holds the remains of a large family, with the richer, more prominent members, buried in the sarcophagi.

"Only the rich could afford to have sarcophagi made of limestone from Thebes," said Hawass. Thebes is an ancient city on the west bank of the Nile, hundreds of miles to the south in what is today's Luxor. "The owner of the dog could have asked that his faithful companion be mummified and accompany him into the afterlife."

Hawass said he believes the mummy in the limestone sarcophagus belonged to a nobleman, but so far the mummies' identities remain a mystery.

The storeroom was found next to an even older cemetery dating to the 4,300-year-old 6th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, a few hundred yards (meters) away from Saqqara's two most prominent pyramids — the famous Step Pyramid of King Djoser and that of Unas, the last king of the 5th Dynasty.

The find reflected the fact that the area was used for burials in both the Old Kingdom and 2,000 years later when these mummies were buried.

The lid of the limestone sarcophagus opened Wednesday had been broken in antiquity — likely by workers carrying it down into the chamber — and resealed with mortar, Hawass said, tracing the crack. Hawass added that he plans to scan the mummy soon, a complicated process that requires the mummy to be removed from the tomb. He believes there could be gold amulets inside meant to "help the deceased in the afterlife," a common practice in pharaonic times.

Also Wednesday, Hawass opened another sarcophagus in the storeroom, a wooden coffin with an inscription in hieroglyphics on the lid that exposed another mummy, but stopped short of opening a third, also a wooden one, because of its poor condition. All eight sarcophagi in the storeroom are believed to hold mummies, said Abdel Hakim Karar, chief archaeologist of Saqqara but so far only three were opened. The first sarcophagi was opened Monday.

Bloomberg

Egyptian archaeologists discovered a fully preserved mummy today in the ancient burial site of Saqqara 30 kilometers south of Cairo after opening a 2,600 year-old Pharaohnic limestone sarcophagus.

The mummy, dating from the 26th dynasty of ancient Egypt, is believed to contain gold amulets, Zahi Hawass, the country’s chief archaeologist, said in a statement today.

The find was made in a burial chamber 11 meters under the ground and contained another 30 mummies, wooden coffins and limestone sarcophagi, Hawass said. Among the remains was a mummified dog that was probably placed by its owner to accompany him to the afterlife, he said.

Egyptian archaeologists think only 30 percent of ancient monuments in Saqqara have been discovered, according to the statement.

The main step-pyramid at Saqqara of King Djoser is almost fully intact and is often visited by tourists along with the pyramids of Giza nearby.

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

Blog Update

Just a quick note to apologise for the fact that the blog was not updated today.

I've spent the best part of the day trying to save 300 local trees from developers in my immediate neighbourhood in London by standing under them to stop them being felled. Barratt Homes, the developer, haven't even secured final planning permission yet! I never saw myself as a wild-haired tree-saver, but there I was with my camera and my muddy trainers standing under 25 year old trees so that they couldn't be chopped down, very wild haired in the wind and the rain before returning home to update our action group's website. Just don't mention Barratt Homes to me if you see me in the next few weeks because I'm not quite sane on the subject.

I'm up at the university all day tomorrow and will probably be saving trees again on Friday. So I'll be updating the blog again on Friday night or Saturday morning.

Best wishes
Andie

More re newly discovered storeroom containing mummies

Sky News

Underneath the Meresamun story there's a 36-slide photograph viewer showing 7 photographs of Hawass with one of the mummies from the new discovery.

The other photographs concern other subjects.





Yahoo! News

A storeroom housing about two dozen ancient Egyptian mummies has been unearthed inside a 2,600-year-old tomb during the latest round of excavations at the vast necropolis of Saqqara south of Cairo, archaeologists said Monday.

The tomb was located at the bottom of a 36-foot deep shaft, said Egypt's top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass. Twenty-two mummies were found in niches along the tomb's walls, he said.

Eight sarcophagi were also found in the tomb. Archaeologists so far have opened only one of the sarcophagi — and found a mummy inside of it, said Hawass' assistant Abdel Hakim Karar. Mummies are believed to be inside the other seven, he said.

The "storeroom for mummies" dates back to 640 B.C. during the 26th Dynasty, which was Egypt's last independent kingdom before it was overthrown by a succession of foreign conquerors beginning with the Persians, Hawass said. But the tomb was discovered at an even older site in Saqqara that dates back to the 4,300-year-old 6th Dynasty, he said.

Most of the mummies are poorly preserved, and archeologists have yet to determine their identities or why so many were put in one room.

The name Badi N Huri was engraved into the opened sarcophagus, but the wooden coffin did not bear a title for the mummy.

"This one might have been an important figure, but I can't tell because there was no title," Karar said.

Karar also said it was unusual for mummies of this late period to be stored in rocky niches.

"Niches were known in the very early dynasties, so to find one for the 26th Dynasty is something rare," he said.

Irish Times

The mummies appear to vary in age. One dates from about 640 BC while the unopened sarcophagus, which is made of limestone and sealed with plaster, is probably much older.

"We think it is Old Kingdom, maybe Fifth Dynasty," archaeologist Abdel Hakim Karar said. The Fifth Dynasty ruled Egypt from about 2,494 BC to 2,345 BC.

It is unusual to find intact burials in well-known necropolises such as Saqqara, which served the nearby city of Memphis, because thieves scoured the area in ancient times.

The archaeologists expect to open it later this week and they may find amulets among the mummy wrappings.

The statement said another sarcophagus, made of wood, had not been opened since pharaohnic times but Mr Karar said ancient grave robbers probably reached it first.

Inside it , the archaeologists found the complete mummy of a man called Badi Enhery, according to the inscriptions on the sarcophagus, Mr Karar said.

BBC News

Egyptian archaeologists have found more than 20 mummies in a burial chamber dating back at least 2,600 years.

Eight wooden and stone sarcophagi were also discovered during the excavations at the Saqqara site, said Zahi Hawass, Egypt's chief archaeologist.

One limestone sarcophagus sealed with plaster is thought to be more than 4,000 years old.

Despite decades of excavations at the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo, new finds are frequently made.

Correspondents say it is rare for such an intact burial site to be unearthed.

The mummies, 22 of which were found in niches along a wall, were in a tomb dating to 640BC, Mr Hawass said.

See the above pages for more.


Also on Chicago Tribune

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Exhibition: Meresamun opens in Chicago this week

There have been lots of articles about the opening of at The Life of Meresamun at the Oriental Institute Museum in Chicago this week. The following are the best of the bunch from the last couple of days.

CBBC Newsround

There's an excellent 7-photograph slide show of the mummy from the exhibition at the above page.

Daily Mail (David Derbyshire)

With photographs

Meresamun is thought to have worked and lived in the temple of Thebes around 800BC. Her name, shown in an inscription on the casket, means ‘She Lives for Amun’ – an Egyptian god.

According to the inscription she was a priestess-musician who served as a ‘Singer in the Interior of the Temple of Amun’. The scans suggest she was about 5ft 5in and in her late 20s or early 30s when she died.

The cause of Meresamun’s death is unknown and all the more mysterious since she
appears to have been in good health.

The state of her bones shows she had a nutritious diet and an active lifestyle.

Although she bore no signs of dental decay, her teeth were worn down by the grit in Egyptian bread, which was made from stone-ground flour.

The Guardian, UK (Matthew Weaver)

Dr Michael Vannier, professor of radiology at the University of Chicago, who examined the scans, said they reveal "no convincing evidence of child bearing". He added: "There is no evidence of pre-mortem bony trauma."

In the first ever use of a 256-slice scanner on a mummy, the scans show that Meresamun's eyes were decorated with jewels or pottery. They also reveal that her teeth, though worn down, show no sign of decay. "Remarkably all the teeth are present. [There is] no evidence of tooth decay or periodontal disease (the principal cause of tooth loss in modern humans)," Vannier wrote.

Earlier attempts to carry out scans of Meresamun's caskets in 1989 and 1991 produced only blurry images. It was thought they showed what could have been a tumour on her throat that may have killed her. The new images suggest that swelling around the neck was resin used by the funeral embalmers.

Oriental Institute Museum exhibition page

February 10 - December 6, 2009
Members' Preview February 9, 2009

"The Life of Meresamun: A Temple Singer in Ancient Egypt," focuses on the life of a priestess-musician in Egypt in about the year 800 BC. The exhibit’s centerpiece is the coffin and mummy of Meresamun who probably lived in Thebes.

The exhibit illustrates the duties of a temple singer and explores what her life was like inside, as well as outside, the temple. Her temple duties are illustrated by a selection of objects she would have used including a sistrum, an ivory clapper, a harp, and cult vessels. Other objects document ritual activities that she would have participated in, such animal cults and the consultation of divine oracles.

The section of the exhibit on her life outside the temple includes an examination of the social and legal rights of women in ancient Egypt and what professions were open to them. Examples of dishes, jewelry and cosmetic vessels show what sort of objects would have been in her home. Religious rituals enacted within the home are illustrated by objects related to ancestor cults and others that sought to promote fertility.

In preparation for the exhibit, the mummy of Meresamun was examined by CT scans at the University of Chicago Hospital with the newest generation of Philips scanners. A video in the exhibit reports on the examination of mummy, her health, and offers a virtual unwrapping and 3-dimenations reconstructions of her face and body.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibit.

Photos added to the KV63 website

KV-63

More photos have been added to the KV63 website, showing some of the newest discoveries.

Well worth a look. Artefacts are shown, together with images of the team processing the different finds. There are no captions but many of the images speak for themselves.

Heritage Conservation Think Tank

Last year, in April 2008, I posted an article on Egypt Today (which is still available online) about the student-run Heritage Conservation Think Tank. A comment in response, from someone who signed himself "Egypt" and didn't supply any contact details, asked if there was some way of joining the group. Today there was a reply to that comment from a member of the HCTT. Here it is, for those who want to pursue the matter:

Dear Sir ,

I thank you for posting the Article on your blog and your interest in joining the HCTT, my name is Sherif Aboelhadeed , and I will be glad if you could join us on the orientation session that will be on friday the 13th of Feb. 2009 At al Sawi Culture Wheel, for more information , contact me at S.Aboelhadid@gmail.com

I thank you very much ,

Regards,

Sherif M.Aboelhadid

Best wishes to them...I have emailed Sherif to find out more about their operation, but if anyone attends the meeting or has any information about any of their activities I would be glad to know.

Blogs to watch

I don't report on these on a daily basis, although I have them all saved to Google Reader for my own entertainment. If there are any news items that I think may be of interest then I report them, but the daily updates are interesting in their own right and I thought that others might like to see them.

If you are using a similar services to see blogs via RSS news feeds then the following might be of interest to you. Not all are updated daily, or even frequently, but all are of interest. Obviously the dig diaries will end when the current season's excavations come to a close. They are listed in no particular order.

John Hopkins dig diary

Brooklyn Museum dig diary

AERA Giza dig diary

Kelsey dig diary (yet to be started)

KV-63 dig diary

Djehuty dig diary (Spanish)

Luxor News Blog by Jane Akshar

Egypt Then And Now by Ben Morales Correa

News from the Valley of the Kings by Kate Phizackerley

Cairo/Giza Daily Photo by Maryanne Stroud

Greek and Roman Studies - presently at the Dakhleh Oasis by Aislinn Lowry

The Eloquent Peasent by Margaret Maitland

Urban Art and Antiquities

Talking Pyramids by Vincent Brown

Desert Prince (the nature of the Western Desert) by Amir Zakhary

Digital Map of Egypt blog by Ragab A. Hafiez

The Egyptian Corner - This is not just Egyptology and at the moment is mainly focusing on offering comments about the current Israel/Palestine situation, which may not agree with everyone's opinions, but it also has a really good mini-phrasebook and some really good Egyptian recipes. For example:

• Warakat Lahma
  
• Egga
  
• Fatta
  
• Spinach with rice

Digital Map of Egypt blog (Ragab A. Hafiez)
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Travel: Camping in the Western Desert of Egypt

Thanks to Ben for posting my article about the task of preparing for a holiday which includes several days camping in the Western Desert of Egypt on his All About Egypt website. He has organized it into 5 sections, with photographs:

Desert travel
http://www.all-about-egypt.com/sahara-desert-travel.html

Planning for your trip
http://www.all-about-egypt.com/sahara-desert-trip-plan.html

What to bring
http://www.all-about-egypt.com/sahara-what-to-bring.html

Desert camping
http://www.all-about-egypt.com/sahara-desert-camping.html

Desert driving, sightseeing (and references)
http://www.all-about-egypt.com/sahara-desert-driving.html

Trivia: Bristol students build 25ft snow sphinx

This Is Bristol

For anyone not resident or a frequent visitor to the UK the following brief story may need a little context. We had snow in the UK on a scale that has not been experienced in over 18 years, so it has been something of a novelty (as well as a major nuisance from a logistical point of view, because we are simply not accustomed to dealing with high volume snowfall in the UK). The other point that may need clarifying is that Comic Relief is an annual charity event which raises money for projects both in the UK and overseas.

If you go down to the Bristol Downs today you are in for a big surprise – a 15ft high sphinx made out of snow.

The structure, which is about 25ft long, was built by a group of University of Bristol students to raise money for Comic Relief.

Ashley Coates, 19, of Leigh Woods, began building the snow sculpture on Friday with four pals.

Over the next three days they worked on it for 14 hours, and were expecting to finish it on Monday.

Ashley, formerly of Clifton College and currently on a gap year, said: "When the snow came down heavily we decided we had got to do something, so decided on a sphinx.
Click here!

"We put floodlights up so we could see it.

"I think it's been worth the effort, we've put out a red box and have started collecting money for Comic Relief.

"We got £20 in the first hour."

There's a photograph on the above page but it's not very good. If anyone is in touch with the Bristol University students who built the giant snow-sphinx please ask them to send me a better photo of it to post. It looks like great fun.

Daily Photo - Wadi es-Sebua

. . .

Wadi es-Sebua, looking out towards Lake Nasser
Click image to see a bigger version of the image


With many thanks to Bob Partridge, Editor of Ancient Egypt Magazine.
Copyright Bob Partridge

. . .

UPDATED Breaking News? 30 mummies found in Egypt

Associated Press

Egyptian archaeologists say they have discovered 30 mummies inside a 4,600-year-old tomb, in the latest round of excavations at the vast necropolis of Saqqara 12 miles (20 kilometers) south of Cairo.

Egypt's chief archeologist, Zahi Hawas, says the new tomb was found Sunday at the bottom of a 36 foot (11-meter) deep well. Eight of the mummies were in sarcophagi and the rest had been placed in niches in the wall.

Hawas has described the new site as a "storeroom for mummies."

His assistant Abdel Hakim Karar said Monday the use of such niches was rare during that period of time.

Excavations have been ongoing at Saqqara for 150 years, uncovering a vast cemetery dating mostly from the Old Kingdom, but including sites as recent as the Roman era.

NU.nl

Thanks very much to Huib Bennekom for sending me the above link. My Dutch is horribly rusty but here's a rough precis (feel free to correct me!). The original Dutch is shown below for those of you who would rather see the untampered narrative :-). There's a photograph on the above site of one mummy coffin.

Egyptian archaeologists have found thirty mummies and an unopened sarcophagus in a 4300 year old burial vault, the government announced on Monday. The burial chamber was found in the desert on the west side of an ancient pyramid in the Saqqara region. One mummy which dates 640 BC was found in a sarcophagus which is is probably much older and is thought to have been made during the Fifth Dynasty. Further analysis will take place later in the week. It is rare for archaeologists working in the Saqqara area to find mummies and tombs in tact, due to the work of grave robbers.

Egyptische archeologen hebben dertig mummies en een ongeopende sarcofaag gevonden in een 4300 jaar oude grafkelder. Dat heeft de overheid maandag bekendgemaakt.

De grafkamer is gevonden in de woestijn aan de westzijde van een eeuwenoude piramide in de Saqqara-regio. Een van de mummies dateert van 640 voor Christus, de sarcofaag is vermoedelijk veel ouder. Volgens de archeologen is de stenen doodskist ongeveer 2400 jaar voor Christus gemaakt ten tijde van de Vijfde Dynastie.

De wetenschappers maken de kist later deze week open. Ook de mummies, die in nissen in de grafkelder stonden, worden nader bekeken. De archeologen hopen amuletten te vinden die hen meer over de identiteit van de mummies kan vertellen.

Het komt niet vaak voor dat archeologen in de Saqqara-regio ongeschonden mummies en graven vinden. Grafrovers lieten de graven, vaak volgestouwd met kostbaarheden, veelal geplunderd en beschadigd achter.

Karnak Temple - Expanding on the cult of Osiris

El Ahram Weekly

With photographs.

Studying and restoring a part of Egypt's ancient history at Karnak Temples was the task of the Franco-Egyptian Research Centre of Karnak in 2008, Nevine El-Aref reports

The work undertaken by the Franco- Egyptian Research Centre of Karnak Temples (CFEETK) in 2008 was slightly different from in previous years. Last year's study focussed on restoration more than excavation. The site that took up much of the centre's attention was the Osirian cults and featured the chapel of Osiris Wennefer Neb-Djefau, the path of Ptah and the neighbouring chapels of Osiris Neb-Neheh and Nebankh-Pa-Usheb-Iad, as well as the temples of Osiris from Coptos, Opet and Khonsu.

To achieve an efficient progress in restoration at the chapel of Osiris Wennefer Neb-Djefau, the CFEETK had to continue excavation in the area in an attempt to complete the plan of the mud- brick walls that surround the chapel.

Egyptologist Laurent Coulon said that comparing archaeological investigations carried out at the chapel's south eastern façade and its east- western side opened to the Ptah path had given a better understanding of the stratigraphy and more clearly define the methods used for the foundation of the wall around the first gate of the sanctuary.

"Excavation and observation of the debris found between the chapel and the Ptah path, which were in a thicker level around the chapel's outer wall, provided more information about the construction of the chapel," Coulon pointed out. He explained that the information showed the chapel seemed to have been reconstructed at some point between the 30th Dynasty and the Ptolemaic era, while the thicker part of the debris proved that the wall continued until it reached the Ptah path. The steep slope between the chapel and the path indicated that no earlier construction was established there.

Three fire areas associated with an activity of bronze working, one of which was fitted out with bricks, were also found at the south-east of the chapel. A number of coins and some bronze slag were also uncovered in these structures, probably linked with the making of statuettes of Osiris found in the sector in 2003.

Cleaning work continued at the chapel of Osiris Neb-Neheh in a very confined way, especially in the perspective of removing the blocks lying in the dust. New reused blocks were discovered. The most significant was a fragment of a lintel showing Ankhnesneferibra, god Amun's wife playing a sistrum in front of Amun and followed by the great overseer Padineith. Emphasis was placed on the restoration of the blocks, which were found in a very bad state of conservation. Among them was a much damaged one showing Amun and Khonsu. A fragment of the façade of the naos, which bears the beginning of a hymn to Osiris engraved on the north doorjamb, was placed back in its original position.

Restoration of the chapel of Osiris Neb-Ankh- Pa-Usheb-Iad continued after it was reconstructed last year. Restorer Agnes Oboussier said that this year the walls were cleaned to preserve the paintings, which on its turn allowed for the completion of the epigraphic documentation.

The ceramics uncovered inside the large mud- brick building behind the chapel contained several coherent elements dating back to the 26th, 27th and 30th dynasties. The levels posterior to the last activities of the building delivered abundant sherds dating back to the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Among these sherds appeared some Mediterranean imports or productions coming from bordering countries, such as amphorae from Cyprus, Phoenicia and the Aegean area.

Archaeologist Mohamed Hussein said that analysis of the pottery uncovered inside deep pits revealed that during the Ptolemaic period the southern part of the building had been dismantled. The most significant elements, often in a very fragmentary shape, were Egyptian amphorae in brown Nile clay, characterised by a high neck decorated with a network of streaks as well as cups, small convex dishes and bowls of Hellenic tradition. Pots and vessels with floral decoration painted in black were also identified.

The second campaign of study of the temple of Osiris from Coptos, located at the north-eastern area of the temenos or sacred enclosure of Amun at Karnak, continued this year as part of a larger research programme on the sandstone chapels established around this Osireion.

François Leclère, who carried out the research, said that the aim of the study was to provide a better understanding as to which context the temple was built, which required a larger scale of fieldwork.

See the above page for the full story.

More re Manchester Museum survey

Manchester Evening News (Ben Rooth)

A MUSEUM is asking visitors whether they want an important collection of mummies to be covered up or left as they were originally intended.

The initiative is part of an on-going consultation at Manchester Museum to discover how people want the artefacts to be displayed in its ancient Egypt gallery.

Museum bosses launched the consultation last year after the venue, in Oxford Road, covered up three unwrapped mummies sparking accusations of 'political correctness'.

Two months after the cover-up bosses did a u-turn and left one of the exhibits partially unwrapped in its original display state, while another was left partially covered, leaving its head, hands and feet exposed.

Curator of archaeology Bryan Sitch said that the consultation is due to finish this summer.

He said: "We've been getting a whole spectrum of opinion about the mummies.

"Many people think that it's important to keep the ancient Egyptian mummies on full display in the state that they were originally left.

"Others think that they should be covered in some way as a mark of respect towards them.

"Whatever happens, it is important that people can enter the gallery and view all the various components of the Egyptian collection.

See the above for more.

Previous posts on the subject are at:
http://egyptology.blogspot.com/2008/08/covering-mummies-summary-of-discussion.html
http://egyptology.blogspot.com/2008/07/mummies-cover-up-reversed-at-manchester.html

The second of those two links contains links to other previous posts on the subject.

Egyptians Believed Green Amulet Carried Special Powers

RedOrbit

Researchers have reported the discovery of a rare mummified child buried along with a green amulet stone, providing further evidence that the ancient Egyptians believed the stone and the stone’s color itself wielded magical powers.

The first colored amulets occurred as early as the predynastic Badarian period, from 4500 to 3800 B.C., said lead author Raffaella Bianucci, a scientist in the Department of Animal and Human Biology at Via Accademia Albertina in Turin, Italy. Her study is set to be published in next month’s issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The recent find, which dates back 4,700 years, contains the remains of a 15- to 18- month-old toddler. Bianucci and her team determined the child died of an acute malarial infection.

The toddler was wrapped in linen bandages, in which researchers discovered a fossilized leather bag that contained two stones. Researchers focused on the bright green stone.

Using X-rays and electron microscope analysis, researchers determined that the stone was chrysocolla, or hydrated copper silica.

"Even in limited forms and materials, these earliest amulets give a good indication of the dangerous forces that the early Egyptians felt were present in their world and needed to be harnessed by magical means," said Bianucci.

The find also explains why many ancient hieroglyphics that depict Egyptian children wearing green eye makeup. It also adds to the growing body of evidence that ancient Egyptians thought color itself held sacred energy that could help or hurt individuals.

See the above page for more - but beware of a video about acupuncture which starts unbidden a few seconds after the page loads.

Burrell Collection at centre of row re neglect

Scotland on Sunday (Marc Horne)

I posted about this in September 2008. Clearly nothing has happened to resolve the situation since then.

ONE of Scotland's greatest art treasure houses is at the centre of bitter accusations that ministers are allowing it to fall apart while finding millions to save Titian paintings for the nation.

Culture chiefs are complaining that the Burrell Collection is "battered" and struggling to raise funds to fix its leaky roof but pleas for financial help from the Scottish Government have been ignored. . . . .

When it opened quarter of a century ago, the glass-based design of the public museum won awards and national recognition. But in recent months staff have had to rescue priceless artefacts after water seeped in through leaks in the roof.

The problem means that visitors to the flagship cultural building now have to negotiate puddles of water after staff run out of buckets to catch the persistent drips.

The worst affected areas include a gallery showing ancient Egyptian treasures, many of which are more than 5,000 years old. As a result some cases had to be emptied and their items put on temporary display in the museum's mezzanine level.

See the above page for the full story.

New Book: Reading Ancient Egyptian Poetry

Wiley

Thanks to Rhio Barnhart for this link.
Reading Ancient Egyptian Poetry: Among Other Histories
R. B. Parkinson
Wiley

“Parkinson, one of the foremost scholars of ancient Egyptian literature, does much more than provide translations of these well-known narratives: he brings them back to life by showing us how they were part of the lives of everyday ancient Egyptians, reconstructing their entire performative context and giving us a rich picture of the performers, the audiences, and their physical and cultural world. It will be impossible to read these texts in the same way again.” Orly Goldwasser, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem

“Parkinson’s new book challenges fashions and overcomes mere theory to confront us with living literary actors: both the ancient authors who composed timeless poems and the later readers who reinterpreted them within their own history. This is a jewel of literary perceptiveness.” Antonio Loprieno, University of Basel.

The above page also has a Table Of Contents, author information and three exerpts from the book.

New website: antiguo-egipto.com

http://antiguo-egipto.com/

Ben Morales-Correa has been creating a new portal in Spanish for those interested in travel in Egypt. Where he gets the time, I'll never know! Here are the introductory paragraphs:

La mayoría de los turistas visita Egipto por sus atracciones faraónicas, a saber La Gran Pirámide y la Esfinge. Visitan el Valle de los Reyes en Luxor, donde cada año ocurren muchos de los descubrimientos arqueológicos más importantes. De Luxor a Aswan, usted puede navegar por el Nilo en un lujoso crucero. Aswan es un destino maravilloso para la relajación y hacer compras al estilo egipcio. Su localización central en el Alto Egipto lo hace un punto conveniente de partida a lugares como Amarna, la ciudad de la bellísima Nefertiti, Abidos, Dendera, Beni Hasan y, el más magnífico de todos, Abu-Simbel, para contemplar los templos majestuosos de Ramsés el Grande.

Pero Egipto no es sólo cultura y monumentos antiguos. El Cairo y Alejandría, las ciudades más grandes de Egipto, ofrecen toda clase de comodidades modernas y amenidades para los viajeros sofisticados de hoy. La costa del Mar Rojo se ha convertido en una atracción de primera para americanos, europeos y árabes con medios económicos para disfrutar sus restaurantes, barras, cibercafés, discos y toda clase de deportes acuáticos. Hurghada y Dahab están entre los destinos más frecuentados por viajeros en el área.

¿Desea alejarse de todo? Entonces siga el camino del desierto hacia el Oasis de Siwa y contemple la puesta del sol y las estrellas en una noche romántica al estilo de las Mil y Una Noches.

¡Egipto le está esperando!

Travel: A trip to Tanis

Egyptian Gazette

Navigate to the Tourism page, to the right. This story will only be available for a few days on the above page so I have reproduced it in full below. Thanks to Kat for this story. I have stopped checking the Egyptian Gazette website so I would have missed it.

The ruins of Tanis at the village of San al-Hagar (not to be confused with Sa al-Hagar, ancient Sais, or Behbeit al-Hagar, ancient Iseum) make an interesting and pleasant detour on an overnight trip to either

Port Said or Ismailia, where in both towns you will find a good variety of accommodations. For those planning a group outing by taxi or tour bus, tourist agencies in Ismailia or Cairo can arrange a day-trip to Tanis.

To visit Tanis, turn left from the Port Said road at a sign for al-Salihiya, seven kilometres north of its junction with the Cairo-Ismailia highway. Although the route to Tanis (sixty-eight kilometres) is fairly straightforward, bear in mind that you are heading for the town of Sa'ud, not Faqus or Husayniya, which are part of the route when coming from the south (Bilbeis and Zagazig). Although few local people will recognise the name Tanis, asking for 'the antiquities' (al-athar) may elicit the response "Sin," the local name for San al-Hagar (or, more properly, al-Salihiya), the village next to Tanis. Al-Salihiya was founded in the 19th century by Sultan al-Salih Ayyub as a stage for travellers on pilgrimage to Mecca. It subsequently figured heavily as an important point on the route to Syria, and Napoleon kept a garrison there while defending his conquests of Alexandria and Cairo against the Mamelukes.

The route keeps to the north and west of the large brown mound near the village of San al-Hagar, the typical signal of an antiquities site in the Delta. You must show your passport near the ticket office. You will be free to wander around the site as you please. Next to the ticket office is a small museum, but most of the objects recovered from Tanis are exhibited in two upstairs rooms of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

San al-Hagar, Egyptian Djanet, Greek Tanis, and identified by some with Biblical Zoan (in the land of Goshen) was the capital of several pharaohs of the Twenty-First and Twenty-Third Dynasties, besides being the supposed site of some of the action in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. (The desert scenes in the film were actually shot in Tunisia. In- cidentally, the Indiana Jones character was loosely based on the early 19th century Italian adventurer-archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni). This is the largest temple and burial complex in the Delta, and many renowned Egyptologists have excavated here, including Auguste Mariette (from 1860 to 1880), Flinders Petrie (from 1883 to 1886) and Pierre Montet, who began major excavations in 1939 that he resumed after the war.The site is huge and dates from the Old Kingdom to Ptolemaic times. A massive mud-brick enclosure wall surrounds the Temple of Amun, which has been filled with an assortment of statues, stone blocks, and fallen obelisks in granite and sandstone, many of them carried here from earlier shrines in other parts of the country to be reused. Although the statues are of various dates between the Middle and New Kingdoms, the temple was probably not built before the Twenty-First Dynasty, probably by Pinudjem (1049-1036 BC). The temple was added later by Shoshenq 111, and restored by Nektanebo.Montet discovered six crudely decorated royal tombs within the enclosure, the only ones in Egypt apart from that of Tutankhamun to have been discovered intact. Four of them belonged to the Third Intermediate Period Pharaohs Psusennes I, Amenemopet, Osorkon II, and Shoshenq III. The first of these tombs also contained the silver coffin of Shoshenq II as well as the coffin and sarcophagus of Amenemopet, while the tomb of Osorkon II also held the sarcophagus of Takelot II. A seventh royal tomb was discovered more recently. It was Montet who was responsible for the now discredited theory that human sacrifice was practised here. In fact, human sacrifice appears to have ended with the First Dynasty.

During their 1990 season, French archaeologists sponsored by the French Gas Company found the outline of a temple that, they say, dwarfs Karnak temple in Luxor.Climbing to the top of the northern enclosure wall affords a rather extraordinary view of the surrounding countryside.Tell Fara'unNot far from San al-Hagar, near the small town of al-Husayniya, is the mound of Tell Fara'un. If you turn west at the ceremonial archway marking the entrance to al-Husayniya and follow the road for less than one kilometre, you will reach the mound, site of the ancient town of Imet. Here Flinders Petrie found a temple dedicated to Wadjet, the cobra goddess of Lower Egypt. There are two temples within the enclosure, the larger one dating from the New Kingdom and the smaller from the Late Period.

Petrie also found a cemetery containing numerous small mud-brick chambers, some cased with limestone, dating from the Twentieth Dynasty. Most had been robbed and rebuilt in later periods, but there remained many green-glazed ceramic funerary statuettes as well as thousands of glass, silver, and lapis lazuli beads, bronze spearheads, amulets, scarabs, and other objects. Other items found at Tell Fara'un include fragments of statues and a headless black granite sphinx inscribed with the cartouches of successive pharaohs, each of whom obliterated the name of his predecessor. Also found here were Middle and New Kingdom inscriptions, although the former appeared to have been usurped and brought here.

A Greco-Roman town is under excavation, and the warren of foundations is just next to the road.Tell al-Daba'aTell al-Daba'a lies in the eastern Delta near the village of al-Khata'na, about six kilometres northeast of Faqus. Like San al-Hagar and Tell Fara'un, it is northwest of Ismailia and is more easily approached from that direction. This is believed to be the site of Avaris, capital of the so-called 'Shepherd Kings'. These invaders from Babylonia, benefiting from their use of the horse - until then unknown to Egyptians - moved in through Palestine and occupied Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, about 1650 to 1550 BC. Avaris continued as a major settlement into the New Kingdom, and the third-century BC. Egyptian priest and historian Manetho stated that this was where the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt began. Today many archaeologists regard Tell al-Daba'a (Avaris) as a suburb of the large New Kingdom town of Pi-Ramesses.

Slightly off-topic, but relevant: ArchAtlas

ArchAtlas

The ArchAtlas project aims to provide a visual summary of spatial processes in prehistoric and early historic times, such as the spread of farming, the formation of trade contacts, and the growth of urban systems, and to illustrate the locations of key archaeological sites. It uses GIS techniques to integrate georeferenced information on archaeological sites, cultural entities and contact routes with environmental data and satellite imagery.

See for example the Origins of Farming in South-West Asia page.

Off-Topic: SHARD, artifact cataloging program

http://www.sonoma.edu/asc/shard

Of potential interest to anyone developing programs to catalogue artefacts:

SHARD, our artifact cataloging program, has just been posted!

http://www.sonoma.edu/asc/shard

Download it free, gratis, and for nothing.

SHARD provides a consistent and (mostly) idiot‐proof system of pull-down menus to catalog artifacts/artefacts from mid‐19th to early‐20th‐century archaeological sites and to create data tables that facilitate comparison.

Although we at ASC have been excavating urban sites since the 1970s, the impetus to create SHARD came from a series of hugely productive archaeological projects in the 1990s and early 2000s sponsored by the California Department of Transportation. These massive San Francisco Bay Area undertakings required a whole new way of recording and tabulating the nearly 1,000,000 individual items recovered from the excavations.

Bootleg versions of ASC's heretofore unnamed cataloging system have been circulating on the archaeological underground for several years. It has taken quite some time and a whole lot of volunteer effort to get to the point of releasing this definitive edition of SHARD to the archaeological community.

Kind comments and suggestions are welcome. However, this has been a labor of love so we're really not that interested in hearing how you would have done it. Oh so much better if only we'd thought to ask.

SHARD is built on MS Office Access 2003, so you'll need that program to run it. Everyone is free to use, reproduce, and adapt it to best suits their needs. SHARD was created by archaeologists Erica Gibson and Mary Praetzellis; Bryan Much helped with database design in Access. The Manual was written by Erica Gibson.

Regards,
Adrian

========================================
ADRIAN PRAETZELLIS, Ph.D.
Professor of Anthropology
Director, Anthropological Studies Center
Sonoma State University
Rohnert Park, California
USA 94928

Daily Photo - Painted coffin in the Cairo Museum

When photographs where still allowed in the Cairo Museum Thierry Benderitter took those shots of the end of a sarcophagus. The label says that it is the sacrophagus of Lady Sat-hedj-hetep, D XII, from Deir el Bersha, but the Thames and Hudson book The Cairo Museum Masterpieces of Egyptian Art (Francesci Tiradritti) says that it is the coffin of Sepi (JE32868). The figure in the oval shape looks more like Bes than anything but the book says that it is a representation of the dead Osiris. The large hieroglyphs at the top read "Venerable in the presence of Nephyths who is below your head, the Chief of the army, Sepi, true of voice".

With many thanks to Thierry Benderitter, owner of OsirisNet

Copyright Thierry Benderitter

KV-63 Update

KV-63

The KV-63 website has been updated by Otto Schaden, with interesting details. Here's an extract:

The long awaited update featuring descriptions and images of some of our most recent ‘finds’ is finally here. Many thanks for your patience, as we have been quite busy.

In January, as the conservation work began in earnest on the coffins, the KV-63 team also began opening some of the remaining storage jars. Jar number 13 was the first to be examined and proved to contain some of the most interesting items…. including a wooden bed. The bed had been broken into many pieces to fit inside the jar, but is now completely restored. The bed features the customary lion head decorations at the head end and the raised footboard on the other; its length is 170 cm. There are no “feet” to speak of, so it may have been used simply to hold a coffin or mummy “off” the ground during the embalming process. Some strange boards covered with linen and adorned with possible “feet” were also in Jar 13. When these items are conserved, we will see if they have any possible connection with the bed as supports.

To add to the bedtime theme of the preceding paragraph, we also found an intact pillow (the 10th from KV-63). Though pushed in at one end from the confined space of the storage jar, it appears to be quite intact and in excellent condition.

Among other finds are more miniature vessels, bowls with hieratic texts, linen, jar lids and reed tubes (containing a powdery substance). One of the jars emptied this season had what must be a whole storage jar within it --- in many fragments, of course. A rough estimate is that the tomb and coffins may have contained nearly forty of these large storage jars, all virtually identical to those found by Theodore Davis in KV-54.

See the above page for the full story.

Mummification Museum Lecture - TT11 and TT12 at Dra Abu el Naga

Luxor News blog (Jane Akshar)

This was an excellent lecture but my notes were done under challenging conditions. They turned off ALL the lights so I was trying to right by the light of the slides. Dr Jose gave an excellent lecture and it was really interesting. They have got a website http://excavacionegipto.com/

They have been at the site for 8 years and have 2 goals TT11 the tomb of Djehuty in the time of Hatshepsut and TT12 the tomb of Hery from the time of Ahmose. In between these two tombs is TT399 and to the north there is a new tomb Baki. All these tombs are interconnected by a transverse series of holes. At first these are thought to be created in the Ptolemaic period when there was a large burial of mummified Ibis and Flacons with demotic graffiti. However it is now believed these were done 100 years after the burials.

Hery
There is a central pillar and the inner chamber was filled with debris so initially they were not sure whether the decoration had been damaged. It is one of the few early 18th dynasty tombs and has parallels with Teti and Ahmose at El Kab. There are few tombs of this period in Thebes. The NE wall has hunting scenes with greyhounds like 12th dynasty figures with stiff figures and well defined muscles. There is a funerary procession and the owner died under Amenhotep I. The quality is outstanding. The owner was an overseer of the granaries of kings with Ahotep but the tomb is of such high quality. His wife is Herunesu and she has connections with the royal family.

See the above page for the rest of Jane's lecture notes. Thanks Jane.

Travel: A walking tour of Cairo

Times Online (Anthony Sattin)

Cairo’s old city has long been famous for the three Cs: crowds, crumbling buildings and . . . overflowing sewers. A decade-long restoration programme, however, and extensive sewage works have made its main street fit for princes.

Founded a little over 1,001 years ago, the old city was originally the preserve of caliphs and viziers. They lived in two sprawling palaces of such beauty and splendour, the 12th-century crusader William of Tyre doubted anyone would believe his description.

The palaces disappeared long ago, but that hasn’t stopped Cairenes continuing to call the street that separated them Bayn al-Qasrayn — Between the Palaces. And along this palace walk lies a princely feast of medieval mosques, crumbling caravanserais, restored mansions and elaborate Koran schools. There’s even some good shopping to be done along the way.

History hangs around every doorway, but nowhere more than at Bab Zuweila, the grand, twin-towered southern gate. This was a popular meeting place long before crowds gathered in 1517 to watch the Turks hang the defeated Egyptian sultan.
The complete guide to modern day Cairo

Perhaps to counter the evil of execution, locals also believed that a holy spirit inhabited the place, and until recently they nailed teeth, rags and other offerings to the gate, hoping the saint would help to cure the ill. The relics were cleared away in a recent restoration, but, as with so much in the old city, the legend lives on.

Beware walking through this gate with a head full of stories and distracting memories, because, once inside, the city will rush at you.

See the above page for the full story.

There are also links on the above page to other Egyptian travel features:

The Complete Guide to Modern Day Cairo by Nick Redman
Cairo's Egyptian Museum in a day by Daniel Jacobs
My Secret Cairo by Philip Hensher

Exhibition: Egitto, tesori sommersi

Corriere Della Sera

Thanks to Pierfranco Dotti for this link, which has eight lovely photographs from the Egypt's Sunken Treasures exhibition. The exhibition is running from 7 February through 31 May 2009 at the Venaria Reale, a former Savoy residence near Turin under its Italian title “Egitto. Tesori Sommersi”. The captions are in Italian but the artefacts speak for themselves.

The exhibition's home page can be found at:
http://www.egitto-tesori-sommersi.it/en/Default.aspx

Bonhams - "The market for Classical and Egyptian antiquities is thriving"

Looting Matters (David Gill)

I was interested to read the press release announcing the sales of antiquities at Bonhams for 2009. It started: "Following a series of strong sales, 2008 saw Bonhams’ Antiquities department established as the market leaders for UK sales of ancient art."

Yet 2008 could also be seen as a singularly unfortunate year for the antiquities department at Bonhams. The sale of the Graham Geddes collection was a PR disaster: intervention b