EEF News Digest

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Alley/4482/EEFNEWS.html

Last week's EEF News Digest will be available online later today at the above address, for all the latest information about exhibitions, conferences, lectures and new online and print publications, grants awards and fellowships, new websites, courses and trips, plus a round up of last week's main news items.

David Roberts volumes to be auctioned

http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=976602006

Inspired by an upcoming auction that will sell three of David Roberts's wonderful volumes of illustrations, this article delves into the life of the painter:

"It was to be a book like no other: bigger, more beautifully bound, more lavishly illustrated. But the man behind the world's most expensive travel book was no gentleman adventurer. He was a painter and decorator from Edinburgh with a big talent, and an even bigger ambition.
David Roberts travelled through the Middle East in the 1830s when such journeys were virtually unknown, sketching as he went. He published his work, The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, in six immense, folio-sized volumes. Three of these volumes, covering the Holy Land and the surrounding area, bound in two magnificent books, will be auctioned at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh on Tuesday. Valued at between £8,000 and £12,000, these books are increasingly rare . . . .

But this is more than the story of a book. It's the rags-to-riches story of a shoemaker's son from Stockbridge who became one of the best-known artists of his generation."

See the above article for the full story, which is well worth reading if you are interested in the painter.

The volumes will be auctioned at Lyon & Turnbull in a Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps and Photographs sale, on Tuesday, 11 July.
www.lyonandturnbull.com

To see some examples of David Roberts's work, go to:

http://www.rosicrucians.org/salon/d_roberts/d_roberts.html

World Heritage Map

http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=319

It's a slow time of year for Egyptology news, so here's a little something just slightly off topic, for those of you who are interested - a complete map of the World Heritage sites, including those in Egypt, is available either electronically in PDF format, or in print (free of charge) at the above web address:

"This large format full-color map features the 812 World Heritage sites and brief explanations of the World Heritage Convention and the World Heritage conservation programmes, as well as superb photos of World Heritages sites with explanatory captions.
The dimensions of the map are 58 cm by 89 cm (23 in. by 35 in.), and it can be downloaded below. If you would like to receive a free printed map, please register on the World Heritage website with your name and address and to specify your preferred language (English, French or Spanish) at this address:http://whc.unesco.org/en/register/".

Saturday Trivia

Makeover for village landmark
http://tinyurl.com/fqru7 (dailyrecord.co.uk)

"Visitors are flocking to a village to see a giant rock painted to look like King Tutankhamun. Villagers in Kilcreggan, near Helensburgh, have just given the boy king a facelift to restore him to his former glory. It is believed the boulder was first painted in the 1920s. . . . The stone was painted by Turner Prize nominee Christine Borland, who lives in Kilcreggan, with children from the Cove Park Art Club. They even got archaeologist Tom Addyman to paint on a replica of King Tut's cartouche - the name plate in hieroglyphics on his tomb."

Book: The Anubis Tapestry
http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=7759
Many thanks to Kat Newkirk for pointing this out. A new illustrated novel from Actionpolis combines ancient Egyptian mythology with the supernatural in an action adventure whose hero is a 13 year old boy. Sounds like a combination of Indiana Jones, The Mummy and Harry Potter - with illustrations: "Written and illustrated by Bruce Zick -- a veteran of every major film company you can think of (and having worked with directors like Lucas, Spielberg and Copolla) – The Anubis Tapestry will bring to life this fall from the fledging all ages imprint, for only $12.95. 'The Anubis Tapestry' is about bringing the mummy mythology to new life,' Zick told CBR News. 'When Chance Henry's father is transformed into a mummy, the boy must become a mummy himself and enter the dreaded Underworld to save his dad. In the process, we reinvent ancient Egypt, the Domain of the Dead, the Elder Gods, and the use of Egyptian magic. The process began when I was approached by Komikwerks to do a book. We collaborated on the story idea and then they cut me loose to create some weird and crazy stuff.

See the above page for the full review. The Actionpolis website is at:

http://www.actionopolis.com/

Movie: The Mummy

http://tinyurl.com/pvc5w (movienews.virgin.net)

"British actress Rachel Weisz and actor Brendan Fraser have apparently agreed to reprise their roles in the next 'Mummy' sequel, despite rumours claiming that they had turned down the offer. Previous reports claimed that the only star to return for the next sequel in the action franchise would be South African actor Arnold Vosloo, who played the villain in the first two blockbusters. However, according to recent sources, both Fraser and Weisz will return in the roles of O'Connell and Evelyn respectively in the planned sequel, which will be set in the 1940s, after the events of the last film 'The Mummy Returns'."

See the above pages for more details.

KV63 - summary of the latest news

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/802/heritage.htm
The Al Ahram Weekly's Nevine El-Aref summarizes the situation at KV63, with news of the latest discoveries: "Hawass told Al-Ahram Weekly that the team had also opened the sealed jars and found that they contained natron, miniature vessels, bits of plant material and in some cases seal impressions. These seals matched examples found in the tomb of Tutankhamun (KV62) and the embalming cache of Tutankhamun (KV54), where leftover material from his mummification and funerary banquet were placed together. The seal impressions found so far include a lion and a crocodile holding a captive, the sun-disk on top of a seated Osiris flanked by the symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt above the sign for gold, and the jackal-headed god Anubis with nine bound captives."
See the above page for the full story.

Mark Rose on Discovery's latest KV63 offering

http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/kv63/kv63.html

Mark Rose continues to do a great job on the Archaeology magazine website with a new piece on the Discovery Channel's programme about the opening of the last coffin at KV63, accompanied by some excellent photos which I haven't seen elsewhere: "The new Discovery Channel documentary covers the opening of that coffin, what was found inside it, and what archaeologists thought of the tomb. The raw footage I was able to view showed an on-site interview with Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities; discussion between Hawass and project director Otto Schaden about the pink gold coffinette; and the opening of the coffin. The film of the opening is amazing: conservator Nadia Lokma seems out of her mind with worry, Hawass is giving orders, and Hawass and Schaden can't help but pitch in with the lifting."

See the rest of the article on the above page.

Egypt reappoints Hawass

http://metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060627-094004-8108r

"Zahi Hawass, Egypt's voluble and media-savvy chief archaeologist, dubbed the King of the Pharaohs, was reappointed head of the country's top antiquities body on Monday. The decision made by Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif came as no surprise after four years of high-profile efforts by Hawass to rejuvenate Egyptology in his home country. . . . The 59-year-old is in theory due to retire next year when he turns 60, but his entourage has not ruled out an extension to his mandate."

Yare Egyptology update

Yare Egyptology, which specializes in supplying electronic copies of out of print books, has been having some technical difficulties since their ISP went out of existence. Brian Yare is working to relocate his operation on alternative web-space. A limited web site is expected to be up shortly at http://www.yare.org/egypt.

The email service should still operate: brian@yare.org or egypt@yare.org.

Brian assures his customers that they will still receive the usual prompt service while they sort out the web shopfront, so business goes on as usual in spite of the web problems.

Sympathies also to the ISP's other 12,000 customers who found themselves without a web presence!

I'll update when Yare Egyptology's website is back up and running.

What's new in Abzu

Abzu has been updated. To find material newly added to Abzu, you can follow the "View items recently added to ABZU" link at:

http://www.etana.org/abzu/.

Entries stay there for a month from the date they are entered. Alternatively you can make use of the RSS feed from the same page, or you can read the blog constructed from the RSS feed: What's New in Abzu blog:

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/AbzuNew

This blog gives a listing of everything added to the database since September 30 2005 (1056 items).

Unearthing Aswan's past

http://tinyurl.com/qlvsv (swissinfo.org)

"Swiss archaeologists are joining the scramble to recover invaluable ancient remains in Egypt before they are lost forever beneath modern developments.
Cornelius von Pilgrim is leading efforts to unearth evidence of how people lived thousands of years ago near the southern city of Aswan. 'Many ancient towns are being covered by modern towns with deep foundations that destroy the ancient remains,' von Pilgrim told swissinfo. The archaeologist from the Swiss Institute for Egyptian Architectural and Archaeological Research in Cairo has been working alongside Egyptian experts for the past six years in Aswan."

See the above page for more.

Model coffin of Teti

http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/bmsaes/index.html

http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/bmsaes/issue5/grajetzki.html

The most recent issue of the British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan (BMSAES) online journal is now available online. There are only two papers in the issue. One is by Wolfram Grajetzki, entitled The Second Intermediate Period model coffin of Teti in the British Museum (EA 35016). The abstract reads as follows: "This article publishes the model coffin British Museum EA 35016 bought in 1868 from the Robert J. Hay collection. It belongs to a military official called Teti and dates to the Second Intermediate Period. Its style of decoration with the high number of text columns on the long sides follows closely the full-scale coffins of the period found at Thebes and other places in Upper Egypt. The inscriptions with different spells spoken by gods are quite garbled but also have parallels on coffins of about the same period." See the second of the two web addresses for the full paper.

Blog Update

I've updated the blog with news from last Wednesday until today. Apologies for the five day absence - as I posted previously, I had a suspicion that I would be unable to find an Internet connection where I was going.

Thanks to everyone who emailed me while I was away and I will catch up with the replies over the next day or so.

Special thanks to the following for emailing me news items in my absence, so that I didn't have to look as far as I would have done: Jen Mason, Greg Reeder, Maria Fdez-Valmayor, Tony Marson, Carolin Johanson, Gary Maher and Doug Weller.

Thanks very much to Mark Morgan's comment on the blog for the information that the first of Discovery's KV63 programmes, Egypt's New Tomb Revealed aired in the UK Saturday 1st July on the Discovery Channel at 10PM. I managed to miss it, being out of reach of the relevant technology, but hopefully it will show again in the not too distant future. Di (gatekeeperdi) - I hope that you didn't miss it?

All the best

Andie

KV63 - A round-up of the week's news

A round-up of the main news items concerning last Wednesday's opening of the last coffin, with Zahi Hawass at the helm.

First of all, here's an excellent photograph of what they found when they opened the coffin:
http://www.antiquos.com/images/restos-humanos-kv63.jpg

Dissapointing for some, no mummy was discovered when the coffin was eventually opened:
http://tinyurl.com/racss (commercialappeal.com)
"When researchers from the University of Memphis last week saw the contents of the last of seven sarcophagi they had found in a previously undiscovered chamber in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, for the seventh time there was no mummy inside."

However, the findings were still great news for the archaeologists:
http://tinyurl.com/gw4mv (mg.co.za)
"The first tomb discovered in Egypt's Valley of the Kings in 80 years doesn't have any mummies, but archaeologists opened the last of eight sarcophagi inside on Wednesday and found something they say is even more valuable: embalming materials and a rare collar of ancient, woven flowers. Hushed researchers craned their necks and media scuffled inside a stiflingly hot stone chamber six metres underground to watch Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass slowly crack open the last coffin's lid -- with his bare hands -- for the first time in what scientists believe is more than 3 000 years . . . . Hawass, who heads the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, said he believed the new tomb could have belonged to King Tut's mother. Closely related Egyptian royals tended to be buried near each other, and graves of the rest of Tut's family have already been found, he said."

The BBC website gives more information about the garland:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5127918.stm

"Archaeologists in Egypt expecting to find a mummy during their excavation of a burial chamber in Luxor have instead discovered a garland of flowers. The 3,000-year-old garland is the first to be discovered . . . . The chief curator of Cairo's Egyptian Museum said the surprise find was 'even better' than discovering a mummy. 'I prayed to find a mummy, but when I saw this, I said it's better - it's really beautiful,' said Nadia Lokma. 'It's very rare - there's nothing like it in any museum. We've seen things like it in drawings, but we've never seen this before in real life - it's magnificent,' she said. Experts say ancient Egyptian royals often wore garlands entwined with gold strips around their shoulders in both life and death.

A slightly different take on things comes from the International Herald Tribune, which focuses on Hawass's speculations about the tomb's original owner
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/29/news/tomb.php
"Archaeology is about patience, and about expecting the unexpected. It is about finding a clue in the sand and gently sifting through layers of time. KV 63 has offered up many mysteries. . . . But archaeology is also about show business, and in modern Egypt the master of ceremonies, the only man allowed to pull back the curtain for the audience, is Hawass, the general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. He has a theory about KV 63, but by the end of the day Wednesday it was hard to know how much of that was show business and how much science, or whether there was a bit of both. His theory was that the tomb was the burial place of King Tut's mother, Queen Kiya. While there is evidence linking Tut's tomb with this one, others who have actually worked inside the newest tomb said there was no evidence a mummy was ever buried there."

The WSTM website lists some of the reasoning behind Hawass's conclusions:
http://wstm.com/Global/story.asp?S=5092087

"* A coffin that included a garland of flowers like that buried with Tutankhamun signifying sweetness in the afterlife, gold beads, lemons, cloves and garlic, which was considered a protector of the soul and guardian of riches in the afterlife;
* Contents within the last-opened coffin that date back to the time of King Tutankhamun and feature unique embalming materials and actual linen scraps used to wrap mummies;
* Seals and inscriptions that include "PA-ATEN," which an Egyptian expert believes is part of the former name given to Tutankhamun's wife, and point directly to the time of King Tutankhamun;
* A ceremonial bowl and additional pottery shards that exactly match those found in King Tutankhamun's tomb, including identical hieroglyphic messages;
* Pots found with gold lining, indicative of materials produced in a royal workshop; and

* An imprint found at the bottom of a coffin that suggests a mummy was once inside. There is a possibility a mummy may have been stolen from KV63."

From the New York Times there's a photo of Zahi Hawass with the unopened coffin:

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/06/28/science/egypt.b.450.jpg

And from CNN, photos and video footage:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/06/28/new.tomb.ap/

There are no updates yet on the official KV63 website.

Museum offers a modern look at ancient art

http://tinyurl.com/r7t46 (masslive.com)

"On Wednesday, the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum in Springfield will unveil a permanent gallery called the Hall of Ancient Treasures, featuring art from ancient Egypt, China, Rome, Greece and other areas. . . . Colorful graphics, maps, video and written commentary will bring the ancient world to life for visitors. Ironically, some of the most dramatic of these displays are about funeral practices. In the Egyptian section, for example, the new gallery features a coffin whose hieroglyphics tell the story of a stonecutter from Thebes who died 2,600 years ago. His name was Padihershef, and the coffin records the names of his parents, too, along with spells and prayers to help him along in the afterlife."

See the above two page article for the full review.

More on sarcophagi found near Giza pyramids

http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=306540&sid=FTP

"Egyptian archaeologists have found two ancient sarcophagi close to the pyramids, the head of Egypt`s Supreme Council for Antiquities said on Sunday. The sarcophagi, found about a kilometer (0.6 miles) south of the pyramids in Giza, dated to the late 26th dynasty, or about 2,500 years old, council chief Zahi Hawass said in a report by the state MENA news agency. Hieroglyphs referring to the ancient Egyptian gods Osiris, god of the dead, and the sun-god Ra were painted on the larger sarcophagus, which measured about 2 meters (6 feet 6.74 inches) tall, 70 centimeters wide and 60 centimeters deep and was painted red, blue and green, the report said. The name of sarcophagus' owner, Neb Ra Khatow, and ritual incantations to the gods were also painted on the sarcophagus. The second sarcophagus had a more human form and was found inside the first. Hawass said it was in good condition, and that a wreath made of plants encircled the mummy inside."

This is the complete item on the Zee news web page.

More on the Bosnian pyramids

http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/osmanagic/update.html

Mark Rose from Archaeology magazine has been following up a few enquiries of his own into the research taking place at the Bosnian pyramids: "Was Barakat there officially? What was his expertise? The news stories said that he was "sent by Cairo" (Reuters, June 5) and that he was an 'expert in pyramids' (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, June 2). Barakat, we were told, had sent his report to Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, who had 'recommended him to the foundation leading the excavation work' (Agence France-Presse, June 12). Taking it all together, you might believe that Barakat had been dispatched by Dr. Hawass. Could that be true?
Unable to confirm any of this, I asked Dr. Hawass directly. Concerning Barakat, he states: 'Mr. Barakat, the Egyptian geologist working with Mr. Osmanagic, knows nothing about Egyptian pyramids. He was not sent by the SCA, and we do not support or concur with his statements'."

See the above page for the full article, together with a link to the letter from Mr Hawass.

Hatshepsut at the Met closes on July 9th

http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_183140024.html

A short summary of the exhibition on the WCBS TV website is accompanied by a video showing footage of the exhibition.

Digital Hierakonpolis Initiative

http://www.commtechlab.msu.edu/projects/dig_hier.html

Not a news item, but an interesting web page looking at how technology is being used to help the excavations at Hierakonpolis, and to help communicate the Hierakonpolis findings to a wider audience. The page provides background information about the Predynastic site, and describes the company's role in applying technology to some of the challenges provided by the Hierakonpolis project.

PalArch updated

http://www.palarch.nl/

Thanks to André J. Veldmeijer for the following update:

The July issue of http://www.palarch.nl/ is online with important news (amongothers on upcoming changes, guaranteed durability and accessibility ofour e-publications etc.), please have a look at the free Newsletter:
http://www.palarch.nl/Non_scientific/newsletter.htm.

New issue of PalArch's Journal of Archaeology of Egypt/Egyptology(ISSN 1567-214X)
http://www.palarch.nl/Archaeology/archaeology.htm:

Vandecruys, G. 2006. Response to Reader (2006): more geological andarchaeological data on the Sphinx discussion.

Reader, C.D. 2006. Further considerations on development at Giza beforethe 4th Dynasty.

PalArch's Center of Book Reviews has 6 reviews online:

http://www.palarch.nl/Non_scientific/bookreview.htm.

Measuring Time

http://tinyurl.com/hpxgf (thestatesman.net)

An informal article that looks at the evolution of time measurement and the development of clocks describes three early Egytian time keeping devices - sundials, merkhets and water clocks. See the above article for the full story, but here's a sample: "Water clocks were among the earliest timekeepers that did not depend on the observation of celestial bodies. One of the oldest of this type was found in the tomb of Amenhotep - I, buried around 1500 B.C. These were stone vessels with sloping sides that allowed water to drip at a nearly constant rate from a small hole near the bottom. Markings on the inside surface measured the passage of time as the water level reached them."