Egyptian mission finds new Ram statue in Luxor

http://tinyurl.com/m6zvo (sis.gov.eg)

"The Egyptian mission working in a subterranean water project at Karnak and Luxor temples found new statue of Ram during digging operations, said chairman of the Higher Council of Luxor Samir Farag on Thursday.
He said the company assigned of lowering the underground, water level in the area found the statue by chance. The project, carried out by a Swiss company with a US aid of LE 20 million, is scheduled to take two years to get the job."

This is the entire bulletin on the State Information Service website.

Saturday Trivia - Games

Tale In The Desert III
http://www.igniq.com/2006/07/tale-in-desert-iii-different-mmorpg.html
"Gamers on the hunt for a different kind of MMORPG might find what they’re looking for in the deserts of ancient Egypt. A Tale In the Desert III is now available online, offering substance rather than violence to create the gaming experience. Lead designer Andrew Tepper, aka Pharaoh in the game, took some time out not too long ago to speak with Igniq about the third incarnation of the title, which has been online in beta for a few months. The franchise has been around since 2003." See the above page for more. (Thanks again Kat).

Luxor Amun Rising

http://pc.gamedaily.com/game/review/?gameid=5390&id=1256

Luxor Amun Rising has you aim colored marbles at a string of constantly moving marbles in an attempt to get three of the same color in a row, at which point they break and leave the line. The object of the game is to keep the marbles from reaching the end of the track. My description here hardly does this game justice, because this is an incredibly fun time. I love a good puzzle, and so not surprisingly, I was highly impressed by this game. I enjoyed watching the pretty colored marbles, and hearing their industrial steel sound as they rolled along the track (remember how I said I am easily amused?). Above all, the game was very addictive, and I spent a lot of time attempting high scores and seeing how far into the game I could go before losing. As the name suggests, the game is nicely decked out in an Egyptian theme, so the graphics and the music reflect that.

See the above site for the full review.

Underwater museum for Alexandria?

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/803/hr1.htm

"Setting up an offshore, submarine archaeological site anywhere is not an easy task, let alone in a city with the water pollution problems of Alexandria. Yet the remarkable discoveries made by underwater archaeologists over the last decade justify further serious efforts for what would be Egypt's first ever offshore underwater museum.
The site and form gives cause for conjecture. Should it be in Alexandria's Eastern Harbour, the Sisila area, or Abu Qir Bay? What will it look like? Should it resemble the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney or the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology at the spectacular Uluburun Wreck in Turkey, or the Musée de Marine in Paris? All these display a collection of sunken ship wrecks, flora and fauna.
These questions and more were raised at an international workshop held last week in Alexandria to discuss the feasibility of constructing such a museum."

See the abovepage for the full story.

Changes at the Valley of the Kings

http://touregypt.net/teblog/luxornews/?p=243
If you're brave enough to tackle the heat and are planning on a visit to Luxor this summer, take note of Jane Akshar's news on the above page about changes at the Valley of the Kings, with the ticket office now moved to a new position.

More re ancient Egyptian insights into suicide

http://tinyurl.com/h8c8c

Thanks very much to N. Doyle for his comment at the above page, which offers some helpful explanation about the somewhat confusing article published re ancient Egyptian insights into suicide. The demystification is much appreciated!

Saharan Prehistory

It's a very slow news day today, so I've dropped this post into the blog for anyone interested in Egyptian/Saharan prehistory and early/mid Holocene climate.

Whilst hunting around for an article on the website of the Polish Academy of Sciences, I found a couple of Egyptian prehistory papers in their Academia magazine, both in PDF format - both very digestible and informative and very well worth a read. I've linked directly to those articles of interest below:

"The Megaliths of Nabta Playa", Romuald Schild & Fred Wendorf

http://www.pan.pl/academia/nr01/10-15+Schild.pdf
"Prehistoric Herdsmen", Michał Kobusiewicz, Romuald Schild

http://www.pan.pl/academia/nr07/20-24%20kobusiewicz.pdf

If you are interested in changing prehistoric environmental conditions in the Sahara, and have access either to Athens or to an academic library, then a couple of papers in the current issue of Quarternary International may be of interest (Volume 151, Issue 1, Page 1-144, July 2006 - Dark nature: responses of humans and ecosystems to rapid environmental changes - edited by S.A.G. Leroy, H. Jousse and M. Cremaschi). :

http://tinyurl.com/nphj5

There is also a recent publicly available article about global climate change during the early/mid Holocene at PNAS (Abrupt tropical climate change: Past and present - Lonnie G. Thompson, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Henry Brecher, Mary Davis, Blanca León, Don Les, Ping-Nan Lin, Tracy Mashiotta, and Keith Mountain

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/28/10536?etoc (abstract)

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/103/28/10536 (full article in PDF format)

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has also announced that legacy content dating back to volume 1, issue 1, in 1915 is now digitally archived, searchable, and freely available on the PNAS web site at http://www.pnas.org/contents-by-date.0.shtml

And since I seem to have drifted off on a tangent into climate change, if you want to find out more about the basics of climate, as well as climate modelling and prediction, have a look at the rather lovely Basics of Climate Prediction website, which is a well put together self-contained course, using Macromedia Flash 8 animated sequences to introduce visitors to the subject (use the Next button at the bottom right to navigate through the sections):

http://www.begbroke.ox.ac.uk/climatebasics/

Ancient Greek carvings found in Alexandria

http://tinyurl.com/kg32g (iol.co.za)

"Egyptian archaeologists have discovered carvings with Greek inscriptions dating back to the era of the second-century Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Supreme Council of Antiquities announced on Tuesday.The carvings, believed to form part of the altar of a temple, was unearthed while archaeologists were excavating in the area around Pompeii's Pillar in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria."

See the above page for more details.

Projects to map and record Egypt’s historical sites

http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=6861

First there's a piece about the GIS mapping project being developed by the EAIS (Egyptian Antiquities Information System): "The need for a single comprehensive database has become more pressing than ever, and since 2000, the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) has been working with the Finnish Foreign Ministry to create an organization to map and describe all of Egypt’s historical sites.
EAIS recently inaugurated its Geographic Information System for use by various branches of the SCA. The cutting-edge system is a multi-functional computerized tool capable of collecting, storing, retrieving, transforming, displaying and analyzing massive amounts of data. . . . Knowing each site’s exact location and borders is crucial so it can be granted protected status under the law. Amlaak (literally translated as ‘property’), the branch of the SCA that surveys and maintains legal records on cultural heritage sites, is one of the main beneficiaries of EAIS’ work."

The EAIS website can be found at:

http://www.eais.org.eg/

On the same page there's an item about the Chicago House project to capture details of existing monuments to provide a precise record of them: "While the EAIS has been working on large scale mapping of historical sites, the University of Chicago-funded Chicago House has been documenting antiquities on a smaller scale. Chicago House is continuing an 80-year project called the Epigraphic Survey, which draws on the skills of photographers, artists and Egyptologists. Dr. Raymond Johnson is the director of the Chicago House. “The goal of our project is to create something so precise that it could stand alone as a replacement for the original — which, unfortunately, has already proved necessary in some cases,” he says. At its core, the Epigraphic Survey is a collection of enhanced photographs.

See the above web page for more on both these stories. Thanks again to Kat!

More on Ramesses statue move

http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=6831
"Carved in StoneHot off the Da Vinci debate, Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni refused to budge an inch over the planned removal of the statue of Ramses II from Ramses Square. The move is scheduled for August 25.At a press conference last month, Hosni explained that the statue was originally slated to be moved after the construction of the Grand Egyptian Museum wraps up, but the ministry has decided not to wait. Hosni said delays at the GEM and the fact that the massive statue stands in the way of urban development plans for Ramses Square factored into the decision.While it waits for the GEM to open in 2011, the statue will be housed in a special hangar where experts will begin restoring it."

More on the New 7 Wonders

http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=6848

For anyone who has managed to miss the New Seven Wonders, there's a short overview on the July Egypt Today website: "Once upon a time, a Greek travel journalist named Herodotus suggested the world’s very first ‘best of’ list, better known as the Seven Wonders of the World. Egypt was a double winner with the now-destroyed Lighthouse of Alexandria and the still-standing Pyramids of Giza. Fast-forward 2,500 years, and a Swiss filmmaker is pitting the world’s oldest standing wonder against 20 other heritage sites for a place among the ‘New 7 Wonders of the World.’ "

Ancient poem's insight into suicide

http://www.rxpgnews.com/research/psychiatry/suicide/article_4679.shtml
"Analysis of an ancient Egyptian poem by a psychiatrist and an Egyptologist shows that it describes the psychopathology of suicide with great accuracy.Dispute over Suicide was a poem written by an unnamed Egyptian writer between 2000 and 1740 BC on papyrus in hieroglyphics.The writer is known as ‘The Eloquent Peasant’, and was commissioned by King Meri-ka-re to write a poem in order to dissuade people from committing suicide.

Suicide as a form of human behaviour is probably as ancient as man himself. Attitudes towards those who take their own lives have veered between condemnation and tolerance throughout the ages.It is possible that moral and cultural views about suicide have affected its incidence, statistics on suicide, and even coroners’ verdicts. An historical approach makes it possible to understand what meaning suicide has for people with different experiences from different backgrounds and generations.

Dr. George Tadros, a consultant psychiatrist, and Dr. Ahmes Pahor, an Egyptologist and ENT consultant, used a computer programme with special software for qualitative analysis to assess the poem."

See the above web page for the full story.

Thanks to Kat Newkirk for pointing out that this is also covered at:

http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=1004112006

"The analysis suggests ancient civilisations could provide insight into wider mental health issues. It comes as the Royal College of Psychiatrists gathers in Glasgow for its annual meeting today."

This is the full item on the Scotsman website. Comments are enabled on the site, but only one has been made so far.

Egypt launches roaming museum in Japan

http://www.kuna.net.kw/home/Story.aspx?Language=en&DSNO=884980

"Egypt will launch a roaming Pharaonic museum to tour 10 Japanese cities for two years, as a token of gratitude for Japan's support for the establishment of the Grand Museum of Egypt. Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouq Hosni told reporters Monday that the museum, to be launched on July 14, would exhibit pieces discovered during the last 40 years by the Japanese Waseda University's archeological mission to Egypt. Japan, he noted, insured the mobile museum, which included 327 pieces chosen from various Egyptian archeological locations, with USD 25 million, and would provide advanced equipment and expertise to the Egyptian Museum as well as grants for four training courses in Japan for Egyptian archeologists."

See the brief article on the above web page.

UNESCO supports Luxor development plan

http://tinyurl.com/pqn87 (sis.gov.eg)

"The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) supported the Egyptian government's development project in the ancient Karnak area in Luxor.
A UNESCO report said that the Karnak project is very well planned and systematic, striking the right balance between preserving Egypt's legacy and Luxor's planning.
There was a fuss about protecting the residential compound and the 19th century house of the French Egyptologist George Legrain, being situated on the doorstep of the Karnak Temple. UNESCO officials said that protecting the historical site in Egypt is the sole responsibility of the Egyptian government which has every right whether to keep or demolish Legrain's house and the residential compound."

This is the complete item on the State Information Service website.

KV63 website updated

http://www.kv-63.com/index.html

Thanks very much to Gary Maher for pointing out that the KV63 dig diary has been updated, with new photographs added. Dr Schaden's diary entry for July 9th gives a short update about coffins D and E, and there are some new photos on Photo Page 2 (with many more promised when the necessary permissions from Dr Hawass have been obtained). The Fall/Autumn edition of KMT will provide a full article about the tomb, and this should be available towards the end of August.

Schaden says that the site will be shut down for the season on Thursday July 13th, and the team will be away for a few months, with plans for next season still pending at the moment.

I'll update the blog when the new photos appear, but it looks as thought that will be the last entry for the KV63 website for the season. Here's hoping that they enjoy the break.

Getty returns artefacts to Greece

http://tinyurl.com/el589 (nytimes.com)

For those keeping up with ongoing international cases where ownership of antiquities is in dispute, the Getty has agreed to return two important pieces to Greece: "After months of intense scrutiny of its collection of Greek and Roman antiquities, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles said Monday that it had agreed to relinquish ownership to two of four important ancient works that the government of Greece says were illegally removed from Greek soil."

Museums and governments worldwide are watching to see the outcome of these cases, with a view to determining their own chances of repatriating artefacts which have been aquired from illegitimate sources.

Digital Egypt website

http://egypt.ebeling.ee/

Thanks to Andrei Bodrov for letting me know about his new site, Digital Egypt, which includes fullscreen QTVR panoramas of Giza, together with still photos from different Luxor and Giza and a rather nice plan of the Giza pyramids. It is a lovely looking page, but the main attraction is the Panorama section, showing Flash movies of the Giza plateau - when a little red viewfinder appears you can mouse over it to see a brief textual description of what it is you are looking at.

In order to see the panoramas, you will need to download Macromedia Flashplayer, if you don't already have it installed (and if you have, you will need version 6 as a minimum), and for full screen views you will need QuickTime FULLSCREEN panoramas. You'll find what you need on the QuickTime website at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/ - and you will then be able to see the full panoramas.

Quest for the Mummy of Hatshepsut

http://guardians.net/hawass/articles/quest_for_the_mummy_of_hatshepsut.htm

Thanks very much to Jen Mason for the following artilce. On Zahi Hawass's own website, Hawass argues in favour of a mummy located in the Cairo Museum being that of Hatshepsut. The first part of the article is historical background information into Hatshepsut herself

There then follows a description of KV20, the tomb of Hatshepsut, and nearby KV60, where Carter found two elderly mummified women (one inscribed for the Great Royal Nurse Sitre-In) and stuffed geese.

Hawass then suggests that the long-forgotten coffin and mummy inscribed for the Great Royal Nurse, removed from KV60 by Ayrton and Davis in 1908, and eventually located after a search on the third floor of the Cairo Museum, were in fact never supposed to be paired together: "The badly damaged coffin is typical of the 18th Dynasty. Among the remaining inscriptions is wr Sdt nfrw nswt In, 'great royal nurse In'. The mummy inside is about 1.5 m. tall but the coffin is 2.13 m, suggesting that the coffin was not originally intended for this mummy. The obese mummy still in the tomb is significantly taller, and would fit much better in the coffin." He goes on to describe the mummy and suggests that her appearence, the quality of the mummification process and the very fine linen used argue that she may have been royal. He points out the the linen on the base of the coffin, not connected directly to the mummy, was of inferior quality.

Putting all of this together, Hawass suggests that the mummy of Hatshepsut was removed from KV20 for security reasons during the Third Intermediate Period, and that it was reburied in KV60 in the coffin of Sitre-In. He beleives that the mummy currently still resident in KV60 may have been the original occupant of the coffin.

See the above URL for the full article by Hawass.

More re speculation on KV63's owner

http://tinyurl.com/rm5zh (AOL News)

Thanks very much to Kat Newkirk for the following item, which looks at Hawass's view that KV63 was originally a tomb and was later used as a storage area for embalming materials. Schaden and Hawass have differing views on whether or not the tomb's original owner can be identified:

"Hawass says historical evidence indicates that Tutankhamun's mother died giving birth to him and that there was not enough time to build her an elaborate tomb. Tutankhamun took the throne at the age of 8 or 9 more than 3,300 years ago. Before he died in his late teens, he asked to be buried near his mother, Hawass says.
Pottery and seals found in the tomb were similar to those found in King Tut's tomb. Faces painted on coffins in both tombs closely resemble each other as well, Hawass says.
But Egyptologist Otto Schaden of the University of Memphis, who is leading the archaeological team, says there is not enough evidence to determine whose tomb it was.
'The coffin has absolutely no royal insignia, so it's very unlikely it belongs to a queen,' Schaden says. 'As head of the antiquities, (Hawass is) in a position to draw whatever conclusions he wishes. I can't say he's wrong because I can't say whose tomb it was meant to be.'

As archaeologists continue to examine the final coffin's fragile contents, they hope to find hieroglyphics that give more decisive evidence of the tomb's former inhabitant."

See the above article for the full story.

Potential problem with Tutankhamun London visit

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2261991,00.html

An article about the troubled UK deputy prime minisiter, John Prescott, which mentions in passing a possible threat to the London visit in 2007 of the Tutankhamun exhibition, which is supposed to be hosted at the Greenwich Dome: "Prescott is under pressure over his links to Philip Anschutz, the US tycoon with business interests in London who entertained the deputy prime minister at his Colorado ranch. An Anschutz company that owns a stake in the Millennium Dome is threatening to shelve £300m of proposed investment and cancel a Tutankhamun exhibition unless it is granted a licence for a supercasino."

Petrie Book Auction

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/FriendsofPetrie/pages/Bookauction2006.html
On Wednesday 12th July The Friends of the Petrie Museum will be holding their annual book auction in Room G6, Institute of Archaeology (University College London), 30 Gordon Square.

Email and postal bids are both possible, and full details of how to go about this can be found on the above page.

There are a few Ancient Near East and general titles, but the majority are Egyptology. There is the usual mix of some very desirable titles, useful out-of-print books and other more general items.

'Viewing' is from 5pm with the auction starting at 6pm. All welcome. If you would like an email list of titles with the current bid status, please email Jan Picton (Secretary, Friends of the Petrie) at:

j.picton@ucl.ac.uk

Last year they raised 2300 pounds. All proceeds go towards the conservation of objects in the Petrie Museum so please support the auction.

The Petrie Museum is located in London, UK:

http://www.petrie.ucl.ac.uk/

More information about the Friends of the Petrie can be found at:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/FriendsofPetrie/index.html