Theban Mapping Project Progress Report 2010

Theban Mapping Project

News about the Susan Howe Weeks Memorial Fund and the most recent excavation work at KV5.

Proyecto Qubbet el-Hawa

Proyecto Qubbet el-Hawa

Thanks to Alejandro Jiménez Serrano for letting me know that the team has just begun the third season of their work at Qubbet el-Hawa, where they are excavating tombs QH33, 34 and carrying out consolidation work on Khunes' tomb (QH34h). Follow their dig diary at the above address. Please note that is in Spanish, but they hope to have an English version very soon so do keep an eye open! There is also a virtual tour of the necropolis.

Factum Arte's work in the tomb of Tutankhamun

Factum Arte

With photos.

Thanks to Jane Akshar and her blog for the above link.

The High resolution recording and production of an exact facsimile of the Tomb of Tutankhamun is part of A major initiative by the Supreme Council of Antiquities to preserve the tombs in the Valley of the Kings while making important tombs that are either closed or in need of closure accessible to the public and to scholars.

The project has been launched by Dr Zahi Hawass in collaboration with the University of Basel, The Friends of the Royal tombs of Egypt, the Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation and Factum Arte.

The Supreme Council of Antiquities has granted permission for the recording and facsimile production of the tombs of Seti i (closed to the public since the late 1980’s), Nefertari (closed to the general public but still visited by special appointment) and Tutankhamun.

All the recording of the tomb of Tutankhamun has now been completed. Work on the processing of the data is now underway and work on the facsimile of the burial chamber and sarcophagus of Tutankhamun will be completed in time for the opening of the Susanne Mubarak Children’s Museum in January 2010.

Dr Zahi Hawass has identified a site near Carter House at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings to install the facsimiles and a full feasibility study has been commissioned.

Egyptian papyrus found in Irish bog

physorg.com

The papyrus in the lining of the Egyptian-style leather cover of the 1,200-year-old manuscript, "potentially represents the first tangible connection between early Irish Christianity and the Middle Eastern Coptic Church", the Museum said.

"It is a finding that asks many questions and has confounded some of the accepted theories about the history of early Christianity in Ireland."

Raghnall O Floinn, head of collections at the Museum, said the manuscript, now known as the "Faddan More Psalter", was one of the top ten archaeological discoveries in Ireland.

It was uncovered four years ago by a man using a mechanical digger to harvest peat near Birr in County Tipperary, but analysis has only just been completed.

O Floinn told AFP the illuminated vellum manuscript encased in the leather binding dated from the eighth century but it was not known when or why it ended up in the bog where it was preserved by the chemicals in the peat.

"It appears the manuscript's leather binding came from Egypt. The question is whether the papyrus came with the cover or if it was added.

More re Kharga city discovery

New York Times (John Noble Wilford)

With map and photographs.

Over the last two decades, John Coleman Darnell and his wife, Deborah, hiked and drove caravan tracks west of the Nile from the monuments of Thebes, at present-day Luxor. These and other desolate roads, beaten hard by millennial human and donkey traffic, only seemed to lead to nowhere.

In the practice of what they call desert-road archaeology, the Darnells found pottery and ruins where soldiers, merchants and other travelers camped in the time of the pharaohs. On a limestone cliff at a crossroads, they came upon a tableau of scenes and symbols, some of the earliest documentation of Egyptian history. Elsewhere, they discovered inscriptions considered to be one of the first examples of alphabetic writing.

The explorations of the Theban Desert Road Survey, a Yale University project co-directed by the Darnells, called attention to the previously underappreciated significance of caravan routes and oasis settlements in Egyptian antiquity. And two weeks ago, the Egyptian government announced what may be the survey’s most spectacular find.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the archaeologists had uncovered extensive remains of a settlement — apparently an administrative, economic and military center — that flourished more than 3,500 years ago in the western desert 110 miles west of Luxor and 300 miles south of Cairo. No such urban center so early in history had ever been found in the forbidding desert.

Dr. John Darnell, a professor of Egyptology at Yale, said in an interview last week that the discovery could rewrite the history of a little-known period in Egypt’s past and the role played by desert oases, those islands of springs and palms and fertility, in the civilization’s revival from a dark crisis. Other archaeologists not involved in the research said the findings were impressive and, once a more detailed formal report is published, will be sure to stir scholars’ stew pots.

Ancient port city to be opened to the public

Yahoo! News

With photos.

Today, it's a sprawl of luxury vacation homes where Egypt's wealthy play on the white beaches of the Mediterranean coast. But 2,000 years ago, this was a thriving Greco-Roman port city, boasting villas of merchants grown rich on the wheat and olive trade.

The ancient city, known as Leukaspis or Antiphrae, was hidden for centuries after it was nearly wiped out by a fourth century tsunami that devastated the region.

More recently, it was nearly buried under the modern resort of Marina in a development craze that turned this coast into the summer playground for Egypt's elite.

Nearly 25 years after its discovery, Egyptian authorities are preparing to open ancient Leukaspis' tombs, villas and city streets to visitors — a rare example of a Classical era city in a country better known for its pyramids and Pharaonic temples.

"Visitors can go to understand how people lived back then, how they built their graves, lived in villas or traded in the main agora (square)," said Ahmed Amin, the local inspector for the antiquities department. "Everyone's heard of the resort Marina, now they will know the historic Marina."

Press TV

With photo.

Egypt is planning to open the ancient city of Leukaspis, a 2,000-year-old Greco-Roman port city buried under the northern modern resort of Marina.

Also known as Antiphrae, the city was hidden for centuries after it was nearly wiped out by a tsunami that devastated the region in the fourth century.

Egyptian authorities have now decided to open the site with all its two-story villas and zigzagg streets nearly 25 years after its discovery, AP reported.

"Visitors can go to understand how people lived back then, how they built their graves, lived in villas or traded in the main agora (square)," said the local inspector for Egypt's antiquities department Ahmed Amin.

The ancient tombs and houses of Leukaspis were found when Chinese engineers were building roads for the Marina resort in 1986.

Two thousand years later, still quite a woman

kansascity.com

How does a piece of art survive in near-perfect condition for almost 2,000 years?

You bury it.

“Egypt is the perfect place to preserve wood, fibers and mummies,” says Robert Cohon, curator of ancient art at the Nelson. “It’s dry, there are no plants or tree roots to interfere with the coffin, and there is no problem with moisture and humidity out in the desert.”

“Portrait of a Woman” at one time had been placed over the face of an Egyptian mummy. It depicts a woman of about 35. Given the jewelry she is wearing, she probably lived a comfortable life.

The piece is painted on smooth wood using the encaustic technique.

Pyramids' Cave World Discovered At Giza

PR Log

Be warned - there's the inevitable Indiana Jones reference.

Huge natural cave world full of bats has been found close to the Great Pyramid on Giza's famous plateau, leading archaeologists now confirm.

A vast natural cave system has been discovered beneath the shadow of the Great Pyramid, and now it’s official.

That is the verdict of world renowned Egyptologist Dr Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, who explored this mysterious underworld of passages and chambers in US television show “Chasing Mummies” this week, having previously dismissed its discovery by a British explorer.

The History Channel series showed dramatic scenes of Dr Hawass and his team – which included consulting archaeologist Dr David Cheetham – advancing through an extraordinary, bat-infested cave realm in scenes that would not have looked out of place in an Indiana Jones movie.

At the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1923

National Geographic

An Account of the Opening of the Royal Egyptian Sepulcher Which Contained the Most Remarkable Funeral Treasures Unearthed in Historic Times. By Maynard Owen Williams, staff correspondent

With photographs

This article was published in the May 1923 National Geographic. We've retained the originally used names and spellings here.

Probably no great graveyard occupies so unusual a site as the Tombs of the Egyptian Kings at Thebes.

Across the Nile from the Temple of Karnak the western skyline is broken by rough limestone cliffs whose color varies from hour to hour. Nature here changes her complexion with the passing of the day, now softly seductive under a filmy veil before the footlights of the sun's first level rays, now savagely sharp under the fierce floodlight of noonday, now darkly mysterious beneath the glowing evening sky. The monotony of rich fields so familiar in the flat delta of Lower Egypt here gives way to the variety of barren waste where tomb robbers and scientists have sought so long the hiding places of the Pharaohs.

Ten thousand tourists have tramped above the spot where the latest find has just been made. Other archeologists, looking for the needle entrance to the royal tomb of Tutankhamen in the limestone haystack of el Qorn, came within a few feet of where, after sixteen years of labor, the late Lord Carnarvon and Mr. Howard Carter found their reward.

Book Review: Deir el-Balah

Biblical Archaeology Review (Review by Carol A. Redmount)

Deir el-Balah: Uncovering an Egyptian Outpost in Canaan from the Time of the Exodus by Trude Dothan
Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 2008, 168 pp.

The critical clue was the yellow sand. But for the grains of fine yellow sand clinging to the clay coffin lid, the source of the stunning finds—carnelian and gold jewelry, scarabs, alabaster vessels, Canaanite, Cypriot and Mycenaean pottery, anthropoid clay coffins—flooding the antiquities market in Jerusalem after the Six-Day War might never have been discovered, or discovered too late for the scientific excavation needed to illuminate the cultural and historical context of the artifacts. Without such excavation, the origin and date of the finds would forever remain guesswork, and it would be impossible to understand the true importance of the objects. It was the yellow grains of sand still on the sarcophagi reaching the antiquities market that eventually led Trude Dothan, under Israeli army escort, to the Gaza Strip site of Deir el-Balah.

Dothan’s Deir el-Balah: Uncovering an Egyptian Outpost in Canaan from the Time of the Exodus is part memoir, part excavation report and part object catalogue (of artifacts she did not herself excavate).

Exhibition: Where's Cleo?

Archeaology Magazine (Mark Rose)

Cleopatra’s reputation as a seducer of emperors—Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian (later Caesar Augustus)—and her suicide by snake bite have made her one of the ancient world’s most intriguing characters. Now she is the subject of Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute.

While Cleopatra’s name is on the marquee, she is largely absent from the show. The exhibition’s highlights are artifacts recovered from the harbor of Alexandria and the submerged cities of Canopus and Heracleius by an expedition led by businessman-turned-archaeologist Franck Goddio. These include a pair of 16-foot-tall statues representing a pharaoh and queen, a head of Caesarion (Cleopatra and Julius Caesar’s son), and Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, portrayed as a sphinx. But these identifications are not very convincing and come with qualifiers such as “possibly” or “may be” attached.

Recent offerings from the Griffith Institute

Ancient World Online (Charles Ellwood Jones)

Thanks to Chuck Jones for posting a list of recent open access offerings from the Griffith Institute, Oxford, including some 1,800 photographs of Egypt and Sudan taken by Reginald St. Alban Heathcote between 1922 and 1933 which can now be seen online on the Griffith Institute's website.

Threat by tour guides to go on strike

Luxor Times

According to Egyptian Newspapaer Al Ahram, Mostafa Waziry, Qurna Antiquities manager, had attacked a tour guide and slapped him 7 times after he made one of the guards hold the tour guide down and there was a religious reasons behind it as the tour guide comes from the same town of Mostafa Waziry,Naga Hamadai – north of Qena. It was also mentioned that the Luxor tour guides syndicate threatened that all tour guides in Luxor will start a strike if Mostafa wasn’t held down and slapped 7 times as he did to the tour guide.

Egyptian Tour Guides

Egypt Daily News (Scott Liddle)

Candlesticks, tobacco and pipes, almond paste, a flag, and a light Cairene donkey-saddle are some of the items a traveler should acquire for a journey in Egypt according to Murray’s Guide to Egypt, published in 1847.

And as Thomas Cook’s Tourists’ Handbook for Egypt of 1897 makes clear, the services of a guide, or “dragoman,” were also considered indispensable for a traveler in Egypt.

Nowadays some 13 million travelers come to Egypt each year, very few of whom acquire either candlesticks, almond paste, or a light Cairene donkey-saddle for their journey. But for the majority of visitors, Egypt’s ancient antiquities are the main attraction. And for these a guide is still indispensable.

“When people choose to visit Egypt, they are choosing a cultural tour. There are beaches all over the world better than those in Egypt. There are ocean cruises that are better than cruises in Egypt. But Egypt is always a cultural tour,” Waleed Zayan, 42, tells me.

Waleed is one of some 15,000 tour guides working in Egypt. Although representing only a small fraction of the Egyptian workforce — or even of the estimated 12 percent of Egyptian workers employed in tourism — tour guides have an unusually important role.

Because of the historical and cultural focus of many tourists’ visits to Egypt, the role of the guide is crucial for unlocking some of the meaning and purpose behind the impressive monuments that travelers visit.

New issue of KMT Fall 2010

KMT Magazine
Volume 21, Number 3, Fall 2010

Includes Six Feature Articles:

Laser Cleaning Tomb Paintings at Luxor (TT49) by Birte Graue, Violeta Maria Pereyra, Susanne Brinkman & Christina Verbeek

The Enigma of Kings Valley Tomb 58 by Dylan Bickerstaffe

The Film Record of the Egypt Exploration Society’s Excavations at El Amarna by Chris Naunton

Egyptian Masterpieces in the Collection of the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia by Victor V. Sorkin

Revisiting Breasted’s Egypt by Gene Kritskey

Giant of Egyptology No. 25: John D.S. Pendlebury

Plus “Nile Currents” & “For the Record,” as well as reviews of: Exodus Quest by Will Adams; Beneath the Sands of Egypt by Donald P. Ryan; Mummies in Nineteenth Century Egypt by S.J. Wolfe with Robert Sinerman; The Mysterious Tomb 63, E. Dziobek & M. Hoveller-Muller, eds.; Whose Cartouch Is That? by Artie R. DeNoyer; The Akhenaten Colossi of Karnak by Lise Manniche; Ancient Egyptian Art by Alice Cartocci; Tutankhamun’s Footwear by Andrej Veldmerijer; & Edward William Lane by Jason Thompson

Book Review: Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt

FT.com (John Ray)

Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 400 pages

In the city of Sais in the Nile Delta there was once a goddess called Neith. She was a virgin, who gave birth of her own accord to the sun god. A few hundred miles south the same goddess was worshipped in another temple. This time she was married to a god with a ram’s head who moulded mankind on his potter’s wheel. Further south still, the potter god reappears, but now married to an entirely different goddess. The pair have a daughter who wears ostrich feathers on her head and has a pet gazelle. The gods of Ancient Egypt can shift their identity in ways that are quite confusing.

We think we know the gods of Greece and Rome, but the gods and goddesses of Egypt are much harder to pin down. The best known myth from Egypt is the story of Osiris and Isis. This is familiar to us but mainly because an account survives in the pages of the Greek author Plutarch, who wrote two and a half millennia after the pyramids. From the Egyptian texts themselves, we have only hints and allusions. Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt takes on the job of weaving a narrative out of these allusions, and the result is an enjoyable book by a skilled author.

Short survey - Should the retrieval of Egyptian antiquities be a government priority?

Al Masry Al Youm (Heba Helmy)

After the theft last month of Van Gogh’s famous "Poppy Flowers" painting--valued at US$55 million--from Cairo's Mahmoud Khalil Museum, concerns have arisen about the relative safety of the country’s precious artworks and antiquities. Al-Masry Al-Youm hit the streets of the capital to ask: Should the retrieval of Egyptian antiquities be a government priority?

Saad Razaq, lawyer: "Reclaiming antiquities is a very important step, which should have been taken years ago. Our monuments constitute our heritage, so the government should exert more effort to protect them. I feel sorry when I travel abroad and see how our monuments are appreciated by foreigners, while here in Egypt we don’t pay much attention to their historical value."

Into the tombs of the pharaohs

The Telegraph, UK (Sophie Campbell)

She was lying on her back at the bottom of the sarcophagus, legs pressed together under a fitted tunic, arms by her sides, bobbed hair immaculate, gazing skywards like a sunbathing tourist. This was Nut, the Egyptian goddess of the night, who swallows the sun every evening and gives birth to it again every dawn. She was very beautiful and her tunic was sprinkled with stars.

"That's a mirror you're looking at," said Khaled, Egyptologist and guide, as we squatted by the stone sarcophagus in the Cairo Museum. "She's actually carved onto the lid."

I tried not to look startled. Nut had been imprisoned in darkness for 3,000 years or more, staring not up at the sky and stars but down at a mummy-form coffin. It gave me an odd sensation – part claustrophobia, part morbid fascination – that seems to lurk about Ancient Egyptian history.

Khaled faced a mammoth task. I find our own kings and queens tricky enough to memorise, and they are a paltry 1,000 years' worth, a blink of a kohl-lined eye by Egyptian standards. He had four days to explain the "Book of the Dead", the subject of an exhibition opening at the British Museum in November, which covers millennia of Egyptian royals.

Online article - Egyptian faience

Article Study

Introduction

From the inception of faience in the archaeological record of Ancient Egypt, the elected colors of the glazes varied within an array of blue-green hues. Glazed in these colours, faience was perceived as substitute for blue-green materials such as turquoise, found in the Sinai peninsula, and lapis lazuli, from Afghanistan. As early as the Predynastic graves at Naqada, Badar,el-Amrah, Matmar, Harageh, Avadiyedh and El-Gerzeh, glazed steatite and faience beads are found associated with these semi-precious stones. The association of faience with turquoise and lapis lazuli becomes even more conspicuous in Quennou’s funerary papyrus, giving his title as the director of overseer of faience-making, using the word which strictly means lapis lazuli, which by the New Kingdom had also come to refer to the ’substitute’, faience. The symbolism embedded in blue glazing could recall both the Nile, the waters of heaven and the home of the gods, whereas green could possibly evoke images of regeneration, rebirth and vegetation.

Photo for Today - will be resumed soon

Apologies to everyone for the late updating of the blog. I've been a bit busy with other things, but you'll find the best of the backlog above. See more tomorrow.

The Photo for Today will be back when I have sorted out the next batch of Rick's photos and captions, probably tomorrow.