Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2006

http://www.archaeology.org/curiss/index.html

See the above address for a full list of contents of the latest issue of Archaeology magazine. Below are two items that might be of particular interest.

The magazine is leading with a feature entitled Archaeology: The Next 50 Years, by Brian Fagan, which looks at the future of archaeology irrespective of national boundaries. The abstract of the piece can be found at:

http://www.archaeology.org/0609/abstracts/fagan.html

"I believe that the most exciting discoveries will come not necessarily from the material remains of the past, but from the ancient intangibles, from the unwritten forces that have governed human behavior for nearly 200,000 years. In the next half-century, we'll come much closer to the ultimate goal of archaeology--understanding human diversity and ourselves in the context of more than 200 millennia. And that, in and of itself, is reason enough to study archaeology--to understand the world of the past and why human beings are so similar and yet so different."

See the above page for the entire abstract.

A second piece is concerned directly with Egypt:

http://www.archaeology.org/0609/abstracts/mut.html

Egypt's Ageless Goddess by Jennifer Pinkowski (a former editor of the magazine) considers that goddess Mut and describes her primary place of worship, the Temple of Mut in Luxor:

"I'd seen aerial photographs and site plans of the temple precinct, but its scale still surprised me. All around lay colossal arms and knees, chopped-up stone blocks, truncated columns, and sculptures of sphinxes, rams, and goddesses from sloe-eyed Hathor to lion-headed Sekhmet. Straight ahead were the ruins of the Mut Temple itself, with two front courtyards, halls, chapels, and the sanctuary in which the statue of Mut had stood. Beyond the temple was the isheru, a horseshoe-shaped sacred lake. A half-dozen isheru existed in antiquity; this was the only one to survive."

Again, the abstract can be found at the above address.