Weekly Websites

An earlier Amarna discovery at Saqqara
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0311/feature3/index.html

During the process of a massive turn out of my house, I found an old National Geographic article by Alain Zivie, looking at the excavation of another Amarna era tomb at Saqqara. As usual with National Geographic, the photographs are absolutely beautiful (by Kenneth Garrett). Three of the photographs are linked to from the above page (in the left hand navigation column). The tomb consits of a colonnaded funerarcy chapel with a rock cut tomb belonged to Raiay-Hatiay, the son of a goldsmith who became a senior administator in the temples of Aten in Akhetaten (Amarna). One of the photos on the above page shows his titles. His wife, Maia is shown as well. The tomb was never used, and it is not known where he was originally laid to rest. The art work is typical of the Amarna period, and some some of the glorious original colour remains.

Notes by the photographer about the assignment can be found at:

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0311/feature3/assignment1.html

The Egypt Archive
http://www.egyptarchive.co.uk/html/index.html

The excellent and long established Egypt Archive is Jon Bodsworth's photographic archive of ancient Egypt. As well as covering some of the key sites of Cairo, Abydos and Luxor, a number of museums are represented as well. The photographs shown on the site are low resolution, but are copyright free - and the quality of even the low resolution images is very good. My favourite is this Old Kingdom wooden statue from the Cairo Museum:

http://www.egyptarchive.co.uk/html/cairo_museum_17.html

In addition to the photographs, Jon has a Historical Archive containing some fascinating material including photographs of the interior of the Great Pyramid by the Edgar Brothers in the early 1900s, plates from an original 1877 copy of Piazzi Smyth's Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, and plates from W.H. Bartlett's mid 1850s The Nile Boat or Glimpses of the Land of Egypt.

The fire makers of El-Kharafish
http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/riemer/index.html

"Since 1995 archaeological research on the interaction of climate and cultural development in arid zones of the Western Desert of Egypt has been carried out within the frame of the interdisciplinary ACACIA project (University of Cologne, Germany). The main period of interest is the so-called Holocene humid phase, c. 9000-5000 cal BC, when the Eastern Sahara had turned into a dry Savannah-like environment (Gehlen et al. 2002). In recent years the focus of research has shifted towards the late prehistory and the transition to the pharaonic occupation in the Western Desert, c. 3000-2200 cal BC, since there have been a number of surprising discoveries of pharaonic and late prehistoric sites. While most sites belong to pharaonic operations, such as along the 400km long Abu Ballas Trail (Kuper 2001), the site El-Karafish 02/5 is a temporary desert camp site of the local pastoral nomads."