Mapping ancient Egyptian sites

archaeology-news.org

Hundreds of viper trails covered the sand before them. The Egyptologists could only hope that the serpents themselves were long gone as they made their way off the ancient desert road towards the limestone cliffs.

First to reach the wall, Dr John Coleman Darnell of Yale University, was surprised to find the surface covered with rough hieroglyphic inscriptions in apparently random patterns. What did they mean?

His past experience in the field led Darnell to think the markings were graffiti. The wall was close enough to an ancient campsite to serve as the common latrine for drivers, merchants and guards. The inscriptions, over 500 counted so far, were the ancient equivalent of writing on the bathroom wall. Darnell was the first person to see that graffiti in possibly 5000 years.

Using standard archaeological methods to measure, record and interpret the inscriptions on this wall could be the work of an entire career, by itself. But Professor Darnell’s plan wasn’t to use conventional techniques in this survey. His team was packing a technological edge that would make quick work of this fascinating new find.

When most people think of Egypt, the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx, Queen Cleopatra, King Ramses II and, of course, the boy king Tutankhamen, spring to mind. In the popular imagination, thanks to explorers like John Carter and classic films such as The Ten Commandments and Cleopatra, Egypt is renowned as an ancient land of mystery whose roots run back to the foundations of human civilisation. It is the Egyptologists who dedicate themselves to uncovering the hidden past of this glorious land.

An author of several books on Egyptology, including Tutankhamun’s Armies, with Colleen Manassa (J. Wiley and Sons, 2007), Professor Darnell is the co-director of the joint Thebian Desert Road Survey and Yale Toshka Desert Survey.

Darnell’s team is working in a harsh environment in the Western Desert, which lies to the west of the Nile in Egypt, Libya and north western Sudan. About 700,000 square km in area, the temperature can rise to over 40 degrees in the midday heat and drop towards zero at night.

See the above page for the full story.

Musée du Louvre Launches Online Database in English

Art Museum Journal (Stan Parchin)

Paris' Musée du Louvre announced today the launch of its first-ever English-language version of Atlas, its free-of-charge online collections database. Supported by €300,000 in grants raised by American Friends of the Louvre, it goes live tomorrow morning.

Some 22, 000 works of art, accompanied by high-resolution images and information about their specific locations within the museum, are now described in English on the Louvre's Web site.

Needless to say the Egyptian department has a presence in the database! See the above page for the full story.

Egyptian Grand Museum worthy of the Pharaohs

The National (Digby Lidstone)

It took about 20 years to build the Great Pyramid of Giza, archaeologists believe. It will take about the same amount of time for the Grand Egyptian Museum to be completed.

Given the scale of the project, it is not entirely surprising. Conceived in 1992, the US$550 million (Dh2.02 billion) museum is an undertaking worthy of the Pharaohs: a vast, stone-roofed structure that will extend from the edge of the Giza plateau across an area the size of 11 football pitches. The museum will house more than 100,000 ancient artefacts, chief among which are the contents of King Tutankhamen’s tomb.

“Egypt’s heritage is very important for its tourism, and so although we have to protect it, we also have to sell it in some way,” says Professor Alaa al Din Shaheen, the dean of Cairo University’s faculty of archaeology and a member of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

With a project manager due to be announced this month, tendering due in September and a new opening date set for 2013, the museum project cannot come too soon for Cairo. Tourism is integral to the Egyptian economy, with receipts from visitors growing four-fold over the past decade to reach more than $11bn last year. The industry accounts for 11 per cent of Egypt’s GDP.

See the above page for the full story.

Teaching by learning first hand

The Times Tribune (Carl Keith Greene)

A memo from Corbin Superintendent Ed McNeel sent a pair of teachers from the city middle school on a trek along the Nile this summer.

Melissa Evans and Michele Anderson took the challenge — they applied for and received the grant that would take them to the land of camels, caravans and Cleopatra.

From June 26 to July 8, they and other teachers toured the Nile Valley in Egypt from Alexandria to near the border with Sudan, experiencing the historical and modern cultures of the nation.

The trip was paid for by a grant from the Fund for Teachers, a non-profit organization that seeks to enrich “the personal and professional growth of teachers” through first-hand experiences across the globe.

Evans explained that one of the criteria of the grant is that the teachers write a thematic unit that connects in some way to the subjects being taught in their classes. Evans teaches science and Anderson, mathematics.

And from the trip they brought back to share “lots of understanding and knowledge of their culture and the contributions they have made to the world,” said Anderson.

They also learned how Americans have misconceptions of the life of people in Egypt. And through that learning, the pair can help people to know that Egyptians, though different, are typical, peaceful Muslims and are not to be feared, but embraced.

“They were kind to us and we never had a reason to be afraid,” Evans said. “They are good, family-oriented people. Everyone in the family works. It’s a survival situation.”

She said by experiencing the trip, she and Anderson can help make Egypt more real for the students.

“You can read and read and know (about a place) but to experience it is different. What we wanted was an experience,” she said.

“There are not a lot of cultural experiences for the (school) children. To see it first hand and bring it back and share with the students can help them to understand a small piece of the rest of the world,” Anderson added.

The trek started in Cairo, literally across the street from the pyramids and Sphinx, the tombs of Egyptian kings.

See the above page for the full story.

Book Review: Ramesside Inscriptions. Translations. Vol. 5

Bryn Mawr Classical Review (Review by Peter C. Nadig)

K. A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions. Translations. Vol. 5, Setnakht, Ramesses III and Contemporaries. Malden, Mass./Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. ISBN 9780631184317.

The Liverpudlian Egyptologist and emeritus Kenneth A. Kitchen is one of the leading authorities on the Ramesside Period, the 19th and 20th Dynasties of New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1292- 1070 BC). His opus magnum is the Ramesside Inscriptions (KRI) in eight volumes -- a painstaking compilation of inscriptions, graffiti, papyri and ostraca.1 The original edition completed in 1990 after 21 years primarily renders the hieroglyphic text of these sources in Professor Kitchen's own hand. In recent years he has begun to add two supplemental series to the original edition: Series A: Translations and Series B: Annotations (RITANC). The latter is to provide a bibliography, introductions, and a compact commentary. Five out of seven volumes of the translation series and two of the annotation series have so far been published. The book under review is No. V in the translations series and concerns the rule of the early twentieth dynasty kings Setnakht (1187-1185 BC) and his son Ramesses III (1185-1154 BC).2 It covers all the texts in the original hieroglyphic edition in KRI V. Since a corresponding annotation volume is still in preparation, this book therefore does not contain any explanatory notes or commentary. Like in the original volume a lengthy table of content -- which also includes the source references -- precedes an abbreviations and sigla list as well a short preface. A brief introduction to this volume's theme has been added. The text has marginal references to the pages of the hieroglyphic edition. Due to its size the table of contents can only be rendered in a concise form below, yet it provides a fair glimpse of the immense variety of the texts covered here. At the end of the book detailed indexes list the sources in museums and collections, papyri, ostraca, graffiti and private tombs in western Thebes.

The bulk of these texts derive from the huge mortuary temple of Ramesses III in Medinet Habu in western Thebes, one of the best preserved buildings from that period. It fills more than half the book.

See the above page for the full story.

Book Review: Cleopatra The Great

Yorkshire Post (Chris Bond)

Cleopatra The Great, The Woman Behind the Legend by Joann Fletcher. Published in paperback by Hodder

MENTION the name Cleopatra to most people and it's likely to conjure images of a sultry Elizabeth Taylor draped over Richard Burton's Marc Antony, or Shakespeare's tragic queen who took her own life with an asp.

Hollywood and the Bard helped cement Cleopatra's legend as a femme fatale whose dangerous liaisons almost brought the Roman empire to its knees. But over the centuries fact and fiction have become blurred, something Joann Fletcher wanted to separate.

The Barnsley-born historian and archaeologist spent five years researching and writing Cleopatra The Great, The Woman Behind the Legend, in a bid to debunk some of the myths surrounding one of history's most iconic figures.

See the above page for the full story.

Book Review: Household and Family Religion in Antiquity

Bryn Mawr Classical Review (Reviewed by David Elton Gay)

John Bodel, Saul M. Olyan (ed.), Household and Family Religion in Antiquity. The Ancient World: Comparative Histories. Blackwell Pub. ISBN 9781405175791

Household and Family Religion in Antiquity is a volume of essays that grew out of a 2005 conference at Brown University. The purpose of the book and the conference, the editors explain in their introduction, is "to advance our understanding, both contextually and comparatively, of a distinct and widespread ancient religious phenomenon--household and family religion--within a number of discrete cultural and historical settings of Mediterranean and West Asian antiquity." (p. 1) To achieve this end the editors brought together a range of scholars to discuss "the phenomenon of household and family religion in a number of different cultural contexts: Second Millennium West Asia (Mesopotamia, Emar, Nuzi, Ugarit); First Millennium West Asia (including Israel); Egypt; Greece; and Rome." (p. 1)

On the positive side the essays, which range from relatively brief summaries like Barbara Lesko's "Household and Domestic Religion in Ancient Egypt" (pp. 197-209) to detailed surveys, like Rainer Albertz's "Family Religion in Ancient Israel" (pp. 89-112), are generally sound introductory statements of the current situation in their respective fields concerning the study of family and household religion. The essays all follow a similar format, which aids in making comparisons, and are accessible to both the non-specialist scholar and general reader. Though the editors do provide a comparative essay by way of conclusion, comparison is little used elsewhere: the primary focus of these essays is on case studies of the particular cultural group and time covered in the individual essay rather than on the comparative study of the materials.

That said, it must also be noted that the book could have been much more. The main problem with the book is its failure to address the previous literature on household and family religion.

See the above page for the full story.

Hawas opens three ancient mosques in Damietta governorate

Egypt State Information Service

Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawas opened in Dammietta Monday three ancient mosques.

Restoration works on the three mosques began five years ago with a total cost of 57 million EGP.

The three mosques are Amr Bin Al-Ass which is considered the second mosque built in Egypt and Africa which was established but the high level of subterranean water resulted in the closure of the mosque for more than 30 years.

Photo - Overview of Taposiris Magna

drhawass.com

A photograph showing a great overview of the site. Includes two links to other Taposiris Magna images. Click on the image below to go to the full-sized photograph.

Travel: Cairo an open air museum

Otago Daily Times (Morgan Hewland)

Cairo is a crazy city, where drivers make six lanes out of a four-lane road, spend more time looking in their mirrors than at the way ahead, and alert other drivers to their presence by a series of horn toots, one short, two long, and others each with their own meaning.

It is where the Nile resembles an open sewer in parts, and where handcarts, donkeys and fat-tailed sheep make other city roads look like farm tracks.

It is where the locals are experts in removing from the unsuspecting tourist his every last Egyptian pound, by any means possible.

And yet it is a wonderful, exciting city with enormous history, and where the Step Pyramid of King Zoser can be found, built some 5000 years ago, preceding those at Giza and the pyramid built by Cheops by many centuries.

See the above page for more.

Online publication: Excavation in Egypt at Tell el-Balamun

British Museum

The fourth volume in the series of final reports for this project is entitled Excavations at Tell el-Balamun 2003 – 2008. It is available to download here in PDF format. The file is low-resolution for on-screen viewing. Users who want to receive a high-resolution version suitable for printing should email:

aspencer@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

Contents of the volume, Excavations at Tell el-Balamun 2003 – 2008:

* Preface
* Bibliography
* The Roman Street
* The subsidiary temple of Nekhtnebef (Temple B)
* Additional details of the excavation of Temple B
* A Brick temple of the Third Intermediate Period
* A barque-station of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (Temple E)
* Miscellaneous work, 2003-2006
* A brick platform of the Thirtieth Dynasty
* The magnetic survey (with T Herbich)

Download the full project report (7.6Mb)

Download cover for the project report (2.2Mb)

Results from earlier years, which may include previous work on some of the monuments included in the final volume, have been published as paper book editions through the British Museum Press and are listed at the foot of the Introduction page.

OFF TOPIC - Hadrian's Timber Wall

Theoretical Structural Archaeology (Geoff Carter)

I've been a fan of the above site for a long time. Geoff has been exploring Hadrian's Wall and has posted a fascinating piece about a vast timber wall which was apparently an earlier version of the later famous stone wall, now one of Britain's most desirable hikes.

Between Hadrian’s Wall and the ditch to north, archaeologists have found three lines of double postholes running parallel to the Wall, which may represent an early timber 'Wall', albeit temporary, comprising a box rampart and the ditch. This was almost certainly the largest structure timber ever built in this country, its full extent is not known for certain, but it was quite probably 117 km long, and would have required an estimated 2.5 million trees.

The evidence for these double postholes, often referred to as ‘cippi pits’, had been picked up in several excavations, and was compiled by Paul Bidwell of Tyne and Wear Museums (TWM) Archaeology, who were responsible for several of the excavations, [1]. His paper sought to set the evidence in the wider context of other Roman frontiers, and drew on Julius Caesar’s Account of the Gallic war, [De Bello Gallico],[2], particularly the siege of Alésia, in reaching his conclusion that these postholes represented ‘obstacles’ on the berm, probably sharpened wooden entanglements, similar to the ‘cippi’ referred to by Caesar. We shall return to these arguments, and Caesar, later, but it is clear that I consider term 'obstacles’ to be somewhat underselling this remarkable structure.

See the above for the full story. With lots of diagrams, photographs, maps, plans and illustrations.

Daily Photo by Bob Partridge

The facade of the Temple of Ramesses II
Abu Simbel


Copyright Bob Partridge,
Editor of Ancient Egypt Magazine, with my thanks

No update re exploration of the Pyramid of Khufu

Thanks to everyone who has emailed asking if I've heard anything about the examination by robot of the Pyramid of Khufu at Giza which was supposed to take place on the 26th of this month. Unfortunately I'm in the same position as the rest of you - I've had no information on the subject. But I'll post something the moment I hear anything.

The original announcement that the invesitgation was to take place was posted on the Egypt State Information Service website (thanks to Brian Donovan for the link).

KV 5 Update

Theban Mapping Project (Kent Weeks)

Thanks very much to Kate Phizackerley's "News from the Valley of the Kings" blog for the information that Kent Weeks has published a brief 2009 update on the clearing of KV 5, the tomb of the sons of Ramesses II. It is available on the Theban Mapping Project website. If you're not familiar with the tomb it is worth looking at the page just to see the site plan - remarkable!

The same page has Weeks's article Developing a Management Plan For Egypt's Valley of the Kings (Summer 2008).

Funding for Egypt related projects from the EES

Egypt Exploration Society

The EES is advertising that funding is now available for successful applicants. See the following two links for details:

Excavations Fund 2009
Centenery Awards 2009

COSI's trip to Egypt

CMB Magazine

Egypt. It’s a place frozen in time, a land of magnificent monuments to humankind’s enduring accomplishments. Glamour, romance, mystery and grandeur set the tone for this country in northeast Africa. Pencil in majestic pyramids, the Sahara desert and the Nile, the longest river on Earth, and you have a destination unlike any other on our planet.
Egypt is known for the Pyramids of Giza and the Valley of the Kings, but what lies still undiscovered? A group from Columbus was about to embark on a mission that forever changed their lives.

COSI, the Center of Science and Industry, has worked on an exhibit for the last five years called Lost Egypt: Ancient Secrets, Modern Science about Egypt and archeology. A year ago they started asking, how can we convince people to care about what life was like more than 4,000 years ago? They ended up finding the answer to that question on the shores of the Nile.

Three COSI staff members, Kate Storm, Carli Lanfersiek and Josh Kessler, along with WOSU videographer Cindy Gaillard, traveled to Egypt to interview archeologists and Egyptologists. They also brought Egypt’s magical charm and secrets to life through video and photography. And who better to photograph the ancient architectural perfection than world-renowned Columbus-based architecture photographer Brad Feinknopf. This was a shoot unlike any other that Feinknopf encountered.

Travel: Enjoying Egypt during Ramadan

Jane Akshar's Luxor News blog

Ramadan in 2009 will start on Friday, the 21st of August and will continue for 30 days until Saturday, the 19th of September.

Ramadan is a great time to visit a Muslim country. don't forget Egypt isn't just about antiquities but also about the people and the culture. Over 80% of the population are Muslims the rest being Coptic Christians and even the most lax and laid back make a special effort during Ramadan

Effects on tourist visiting sites - none what so ever, drink what you like, eat what you like, smoke what you like. I think it is nice not to smoke in a car when the driver is fasting but actually I think it nice not to smoke in a car full stop. Some drivers are very macho about their fasting and like to show how strong willed they are.

Effects on tourist in hotels - none what so ever, often the Christian staff do day time and Muslims night so don't assume everyone you see is fasting

Availability of alcohol - reduced during Ramadan although this is generally sold by Christians it does stop during Ramadan and strict Muslims will not handle it. 5* hotels are not affected.

Effects on tourists non tourist sites, banks, etc these often keep different hours during Ramadan generally closing for Iftar (the sunset meal) so just remember to go early in the day.

See the above page for the rest of Jane's excellent advice.

Oriental Institute Museum Audio Guides

The Oriental Institute blog

The Oriental Institute has released a set of audio tours of the collections on display in the Museum.

You can download them ahead of time and play them on your own iPod as you walk through the Museum, or you can check out iPods at the Suq at no charge to members, and for a fee of $5.00 for non-members.

The first group of tours includes:

* Highlights of the Collection
* The Ancient Middle East in the Time of Tutankhamun
* A Kid's Tour of Ancient Egypt
* The Bible and the Ancient Middle East (coming soon)

Other tours are under development.

* Audio Tour Guide, in Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf)

See the above page for the active links.

What is a pharaoh and why not call him a king?

examiner.com (Diana Gainer)

The "Word Geek" generally prefers calling a spade a spade. But the ancient king of Egypt was called a pharaoh for a reason. Nobody else’s king was a pharaoh. This word comes from a real and actual Egyptian word. The English version comes from Latin Pharao by way of Greek, also Pharao (with a macron or long sign over the “o”), via Hebrew par’oh, which also had a long “o.” The Hebrew version came from the original Egyptian which was written without vowels, transcribed pr’3. The Word Geek realizes that the last letter looks like a number, but that’s more or less the conventional way of representing a throaty sound called a glottal stop, which English has in the middle of “uh-oh.” Egyptian had three different kinds of glottal stop, actually, with the apostrophe and the apparent number three representing two of them. Originally, there would’ve been some vowels around those four consonants, making them pronounceable, so that the word probably sounded a lot like the Hebrew word above.

Anyway, the Egyptian expression means “great house, big house.” The first bit, pr, means “house” and the part with the two glottal stops means “big” or “great.” Originally the phrase referred to the palace where the king lived. But eventually it became a metaphor for the fellow who lived in that big house. That’s a lot like Americans speaking of the President by saying the White House said or did thus and so.

See the above page for the full story.