New on OsirisNet: Menna TT69

OsirisNet (in English)
OsirisNet (in French) 

One of my very favourite websites has now been updated with a section on the tomb of Menna (TT69) in the Valley of Nobles.  As usual the excellent descriptions are accompanied by diagrams, maps, illustrations and photographs. 

The tomb of Menna (TT69) is located in the necropolis of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna (see the location plans below), in the part known as the "upper enclosure". TT69 is one of a group of tombs which date to the end of the reign of Thutmoses IV and the beginning of the reign of Amenhetep III. This group includes the tombs of Nakht (TT52) and Djeserkareseneb (TT38). Although Menna calls himself "The eyes of the King in every place", the name of the actual king is not known, as no name is mentioned in the texts. The chapel provides an irreplaceable directory of scenes of everyday life and of funerary customs for all the publications on Egyptian art.

Update on the Lady Ka-Nefer-Nefer (St Louis) Mask

Bizjournals (Matthew Hibbard)

With photo of the mask

A 3,200-year-old mummy mask located in gallery 130 inside the St. Louis Art Museum isn’t going anywhere soon.

U.S. District Court Judge Henry Autry made that decision earlier this week, according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Missouri.

The government, represented by U.S. Attorney Richard Callahan, filed a claim in March 2011 stating that the “Mummy Mask of the Lady Ka-nefer-nefer” (1295-1186 BC) had entered the country illegally and should be retuned to the property of Eygpt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

According to court documents, the U.S. government alleges the mask was “packed for shipping” to Cario, Egypt in preparation for an exhibit in Tokyo. After a few trips in Egypt, the mask was declared “missing” in 1973. While the government declared the item to be out of Egyptian's possession, it was unable to provide specific facts to show the mask was indeed stolen in the first place.

Cultural Heritage Lawyer (Rick St Hilaire)

The U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Missouri, today published an order dismissing the government's’ forfeiture complaint against the Ka Nefer Nefer mummy mask.  The Egyptian artifact is located at the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM).

The government filed a claim in March 2011 to forfeit the 19th Dynasty Egyptian mummy mask of a noblewoman from SLAM, alleging that it was stolen from Egypt.

Judge Henry Autrey brought the government’s case to a halt after concluding this past Saturday that the federal attorneys failed to specifically articulate how the mask was stolen and smuggled, or how it was brought into the United States "contrary to law."

Excerpts from the court’s nine page opinion are quoted below with citations omitted . . . .

And on Looting Matters by David Gill.

Recent news re Hawass situation

Al Ahram Weekly

The article lists the allegations.

A judicial figure at the Public Funds Prosecution Office has denied reports circulated in different media outlets that former first lady Suzanne Mubarak was questioned in relation to charges filed against the former minister of state for antiquities, Zahi Hawass.

Hawass is facing charges involving the squandering of public funds and the theft of Egyptian antiquities during his decades-long career as an archaeologist and later as secretary-general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities and as minister of state for the recently-created Ministry for Antiquities.

On Monday the prosecution opened an investigation into Hawass, who faces seven charges filed against him by a number of archaeologists, including the editor-in-chief of a literary magazine.

And from Hawass himself:
drhawass.com

UNESCO - integrating heritage and tourism

UNESCO 

UNESCO Director-General, Irina Bokova underlined the importance of better integrating cultural heritage preservation and sustainable tourism during the Roundtable on World Heritage and Sustainable Tourism, held in Miami on 19 March. She highlighted that cultural heritage is a powerful driver of social and economic development for local communities.erful men in the archaeological world finally came to an end. . . .

The Director-General also highlighted the importance of a comprehensive approach to heritage preservation in its various forms, be it natural, cultural or intangible, in order to educate younger generations to the need to preserve it, not just as a historical legacy but as a living and fundamental component of our lives and of the lives of many communities around the world.

In this context, the Director-General invited the United States authorities to consider further advancing the ratification of the UNESCO 2003 Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention.

On this occasion, the Honorable Nathaniel Reed made a strong plea "to continue investment by appropriating funds for the national parks as great economic engines and vital for their sustainability".

Egypt smuggler caught in Brussels, 80 artefacts to return home

Ahram Online (Nevine El-Aref)

The Belgian court of appeal on Sunday ordered the return to Egypt of 80 artefacts stolen and smuggled out of the country.

The artefacts were discovered in April 2010 when customs officials at Brussels airport caught an Egyptian woman trying to smuggle the small objects inside two large wooden replica statues. Belgium police confiscated the artefacts and called the national museum to judge their authenticity. The case was sent to court after the museum found they were genuine.

Amarna News

Amarna news by Barry Kemp

1) Conservation appeal

One of the successful results of the excavations at the South Tombs Cemetery at Amarna has been the recovery of substantial parts of three decorated coffins and fragments from a fourth. Their decoration is a rare record of funerary beliefs held by the non-elite inhabitants of Amarna.

Much of the wood of the coffin panels has been consumed by termites, leaving little more than the brittle layer of paint itself. The conservation of this material, by professional conservators, has begun and will be pursued during the Amarna season that has just started.

To aid the work, we have recently launched an appeal on the Amarna Justgiving website:

http://www.justgiving.com/Amarna-Project2

Donation is easy, and the Gift-Aid element is automatically handled.

Please, if you can, help this project to succeed.

2) A specialist tour of the Nile Valley and Delta, with full day visit to Amarna, to run between December 1st and 14th, 2012, is now taking bookings.

It is organised by Far Horizons (Archaeological and Cultural Trips, Inc) and Barry Kemp will be the accompanying specialist. Go to the website:

http://www.farhorizons.com/trips/EgyptAfrica/UndiscoveredEgypt/TravelwithBobBrieronUndiscoveredEgypt.php

3) The new season has begun

The last season at Amarna - seeing further excavation at the cemetery - continued until the very end of 2011. After a break of nearly three months the expedition has resumed. The fieldwork is now at the site of the Great Aten Temple, fully excavated in 1932 but left unprotected. The aims are to clear it of debris, including rubbish dumped from the nearby village, to record afresh what is left, and to begin to mark the most prominent features in fresh brick and stone; this last in the hope of halting the steady advance of the village cemetery which now threatens to engulf the site. The first day of work was yesterday.

More news soon.

--
Support the work of the Amarna Project at:
http://www.justgiving.com/Amarna-Project2

The Ramesseum Papyri

The British Museum Blog

With photos.

For many years before joining the British Museum as a curator in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, my life was tied up with the so-called ‘Ramesseum papyri’: a library of ancient Egyptian papyri that were discovered in 1895-6 under the temple of Ramses II, now known as the ‘Ramesseum’. As a school boy I had bought Alan Gardiner’s 1955 partial publication of some of the papyri and my doctorate was a commentary on one of the poems preserved in them, The Eloquent Peasant.

The 24 papyri are an almost unique surviving example of an ancient Egyptian library that was buried in its owner’s tomb around 1680 BC, but although some of them have been much studied they are extraordinarily fragmentary and fragile. Over the years, Bridget Leach, the Museum’s papyrus conservator, and I have helped many students and scholars examine them, and every time we have worried about their extreme fragility. And so we were eager to have a full visual record made in high resolution colour, so that the papyri could also be studied remotely without being disturbed too often, as well as enabling a global audience to access them.

The British Museum

This online research catalogue brings together for the first time all of the surviving Middle Kingdom papyri from a 13th Dynasty shaft-tomb at Luxor that was later covered by the funerary temple of Ramses II, known as the Ramesseum. This unique library is now held in the British Museum (136 frames of papyri) and the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Berlin (38 frames). Associated objects from the tomb are held in the University Museum, Manchester, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

The EES Delta Surveys

EES Delta Survey  

The aim of the EES Delta Survey is to investigate those tells in the Delta about which little is known - to record surface features, get an idea of the dating of any material and the site in general and carry out surveys. If a site has any significant features, these can then be investigated in more detail. All the information gathered is fed back into the on-line data held on the Society’s website: http://www.deltasurvey.ees.ac.uk/ds-home.html to inform colleagues and record the current state of sites, many of which are under threat from urban or agricultural expansion. The work that Penny Wilson and her team are currently doing around Lake Burullos is the first stage in this process (gathering information), and the survey which they will start next week at Tell Mutubis http://ees.ac.uk/research/AEP%20Tell%20Mutubis.html is the follow-up stage of more detailed study. 

Follow the Gurob excavation

Gurob Harem Palace  

Blog

The main area of settlement remains at the site can be clearly identified as the remains of an independent establishment relating to royal women (a 'harem-palace'), founded in the reign of Thutmose III (1479-1425 BC) and occupied throughout the rest of the 18th Dynasty and presumably also for at least part of the Ramesside period. The inscriptions on stelae, papyri and various other inscribed artefacts from the main buildings at the site repeatedly include the titles of officials connected with the royal harem of Mer-wer. There was evidently a similar establishment at Memphis, but that site has not survived.

Video of the tunnels beneath the Step Pyramid

MSNBC Video

MSNBC were taken into the 5 miles of the Step Pyramid's subterranean tunnels by Zahi Hawass before he lost his position. A lot of scaffolding!  Very upbeat and excitable, but it has some really fascinating footage.  Not sure about the wisdom of letting the TV crew loose in the pyramid.

The Great Pyramids of Giza are one of the most iconic images in the world, but 19 miles south of modern-day Cairo lies the Saqqara plateau, Egypt’s oldest pyramid complex. Follow NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel to Egypt, where he journeys through a network of underground tunnels beneath the Step Pyramid of Djoser. 

Visualising ancient Egyptian artefact surface transformations

Kathryn Piquette's Blog 

These past several days have been largely occupied with preparing and delivering a conference paper at ‘The Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology’ (CAA) 2012 at the University of Southampton.

As mentioned in a previous post, I am researching early Egyptian (and Mesopotamian) image bearing artefact surfaces in order to understand how they were formed and transformed through scribal and artistic activities. Taking the example of elaborate carving on a Late Predynastic (c.3100BCE) Egyptian mudstone palette, namely the so-called Hunters Palette, I am investigating evidence for its creation through close analysis of the carved surface using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) data*.

Kom el-Daba signing off

EES Delta Survey

With photos

When we started fieldwork last year at Kom el-Daba we mapped the site and returned this year to try to establish the nature of the surviving high mounds of mud-brick. Our excavation has shown that these were town houses, probably of the Ptolemaic period. As at so many Delta sites, imagination is needed to envisage what the buildings were like before they were destroyed and in his talk in Mansura Jeff used the following two slides, of well-preserved houses at Karanis and a model, to show what our town houses would have looked like in antiquity.

Minufiyeh Survey update

EES Minufiyeh Survey

With photos.

In preparation for this week’s backfilling of the trenches, some protective measures needed to be carried out on the mud-brick structures in Trenches 11 and 12. Some cracks had started to appear and we decided that it would be prudent to try and make the structure stable before the backfilling on Wednesday and Thursday this week. Richard came down to the trench and worked together with Yasser to improve the situation. We had to send one of our workers into the fields below the site to get a sack of soil, which was then mixed with water to the right consistency. Richard and Yasser, using makeshift wooden spatulas (thanks to Richard’s trusty pocket knife!) gently pushed the mud deep into the cracks and added more until it came just to the surface. Richard was careful not to introduce mud beyond the cracks themselves, so as not to alter the actual appearance of the structure beyond its original form. The work was most successful and we hope that when we re-open the trenches in August all will be well.

Albany mummies to go under the scanner

YNN  (Beth Croughan)

With Video.

It's the most popular exhibition at the Albany Institute of History and Art. But Saturday, part of the Ancient Egypt display is taken out of the museum to unwrap a mystery.

There were no sirens as the Five Quad Ambulance made its way to the Albany Medical Center. On board wasn't your average patient. Upon arrival, volunteers removed one of the Albany Institute of History and Art's two mummies; about 3,000 years old and carefully covered during transport.

"We get a chance to play detective. We've got two mummies, we're not sure about a lot of things about them. We're not sure about their age, their sex, what kind of occupations they had," said Egyptologist Dr. Bob Brier.

Using X-Ray and CT Scan machines researchers and radiologists will work to uncover new information about this ancient egyptian history.

The Saratogian (Danielle Sanzone) 

An ambulance that would normally be speeding along Washington Avenue and into Washington Park was carefully maneuvering through downtown Albany at about 15 mph Saturday morning to avoid any potholes or bumps.

The reason? Its passenger was a 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy.

Two mummified Egyptians and an alligator mummy were transported to Albany Medical Center’s South Campus to undergo X-ray and CT scans in an effort to learn more about the Albany Institute of History and Art’s Egyptian collections and its mummies.

Royal Cornwall Museum mummy under the scanner

This is Cornwall

There seem to be so many mummy scans at the moment that it would be useful to collate all the findings. 

THE ANCIENT world met cutting-edge technology when an Egyptian mummy from the Royal Cornwall Museum had a CT scan.

Data from the scan at the Duchy Hospital will be used to recreate a face from what is now just a skull covered with dessicated flesh and skin.

The mummified remains of Iset Tayf Nakht, a priest, craftsman, husband and father who lived more than 2,500 years ago, have long been the Truro museum's most popular exhibit.

The recreated image of his head will feature alongside the original remains in a new permanent exhibition at the museum made possible by a £233,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Atherosclerosis and diet in ancient Egypt

The Lancet  

Thanks to Tony Cagle's Archaeoblog for this link.
The Lancet, Volume 375, Issue 9716, Pages 718 - 719, 27 February 2010

Rosalie David, Amie Kershaw and Anthony Heagerty

Atherosclerosis is often considered a modern disease, yet it is evident in the remains of many ancient Egyptians. The mummification process was usually done for the more affluent members of society, and a rich legacy of archaeological and literary evidence, as well as the pathology preserved in both skeletal and mummified remains, has enabled disease studies to be undertaken. These studies not only provide information about this early society, but also establish a historical context for diseases found in modern populations.

Atherosclerosis and vascular calcification are usually regarded as circulatory phenotypes associated with advanced modern lifestyles. However, although rare, such conditions have been identified in human remains from some early societies. Examples occur in an elite Chinese burial (c. 700 BCE), and among Canadian Eskimos (c. 400 CE to c. 1520 CE) whose diet was almost entirely meat. They have also been reported since the early 20th century in the mummified remains of the rulers and elite of ancient Egypt. Marc Ruffer described arterial lesions in hundreds of Egyptian mummies in 1911 and Graham Shattock noted atheromatous deposits in the aorta of King Menephtah in 1909; these findings were later confirmed by John Harris and Edward Wente's radiological survey in 1980, which additionally reported vascular calcification in the mummies of Ramesses II, Ramesses III, Sethos I, Ramesses V, and Ramesses VI..

Cairo: Egyptology in crisis

Current World Archaeology (Tom St John Gray)

March 29, 2012. Issue 49.

A lengthy extract from a longer artcile.  This chunk of the article mainly deals with the career of Zahi Hawass.

After the dramatic departure of President Hosni Mubarak, attention swiftly turned to one of his high-profile ministers, the world- famous archaeologist Dr Zahi Hawass. No stranger to the glare of the media spotlight, Hawass quickly became tainted along with the crumbling regime and was engulfed by damaging charges of corruption and mismanagement. On Sunday 17 July, Hawass was abruptly sacked as the Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs in an overhaul of the country’s cabinet, and his controversial reign as one of the most powerful men in the archaeological world finally came to an end.

Now online: Egyptological Edition 5, April 2012

www.egyptological.com

Editorial: Egyptological Magazine Edition 5:
http://www.egyptological.com/welcome/editorial

Articles:
Egyptologically Speaking: An Interview with Joyce Tyldesley (Interview by Barbara O'Neill)
Ancient Egyptian Religion, Part 5 — The Mansion of Millions of Years (Brian Alm)
Life on Mars: The Gilf Kebir, Zerzura and the Cave of Swimmers (Andrea Byrnes)
Arthur Weigall: A Man Out of Time – Part 2 (Garry Beuk)
Sleep and the Sleeping in Ancient Egypt (Barbara O'Neill)
The Birth Bower and Mamissi-Chapels in Ancient Egypt (Kate Phizackerley)

Reviews:
Documentary Review: The Man Who Discovered Egypt
Book Review: A Companion to Ancient Egypt
Book Review: Egyptian Myth – A Very Short Introduction
Book Review: Guide to the Valley of the Kings by Alberto Siliotti
Book Review: The Discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb and Tutankhamun’s Tomb: the Thrill of Discovery
Book Review: The Oases. Egypt Pocket Guide.

Albums:
Album: Valley of the Kings from the Theban Hills – Part 2
Album: The Mestekawi-Foggini Cave, Gilf Kebir

Book Review: Tutankhamen’s Curse

The Lancet PDF (Andrew Robinson)

The opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt in 1922 by Howard Carter and his patron Lord Carnarvon is the most famous archaeological discovery of all time, with the possible exception of the excavation of Pompeii in the 18th century. On the 50th anniversary, in 1972, this discovery provided Britain’s fi rst “blockbuster” exhibition at the British Museum—visited by many of us as schoolchildren, including Joyce Tyldesley, author of Tutankhamen’s Curse. Although the queue that day was so long that she had to leave with only posters and postcards, the event nevertheless kindled her interest in Egyptology. Her fixation with ancient Egypt—she is a senior lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Manchester—“may well be”, she writes, “my own, personal version of Tutankhamen’s curse”.

So much has been written on Tutankhamen that one might be excused for doubting the need for another book. But one would be wrong, given the developing scientifi c study of the objects from the tomb, including investigation of Tutankhamen’s mummy with x-rays, CT scans, and DNA analysis, alongside the increasing knowledge of the young pharaoh’s historical context generated by continuing excavations in such sites
as the Valley of the Kings, Luxor, and Amarna.

Book Review: Nofretete und Echnation

PalArch (Christoffer Theis)

PalArch’s Journal of Archaeology of Egypt/Egyptology, 9 (4) (2012)" April 5, 2012 at 07:54

Habicht, Michael E. 2011. Nofretete und Echnation. Das Geheimnis der Amarna-Mumien. – Leipzig, Koehler & Amelang GmbH.

Die Geschichte der Amarnazeit und das Wirken der verschiedenen Charaktere, deren Namen Echnaton, Nofretete, Tutanchamun oder Aja II.
wohl vielen Individuen ein Begriff sein dürften, ist in der Ägyptologie auch weiterhin ein vieldiskutiertes Thema - eine Publikationen zu den verschiedenen Bereichen [...]