Hidden King Tut Chambers? Not So Fast, Officials Caution

Egypt's new antiquities minister, Khaled El Anany, sounded caution this morning at a press conference in Luxor over the claim that Tutankhamun's tomb holds two hidden chambers.

Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project, had proposed that two hidden chambers were lurking in the tomb of Tutankhamun and that the hidden rooms may hold the tomb of Queen Nefertiti, the stepmom of King Tutankhamun.

Radar scans conducted last year by Japanese radar technologist Hirokatsu Watanabe supposedly supported this idea. On March 17, Egypt's ministry of antiquities, led at the time by Mamdouh ‪El-Damaty, stated that Watanabe's scans "suggest the presence of two empty spaces or cavities beyond the decorated north and west walls of the burial chamber," as well as the "presence of metallic and organic substances."

The radar scans also showed what could be door lintels that indicate the presence of doorways, the antiquities minster said at the time in a statement to media.

However, radar experts not affiliated with the project disputed the results of those scans. These experts noted that the sediment layers at the Valley of the Kings, where King Tut's tomb is located, contain natural voids and rock inclusions that make it difficult for radar to distinguish between archaeological remains and natural phenomena.

Over the past two weeks, the antiquities minister at the time, ‪El-Damaty, along with Egypt's minister of

However, radar experts not affiliated with the project disputed the results of those scans. These experts noted that the sediment layers at the Valley of the Kings, where King Tut's tomb is located, contain natural voids and rock inclusions that make it difficult for radar to distinguish between archaeological remains and natural phenomena.

Over the past two weeks, the antiquities minister at the time, ‪El-Damaty, along with Egypt's minister of tourism, Hisham Zazou, were replaced in a cabinet shuffle. Yesterday, a team supported by the National Geographic Society conducted new radar scans. Those scans are being processed and analyzed; however, the new antiquities minister — El Anany — sounded a note of caution at today's press conference.

"We are not looking for hidden chambers but for the reality of the truth," El-Anany said. "We are very keen to follow the scientific procedures," he said, adding that more radar work would be performed in late April, followed by an international conference in May in which experts would review the results. Egypt's former antiquities minister, El-Damaty, was also at today's press conference and said that while the two cavities could exist, "we have to be sure 100 percent."

Even so, the Egypt's antiquities ministry said in a statement that "the preliminary results [of yesterday's scans] reached so far do not contradict with the results of the previous radar scans."

Reeves also said that the two cavities, possibly holding a tomb, could still exist.

No new radar images were released to media.

Third set of scans

For the next scan, scheduled for the end of April, another team of scientists will use a different radar-scanning method on King Tut's tomb. In the previous two scans, scientists tried to peer behind the walls of the Tutankhamun burial chamber. The new scans will take place in the hills above Tutankhamun's tomb, using radar equipment that can peer 40 meters (130 feet) below the ground to see if hidden chambers exist.

The international conference to review the results will be held in the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, El Anany said. There, experts will discuss whether the two chambers exist, and if so, what could be in them and what would be the best way to access them. Scientists will not use any methods that could damage the artwork in Tutankhamun's tomb,
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Reference:

Jarus, Owen. 2016. “Hidden King Tut Chambers? Not So Fast, Officials Caution”. Live Science. Posted: April 1, 2016. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/54263-hidden-king-tut-chambers-may-not-exist.html

Facts on Tutankhamun's tomb

Specialists believe two rooms might be hidden inside the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, which was built some 3,300 years ago in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.

Here are key facts about the site.

Untouched treasure

In November 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb along with its treasure of more than 5,000 objects, many in solid gold. The tomb was nearly intact and it took Carter six years to excavate, with funding from Britain's Lord George Carnarvon.

The treasure was laid out in five rooms and included thrones, statues, furniture and arms.

The walls of the chamber in which Tutankhamun lay were covered in gold, and his coffin was a three-piece sarcophagus of which the outermost was in red quartzite and the innermost was 110 kilograms (240 pounds) of solid gold.

The pharaoh, who died in 1324 BC at the age of 19, had a funeral mask that was also made from gold, inlaid with lapis lazuli. Its eyes were made of obsidian and quartz. The mask has become one of the world's most widely-recognized Egyptian artifacts.

It took Carter 10 years to complete his exploration of the tomb and catalogue the thousands of objects that he found. Lord Carnarvon died In April 1923 in mysterious circumstances, fuelling speculation that the fabled "curse of the pharaohs" had struck one of those responsible for violating "King Tut's" tomb.

A child pharaoh

The discovery made Tutankhamun, who died after just nine years on the throne, one of Egypt's best-known pharaohs. In 2010, a study of DNA tests and CT scans concluded that he suffered from an often-fatal form of malaria and a club foot that caused him to walk with a cane.

Tutankhamun's reign coincided with a troubled time in Egyptian history known as the Amarna period, during which the pharaoh Akhenaten tried to radically transform religion to focus on just one god, Aton.

The DNA tests showed that Tutankhamun was Akhenaten's son, but not that of Nefertiti, an influential wife of the pharaoh celebrated for her beauty.

In fact, his mother is now believed to have been Akhenaten's sister.

Tutankhamun sired two children, both girls, but they died in the womb, the study found. King Tut's mummy is now on display in Luxor.

What's in the two rooms?

Egyptian Antiquities Minister Mamduh al-Damati told reporters Thursday that preliminary scans of Tutankhamun's tomb revealed "two hidden rooms behind the burial chamber" of the boy king that appeared to contain "some organic and metal material".

British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves believes that Nefertiti's tomb might be in a secret chamber adjoining that of King Tut.
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Reference:

Phys.org. 2016. “Facts on Tutankhamun's tomb”. Phys.org. Posted: March 17, 2016. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-facts-tutankhamun-tomb.html

8 Million Dog Mummies Found in 'God of Death' Mass Grave

In ancient Egypt, so many people worshiped Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death, that the catacombs next to his sacred temple once held nearly 8 million mummified puppies and grown dogs, a new study finds.

The catacomb ceiling also contains the fossil of an ancient sea monster, a marine vertebrate that's more than 48 million years old, but it's unclear whether the Egyptians noticed the existence of the fossil when they built the tomb for the canine mummies, the researchers said.

Many of the mummies have since disintegrated or been disrupted by grave robbers and industrialists, who likely used the mummies for fertilizer. Even so, archaeologists have found enough evidence to suggest that the Anubis animal cult was a large part of the ancient Egyptian economy.

Ancient Egyptians built the temple and catacomb in honor of Anubis in Saqqara, a burial ground in the country's ancient capital of Memphis. Archaeologists have also found catacombs with the mummified remains of such other animals as the ibis (long-legged birds), hawk, baboon and bull, suggesting the ancient Egyptians also worshipped other animal gods.

"When you go to Saqqara now, you see an area of attractive desert with the pyramids sticking up and one or two of the prominent monuments" associated with animal cults, said the study's lead researcher, Paul Nicholson, a professor of archaeology at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.

But during the Late Period (747 to 332 B.C.), if one were to visit Saqqara, they would have seen temples, merchants selling statues of bronze deities, priests conducting ceremonies, people offering to interpret dreams and tour guides jostling for business, Nicholson said. Not far off, animal breeders likely raised dogs and other creatures that would later be mummified in honor of the gods.

"It would have been a busy place," Nicholson told Live Science. "A permanent community of people living there supported by the animal cults."

'Monstrous deities'

People have known about Egypt's penchant for mummifying animals for more than a thousand years. In about A.D. 130, the Roman poet Juvenal wrote, "Who has not heard, Volusius, of the monstrous deities those crazy Egyptians worship? One lot adores crocodiles, another worships the snake-gorged ibis … you’ll find whole cities devoted to cats, or to river-fish or dogs."

In 1897, French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan published a paper on the necropolis at Memphis, but spent little time detailing the canine catacombs. Other researchers have taken cursory looks at the dog catacombs, but the new study is the first to analyze it in depth, the researchers said.

In fact, de Morgan drew a map showing two dog catacombs, but drifting sand and an earthquake in 1992 have made the smaller of the two inaccessible. So Nicholson and his colleagues spent countless hours examining the larger catacomb, studying its rock walls and mummified contents.

"It's a very long series of dark tunnels," Nicholson said. "There is no natural light once you've gone into the forepart of the catacomb, and beyond that everything has to be lit with flashlights. It's really quite a spectacular thing."

The catacombs were likely built in the fourth century B.C., and were made out of stone from the Lower Eocene (about 56 million to 48 million years ago). So, it was a nice surprise when researchers discovered a fossil in the catacomb's ceiling. The fossil belonged to a long-extinct marine vertebrate, likely a relative of modern-day manatees and dugongs, Nicholson said.

"The ancient [Egyptian] quarry men may have been aware of it, or they may have gone straight through it, it's hard to know," said Nicholson, who is still researching the fossil with several of his colleagues.

The researchers explored every possible nook of the catacomb, which measures 568 feet (173 meters) down the center passageway, with a maximum width of 459 feet (140 m) from the branch corridors. In addition to canine mummies, they found the mummies of jackals, foxes, falcons, cats and mongoose, although about 92 percent of the remains belonged to dogs, they found. 

It's unclear why these other animals were buried in the dog catacomb, "but it is likely that all 'doglike' creatures were interchangeable, and that mythological reasons probably underlie the choice of cats and raptors," the researchers wrote in the study, published in the June issue of thejournal Antiquity.

Pilgrims visiting Saqqara likely viewed the display of the mummies as expressions of gratitude that the gods would appreciate, Nicholson said. Many of the dogs were only hours or days old when they were mummified. Some older dogs had more elaborate burials, and may have lived at the temple, but the younger pups were likely "bred — farmed if you will — for the cult," Nicholson said.

It's likely that these young pups were separated from their mothers and died from dehydration or starvation. "They probably weren't killed by physical action; we don't have evidence of broken necks that you get with cat burials," Nicholson said.

Animal cults remained popular from about 747 B.C. to 30 B.C., but they declined during the Roman occupation. The cults likely gained support because they were uniquely Egyptian, and may have been a symbol of national identity when the country was invaded by the people of other nations, such as the Libyans and Persians, the researchers wrote in the study.

"They set up a pilgrimage temple for almost any deity you can fancy," said Aidan Dodson, a senior research fellow in archaeology at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, who wasn't involved with the study.

He agreed that the temples and catacombs likely spurred trade and commerce.

"There's probably a vast amount of trade coming in, not only for producing the animal mummies, but people wanting food, lodging and drinks," Dodson said. "It's probably an ancestor of a mass tourism industry."
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Reference:

Geggel, Laura. 2015. “8 Million Dog Mummies Found in 'God of Death' Mass Grave”. Live Science. Posted: June 18, 2015. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/51232-millions-of-dog-mummies-found.html

Recent Luxor discoveries include tomb inside Ramesseum

Two important discoveries in Luxor by French archaeological missions were announced by the Egyptian antiquities ministry on Friday.

The first was at the Ramesseum temple on Luxor’s west bank, where the tomb of a divine royal wife called Karomama was accidently discovered within the walls of temple.

The ministry's head of Ancient Egyptian antiquities, Youssef Khalifa, told Ahram Online that the tomb includes a five metre-deep shaft leading to a burial chamber with a stone door. Inside the tomb excavators unearthed a collection of 20 ushabti funerary figurines of Karomama, and the remains of offerings.

According to Khalifa the discovery is important because it sheds more light on the queen, about whom little is known. The only previous funerary collection of Karomama includes 12 ushabti figurines, two canopic jars and a bronze statue now on display at the Louvre in Paris.

Until now, he said, the king she was married to has not been identified, but this information will be revealed after further studies of the tomb.

The second discovery was at Karnak temple, where the French mission unearthed a collection of Late Period artefacts, including three small bronze statuettes and a pot containing the remains of blue glue.

The ministry's director-general of Upper Egyptian antiquities, Abdel Hakim Karar, told Ahram Online that the statues were offerings to gods presented at the temple.

Two of these statuettes are carved in bronze and depict the god Osiris sitting wearing a wig and the double crown on his head. The third statuette depicts an as-yet unidentified god in a standing position, decorated with hieroglyphic text.

Excavators are cleaning the statuette in order to reveal the god’s name.
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El-Aref, Nevine. 2015. “Recent Luxor discoveries include tomb inside Ramesseum”. Ahram. Posted: December 12, 2014. Available online: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/9/40/117752/Heritage/Ancient-Egypt/Recent-Luxor-discoveries-include-tomb-inside-Rames.aspx

Egyptologist unravels ancient mystery

It is one of the greatest archaeological mysteries of all times: the disappearance of a Persian army of 50,000 men in the Egyptian desert around 524 BC. Leiden University Professor Olaf Kaper unearthed a cover-up affair and solved the riddle.

Herodotus

It must have been a sand storm, writes the Greek historian Herodotus. He tells the story of the Persian King Cambyses, who entered the Egyptian desert near Luxor (then Thebes) with 50,000 men. The troops supposedly never returned; they were swallowed by a sand dune. A fantastic tale that was long the subject of many debates.

Long quest

Egyptologist Olaf Kaper never believed it: 'Since the 19th century, people have been looking for this army: amateurs, but also professional archaeologists. Some expect to find somewhere under the ground an entire army, fully equipped. However, experience has long shown that you cannot die from a sand storm, let alone have an entire army disappear.'

Petubastis III

Kaper is now putting forward an entirely different explanation. He argues that the army did not disappear, but was defeated. 'My research shows that the army was not simply passing through the desert; its final destination was the Dachla Oasis. This was the location of the troops of the Egyptian rebel leader Petubastis III. He ultimately ambushed the army of Cambyses, and in this way managed from his base in the oasis to reconquer a large part of Egypt, after which he let himself be crowned Pharaoh in the capital, Memphis.'

Spin doctor

The fact that the fate of the army of Cambyses remained unclear for such a long time is probably due to the Persian King Darius I, who ended the Egyptian revolt with much bloodshed two years after Cambyses' defeat. Like a true spin doctor, he attributed the shameful defeat of his predecessor to natural elements. Thanks to this effective manipulation, 75 years after the events, all Herodotus could do was take note of the sand storm story.

Pieces of the puzzle

Kaper made this discovery accidentally; he was not looking for it actively. In collaboration with New York University and the University of Lecce, he was involved for the last ten years in excavations in Amheida, in the Dachla Oasis. Earlier this year, he deciphered the full list of titles of Petubastis III on ancient temple blocks. 'That's when the puzzle pieces fell into place', says the Egyptologist. 'The temple blocks indicate that this must have been a stronghold at the start of the Persian period. Once we combined this with the limited information we had about Petubastis III, the excavation site and the story of Herodotus, we were able to reconstruct what happened.'

The discovery will be announced on Thursday at an international conference.
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References:

Science Daily. 2014. “Egyptologist unravels ancient mystery”. Science Daily. Posted: June 19, 2014. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140619095824.htm

Basel Egyptologists identify tomb of royal children

Who had the privilege to spend eternal life next to the pharaoh? Close to the royal tombs in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, excavations by Egyptologists from the University of Basel have identified the burial place of several children as well as other family members of two pharaohs.

Basel Egyptologists of the University of Basel Kings' Valley Project have been working on tomb KV 40 in the Valley of the Kings close to the city of Luxor for three years. From the outside, only a depression in the ground indicated the presence of a subterranean tomb. Up to now, nothing was known about the layout of tomb KV 40 nor for whom it was build and who was buried there.

The Egyptologists assumed that it was a non-royal tomb dating back to the 18th dynasty. They first cleared the six meter deep shaft which gives access to five subterranean chambers and then recovered the countless remains and fragments of funerary equipment.

Mummified royal children

The scientists discovered mummified remains of at least 50 people in the center chamber and in three side chambers. Based on inscriptions on storage jars, Egyptologists were able to identify and name over 30 people during this year's field season. Titles such as "Prince" and "Princess" distinguish the buried as members of the families of the two pharaohs Thutmosis IV and Amenhotep III who are also buried in the Valley of Kings. Both pharaohs belonged to the 18th dynasty (New Kingdom) and ruled in the 14th century BC.

The analysis of the hieratic inscriptions (related to hieroglyphics) revealed that tomb KV 40 contains the mummified remains of at least 8 hitherto unknown royal daughters, four princes and several foreign ladies. Most of them were adults, however, mummified children were also found: "We discovered a remarkable number of carefully mummified new-borns and infants that would have normally been buried much simpler", describes Egyptologist Prof. Susanne Bickel the findings. "We believe that the family members of the royal court were buried in this tomb for a period of several decades."

The identification of people buried in the proximity of the royal tombs gives the team of researchers important insight into who had the privilege to spend eternal life close to the pharaoh. "Roughly two thirds of the tombs in the Kings' Valley are non-royal. Because the tombs do not have inscriptions and have been heavily plundered we so far have only been able to speculate on who lies buried in them", explains Susanne Bickel in regard to the importance of the findings for the field of Egyptology.

Remains of later burials

Even though the tomb was looted several times in Antiquity as well as at the end of the 19th century, the researchers found countless fragments of funerary equipment, such as fragments of coffins and textiles. "The remains and the walls have been heavily affected by a fire that was most likely ignited by the torches of the tomb raiders", suspects Susanne Bickel. The fragments of various wooden and cartonnage coffins indicate that tomb KV 40 was used a second time as a burial ground: long after the abandonment of the valley as royal necropolis, members of priestly families of the 9th century BC were interred here.

Anthropological analyses as well as further examination on the burial goods will deliver important insight into the composition of the pharaonic court of the 18th dynasty as well as the conditions of life and the burial customs of its members.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2014. “Basel Egyptologists identify tomb of royal children”. EurekAlert. Posted: April 28, 2014. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-04/uob-bei042814.php

Basel Egyptologists identify tomb of royal children

Who had the privilege to spend eternal life next to the pharaoh? Close to the royal tombs in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, excavations by Egyptologists from the University of Basel have identified the burial place of several children as well as other family members of two pharaohs.

Basel Egyptologists of the University of Basel Kings' Valley Project have been working on tomb KV 40 in the Valley of the Kings close to the city of Luxor for three years. From the outside, only a depression in the ground indicated the presence of a subterranean tomb. Up to now, nothing was known about the layout of tomb KV 40 nor for whom it was build and who was buried there.

The Egyptologists assumed that it was a non-royal tomb dating back to the 18th dynasty. They first cleared the six meter deep shaft which gives access to five subterranean chambers and then recovered the countless remains and fragments of funerary equipment.

Mummified royal children

The scientists discovered mummified remains of at least 50 people in the center chamber and in three side chambers. Based on inscriptions on storage jars, Egyptologists were able to identify and name over 30 people during this year's field season. Titles such as "Prince" and "Princess" distinguish the buried as members of the families of the two pharaohs Thutmosis IV and Amenhotep III who are also buried in the Valley of Kings. Both pharaohs belonged to the 18th dynasty (New Kingdom) and ruled in the 14th century BC.

The analysis of the hieratic inscriptions (related to hieroglyphics) revealed that tomb KV 40 contains the mummified remains of at least 8 hitherto unknown royal daughters, four princes and several foreign ladies. Most of them were adults, however, mummified children were also found: "We discovered a remarkable number of carefully mummified new-borns and infants that would have normally been buried much simpler", describes Egyptologist Prof. Susanne Bickel the findings. "We believe that the family members of the royal court were buried in this tomb for a period of several decades."

The identification of people buried in the proximity of the royal tombs gives the team of researchers important insight into who had the privilege to spend eternal life close to the pharaoh. "Roughly two thirds of the tombs in the Kings' Valley are non-royal. Because the tombs do not have inscriptions and have been heavily plundered we so far have only been able to speculate on who lies buried in them", explains Susanne Bickel in regard to the importance of the findings for the field of Egyptology.

Remains of later burials

Even though the tomb was looted several times in Antiquity as well as at the end of the 19th century, the researchers found countless fragments of funerary equipment, such as fragments of coffins and textiles. "The remains and the walls have been heavily affected by a fire that was most likely ignited by the torches of the tomb raiders", suspects Susanne Bickel. The fragments of various wooden and cartonnage coffins indicate that tomb KV 40 was used a second time as a burial ground: long after the abandonment of the valley as royal necropolis, members of priestly families of the 9th century BC were interred here.

Anthropological analyses as well as further examination on the burial goods will deliver important insight into the composition of the pharaonic court of the 18th dynasty as well as the conditions of life and the burial customs of its members.
________________
References:

EurekAlert. 2014. “Basel Egyptologists identify tomb of royal children”. EurekAlert. Posted: April 28, 2014. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-04/uob-bei042814.php

Long-Lost Pyramids Found?

Mysterious, pyramid-like structures spotted in the Egyptian desert by an amateur satellite archaeologist might be long-lost pyramids after all, according to a new investigation into the enigmatic mounds.

Angela Micol, who last year found the structures using Google Earth 5,000 miles away in North Carolina, says puzzling features have been uncovered during a preliminary ground proofing expedition, revealing cavities and shafts.

"Moreover, it has emerged these formations are labeled as pyramids on several old and rare maps," Micol told Discovery News.

Located about 90 miles apart, the two possible pyramid complexes appeared as groupings of mounds in curious positions.

One site in Upper Egypt, just 12 miles from the city of Abu Sidhum along the Nile, featured four mounds with an unusual footprint.

Some 90 miles north near the Fayum oasis, the second possible pyramid complex revealed a four-sided, truncated mound approximately 150 feet wide and three smaller mounds in a diagonal alignment.

"The images speak for themselves," Micol said when she first announced her findings. "It's very obvious what the sites may contain, but field research is needed to verify they are, in fact, pyramids,"

First reported by Discovery News, her claim gained widespread media attention and much criticism. Authoritative geologists and geo-archaeologists were largely skeptical and dismissed what Micol called "Google Earth anomalies" as windswept natural rock formations -- buttes quite common in the Egyptian desert.

"After the buzz simmered down, I was contacted by an Egyptian couple who claimed to have important historical references for both sites," Micol said.

The couple, Medhat Kamal El-Kady, former ambassador to the Sultanate of Oman, and his wife Haidy Farouk Abdel-Hamid, a lawyer, former counselor at the Egyptian presidency and adviser of border issues and international issues of sovereignty, are top collectors of maps, old documents, books and rare political and historical manuscripts.

El-Kady and Farouk have made important donations to the Egyptian state and the U.S. Library of Congress. Their various gifts to the Library of Alexandria include Al-Sharif Al-Idrissi's map of the Earth drawn for King Roger II of Sicily in 1154.

According to the couple, the formations spotted by Micol in the Fayum and near Abu Sidhum were both labeled as pyramid complex sites in several old maps and documents.

"For this case only, we have more than 34 maps and 12 old documents, mostly by scientists and senior officials of irrigation," El-Kady and Farouk told Discovery News.

For the site near the Fayum, they cited three maps in particular -- a map by Robert de Vaugoudy, dating from 1753, a rare map by the engineers of Napoleon Bonaparte, and a map and documents by Major Brown, general of irrigation for Lower Egypt in the late 1880s.

The documents would point to the existence of two buried pyramids which add to the known Fayum pyramids of Lahoun and Hawara.

"They would be the greatest pyramids known to mankind," the couple said. "We would not exaggerate if we said the finding can overshadow the Pyramids of Giza."

Their sources would indicate the pyramids at the Fayum site were intentionally buried in a "damnatio memoriae" -- an attempt to intentionally strike them from memory.

While the site in the Fayum has not been investigated yet, a preliminary on-the-ground expedition has already occurred at the site near Abu Sidhum, providing intriguing data to compare with El-Kady and Farouk’s maps and documents.

"Those mounds are definitely hiding an ancient site below them," Mohamed Aly Soliman, who led the preliminary expedition near Abu Sidhum, told Discovery News.

"First of all, the land around them is just a normal flat land. It is just desert -- sand and stones," he said.

"The mounds are different: You will find pottery everywhere, seashells and transported layers. These are different layers, not belonging to the place, and were used by the Egyptians to hide and protect their buried sites," he said.

"Describing himself as "one of the many Egyptians obsessed with the pharaohs’ civilization," Aly has a background as a private investigator and has been studying to identify archaeological sites in Egypt.

"If we look back in history we will find that pharaohs were using seashells in building their tombs and pyramids for ventilation purpose," Aly said.

"Even the rocks used in building pyramids contained up to 40 percent seashells."

He cited the work of Ioannis Liritzis, a professor of archaeometry at the University of the Aegean and colleagues at the University of Athens.

According to the amateur geo-archaeologist, the local people living near the mounds had long suspected the formations were ancient in origin. They had tried to dig on one of the small mounds years ago, but the excavation failed due to striking very hard stone that Aly and Micol believe may be granite.

"What made us sure those mounds are hiding pyramids was a special cavity and metal detector we used over the mounds," Aly Soliman said. "The detector we used showed an underground tunnel heading north on both the big mounds."

"It also signaled metal was present in the mounds," he said. "Most Egyptian pyramids have north facing entrance tunnels, so this is another promising piece of evidence we have found."

According to Micol, the Egyptian team believes they have identified a temple or habitation site near the site and a row of what may be mastaba tombs adjacent to the mounds.

So, has a bunch of amateur archaeologists made a discovery that will dwarf the Pyramids of Giza? Or are their pyramids just naturally occurring rock outcrops filled with wishful thinking and vivid imagination?

"Whether they prove to be anything more than nature must be verified on the ground, but this location seems promising and is the result of research beyond simply pointing out the first sand dune noticed on Google Earth," archaeologist Patrick Rohrer told Discovery News.

To further research the pyramid puzzle and examine other sites, Micol's set up the Satellite Archaeology Foundation, Inc. a pending non-profit -- and launched a crowdfunding campaign.

"Due to unrest and economic distress in Egypt, life is not easy for archaeologists" Micol said. "We found no one from the Egyptian academic community who is interested in finding out about these sites at this time."

"Now that we have ground proof and historical evidence," she added, "my goal is to go to Egypt with a team of U.S. scientists and videographers to help validate the evidence found by the expedition team and to prove if these sites are lost pyramid complexes."
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References:

Lorenzi, Rossella. 2013. “Long-Lost Pyramids Found?”. Discovery News. Posted: July 16, 2013. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/long-lost-pyramids-found-130715.htm

Mummy Teeth Tell of Ancient Egypt's Drought

The link between drought and the rise and fall of Egypt's ancient cultures, including the pyramid builders, has long fascinated scientists and historians. Now, they're looking into an unexpected source to find connections: mummy teeth.

A chemical analysis of teeth enamel from Egyptian mummies reveals the Nile Valley grew increasingly arid from 5,500 to 1,500 B.C., the period including the growth and flourishing of ancient Egyptian civilization.

"Egyptian civilization was remarkable in its long-term stability despite a strong environmental pressure — increasing aridity — that most likely put constraints on the development of resources linked to agriculture and cattle breeding," said senior study author Christophe Lecuyer, a geochemist at the University of Lyon in France.

Many studies have linked dramatic droughts to crises near the end of the Old Kingdom (the Age of the Pyramids) in the third millennium B.C. But Lecuyer and his colleagues also found a jump in aridity before the downfall of Egypt in the 6th century B.C. during the Late Period, when it was conquered by Alexander the Great.

However, the new study can't resolve the occasional drops in annual Nile River floods or short-term droughts that often caused widespread famine and upsets in Egyptian history.

"Our database cannot identify short-term events, only long-term trends, and there is [only] one obvious major event of increasing aridity that took place before the Late Period," Lecuyer said.

The climate data comes from the teeth of Egyptian mummies from various dynasties at the Musée des Confluences de Lyon in France. Led by graduate student Alexandra Touzeau,the researchers drilled small amounts of enamel off some of the teeth and tested it for oxygen and strontium isotopes.

The mummy's teeth record the ratio of two oxygen isotopes (oxygen atoms with different numbers of neutrons) in their diet and their drinking water, which in this case is Nile River water, Lecuyer said. Shifts in the ratio of the isotopes indicate changing precipitation patterns in the region.

The isotopes can also indicate what people were eating, and the research team plans to publish additional studies of Egyptian diets through time, Lecuyer said. "The general drying trend had no negative impact on the Egyptian civilization in terms of cereal production or population," he said. "One of the studies we plan to publish soon reveals there was no diet change over this long period of about four millennia."

The Nile Valley wasn't the only part of North Africa to experience drying after 5,500 B.C. The Sahara Desert was once covered in lakes and grasslands, but switched to a drier regime between about 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, studies have shown.

The mummy teeth findings were published June 2 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
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References:

Oskin, Becky. 2013. “Mummy Teeth Tell of Ancient Egypt's Drought”. Live Science. Posted: July 16, 2013. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/38153-egyptian-mummy-teeth-nile-climate.html

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Zahi Hawass

The long-reigning king of Egyptian antiquities has been forced into exile—but he’s plotting a return

I've always been intrigued by Zahi. He is a showman in front of the cameras, but I've never seen anyone so dedicated to his science.

Zahi Hawass doesn’t like what he’s seeing. Clad in his familiar denim safari suit and wide-brimmed bush hat, the famed archaeologist is standing inside the burial vault of the Step Pyramid of Djoser, a six-tiered, lopsided mound of limestone blocks constructed nearly 5,000 years ago. The huge, gloomy space is filled with scaffolding. A restoration and conservation project, at Saqqara outside Cairo, initiated by Hawass in 2002, has been shoring up the sagging ceiling and walls and staving off collapse. But the February 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak—and also ended Hawass’ controversial reign as the supreme chief of all Egypt’s antiquities—is now threatening to unravel Hawass’ legacy as well. With tourists nearly gone, funds dried up and the Ministry of Antiquities leadership reshuffled several times in the past two years, preservation work on the pyramid has ground to a near halt. The new minister has diverted reconstruction money into hiring thousands of unemployed archaeology graduates, claims Hawass, in a desperate move to stop protests. “He has done nothing,” Hawass says, with perhaps a touch of schadenfreude in his voice, scrutinizing the rough limestone ceiling and walls.

Hawass alights on the subterranean floor and shines a flashlight on the Pharaoh Djoser’s granite sarcophagus. I follow him on hands and knees through a low tunnel, part of a network of five miles of passages that workers burrowed beneath the pyramid in the 27th century B.C. The air is redolent of mud and dust. “The dead king had to go through these tunnels to fight wild creatures until he could become Osiris, the god of the underworld,” he tells me, stepping back into the sunlight.

***

In Egyptian mythology, Osiris ruled on earth as the all-powerful king, until the jealous god Set murdered him and usurped his throne. Osiris’ fall set in motion a drama of rivalry and revenge in which Set was finally defeated—and Osiris resurrected. Only through the return of the king could order be restored to Egypt.

For more than a decade Zahi Hawass was, arguably, the Osiris of antiquities. A regal combination of showman and scholar, he ruled a netherworld of tombs and temples, investigating age-old mysteries—the burial place of Antony and Cleopatra, the cause of death of Tutankhamen—for rapt television audiences. Hawass’ megalomania was legendary: In “Chasing Mummies: The Amazing Adventures of Zahi Hawass,” a reality television series on the History Channel, the archaeologist led his trainees on Howard Carter-type adventures, an exercise in self-aggrandizement so unabashed that it prompted a New York Times critic to smirk: “One hopes...Dr. Hawass will unearth some ancient Egyptian chill pills and swallow a generous helping.” Yet he also earned the admiration of peers and millions of fans. The National Geographic Society named him explorer-in-residence in 2001, an honor he shared with primatologist Jane Goodall, filmmaker James Cameron and paleontologists Meave and Louise Leakey. He wrote best-selling books. He commanded lecture fees ranging from $10,000 to $50,000. A traveling exhibition he put together of five dozen artifacts from the Egyptian Museum, “Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” earned $110 million for Egypt during its tour of seven cities in Europe and the United States. It was one of the most lucrative museum shows of all time.

It all ended with the revolution. Hawass was vilified when protests against President Mubarak erupted in Tahrir Square in January 2011. Protesters called him “the Mubarak of Antiquities” and accused him of corruption. Underlings in the antiquities department and jobless and frustrated archaeology graduates besieged his office, demanding his ouster. “And take your hat,” they shouted. In April 2011 he was sentenced to a year in jail, stemming from an alleged case of rigged contract bidding at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. (The verdict was later overturned.) In July 2011, after serving two successive post-Mubarak governments, Hawass finally was obliged to give up his job. According to one Egyptian blogger, Hawass was “escorted out the back door of the ministry into a cab, showered with insults and angry chants from young archaeologists,” an event captured on video and watched by thousands of Egyptians.

Today, Hawass finds parallels between his fall and that of Osiris. “I had lots of enemies—the enemies of success,” he says. “They are the friends of the god Set, the evil desert god in ancient Egypt.” Many in the archaeological community seem to agree. “No one in Egyptology...has accomplished even a tiny fraction of what Zahi has. That, plus his fame, enrages people,” says Peter Lacovara, an Egyptologist at Emory University in Atlanta who has known Hawass for decades. “Zahi is a lightning rod, because he’s got so much energy and passion, and he doesn’t pull any punches,” says one noted Egyptologist in the U.S., who insisted on anonymity because her museum wants to stay on the sidelines. “People became envious of how high his profile became.” Others say that his blustering style and sometimes belittling manner, as well as his utter misreading of the public mood on the eve of Mubarak’s overthrow, all but assured his downfall.

Whatever its ultimate cause, Hawass’ departure has raised concerns about the future of Egypt’s antiquities. He may have antagonized people, but he was also an effective and enthusiastic manager who “cut through the bureaucracy,” says Naguib Amin, a consultant and friend since their days as graduate students in the U.S. Now many projects, including Saqqara, have stalled, and some say that Hawass’ fall has adversely affected both fund-raising and stewardship of the country’s treasures. “Antiquities are collapsing in front of my eyes,” Hawass says. Lacovara says that the new director of antiquities, Mohamed Ibrahim Ali, “is well respected and has done an excellent job....He has restored stability [and] things are running smoothly.” But Hawass says that Lacovara, who has ongoing projects in Egypt, may be reluctant to criticize the new boss. “I wanted to support Ibrahim, I wanted him to be good, but he is not doing anything,” he insists. Some colleagues in the ministry agree, saying that Ibrahim lacks Hawass’ dynamism, and has been forced to slash budgets because of a steep decline in revenue.

Egyptian tourism, a big piece of the country’s economy, has declined by as much as 50 percent since 2010, raising questions about whether the government will decide that it needs Hawass and his famous face to revive it. President Mohamed Morsi has never discussed the issue publicly, and Hawass has been critical of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement to which Morsi belonged and whose members dominate his administration. However, he also points out that in 2010, Muslim Brotherhood members overwhelmingly supported a bill he introduced to impose more severe sentences for antiquities theft and ban domestic trafficking in ancient artifacts. “Mubarak’s party was against me,” he adds, and only a watered-down version passed. Some former colleagues believe that Morsi may have no other choice but to bring back Hawass. “His charisma was bringing in money,” says Ali Asfar, the director of the Pyramids. “Nobody can fill his shoes.” Kamal Wahid, the director of Saqqara, concurs. “Every site misses him,” he said. “Tourism [at Saqqara] is down to 10 percent of what it was before the revolution. We are waiting until Dr. Hawass comes back again.”

***

I first met Hawass on a cool morning last December, at the office that he now uses on the ninth floor of a dilapidated high-rise apartment building in a busy Cairo neighborhood near the Nile. Hawass’ two-room suite is at the end of a gloomy hallway redolent of home cooking. He shares the space with a female assistant and a protégé, Tarek El Awady, whom Hawass hired as a field archaeologist, sent to graduate school and later appointed as director of the Egyptian Museum. Determined to snatch Egyptology out of the hands of Westerners who had dominated the field since the days of the emperor Napoleon, Hawass “encouraged training and opportunities for young Egyptians to a degree never seen before,” says Lacovara.

El Awady, now on a leave of absence from the museum, escorted me to Hawass’ small office. There the former antiquities chief, wearing denims, was sitting behind a cluttered desk, talking on the phone to members of a Russian television crew that was due to interview him in a few minutes. Suddenly, Hawass began screaming in Arabic into the phone. The tirade went on for 20 seconds. Face bright red, he hung up and looked at me apologetically. “Stupid man,” he said, shaking his head. He explained that he had attempted to give directions to the crew’s Egyptian driver, who had interrupted him. Hawass’ temper is legendary—the History Channel reality series shows him berating his colleagues unmercifully—but I was surprised that he had shown me that side of his personality within a few seconds of meeting him.

I had planned to join Hawass at a lecture for foreign tourists he was scheduled to deliver inside a temple at Luxor that evening, but the sponsors had pulled the plug because there had been too many cancellations. The past week had been among the most violent since the revolution. Six people had died the night before in clashes between supporters of Morsi and his opponents, and crowds were gathering around the presidential palace in Heliopolis to demand that Morsi rescind a decree giving him near-dictatorial powers in advance of Egypt’s constitutional referendum.

“Morsi is worse than Mubarak, he doesn’t listen to the people,” Hawass told me, as his assistant brought in two cups of green tea. He is a burly man with a dominating manner and, despite his recent troubles, an air of total self-confidence. “What he did with the constitution is dictatorship. I always say give the opportunity to Muslim Brotherhood to rule. But they are not trained to rule....I think it is going to be civil war.”

Hawass is still fighting the legal problems that ensnared him during the revolution. Last spring the prosecutor general banned him from traveling outside Egypt, pending investigation of dozens of charges of impropriety and corruption brought against him by a pair of former colleagues. Hawass stands accused of wasting public money and exposing Egyptian antiquities to possible theft by shipping them overseas without permission. He gave up his National Geographic contract, an arrangement that paid him $200,000 a year, after questions were raised about possible conflict of interest. As antiquities chief, Hawass administered many sites that the Geographic used in its television programs and other projects. (He insists that he left because “I can make more money” without an exclusive arrangement for his lectures and books.)

This is a lengthy article. I recommend going to the website and reading it in it's entirety.
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References:

Hammer, Joshua. 2013. “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Zahi Hawass”. Smithsonian Magazine. Posted: June, 2013. Available online: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Rise-and-Fall-and-Rise-of-Zahi-Hawass-208348331.html#Pyramid-Scheme-Zahi-Hawass-and-Giza-murals-1.jpg

Lost and Found: Ancient Shoes Turn Up in Egypt Temple

More than 2,000 years ago, at a time when Egypt was ruled by a dynasty of kings of Greek descent, someone, perhaps a group of people, hid away some of the most valuable possessions they had — their shoes.

Seven shoes were deposited in a jar in an Egyptian temple in Luxor, three pairs and a single one. Two pairs were originally worn by children and were only about 7 inches (18 centimeters) long. Using palm fiber string, the child shoes were tied together within the single shoe (it was larger and meant for an adult) and put in the jar. Another pair of shoes, more than 9 inches (24 cm) long that had been worn by a limping adult, was also inserted in the jar.

The shoe-filled jar, along with two other jars, had been "deliberately placed in a small space between two mudbrick walls," writes archaeologist Angelo Sesana in a report published in the journal Memnonia.

Whoever deposited the shoes never returned to collect them, and they were forgotten, until now.

In 2004, an Italian archaeological expedition team, led by Sesana, rediscovered the shoes. The archaeologists gave André Veldmeijer, an expert in ancient Egyptian footwear, access to photographs that show the finds.

"The find is extraordinary as the shoes were in pristine condition and still supple upon discovery," writes Veldmeijer in the most recent edition of the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. Unfortunately after being unearthed the shoes became brittle and "extremely fragile," he added.

Pricey shoes

Veldmeijer's analysis suggests the shoes may have been foreign-made and were "relatively expensive." Sandals were the more common footwear in Egypt and that the style and quality of these seven shoes was such that "everybody would look at you," and "it would give you much more status because you had these expensive pair of shoes," said Veldmeijer, assistant director for Egyptology of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo.

The date of the shoes is based on the jar they were found in and the other two  jars, as well as the stratigraphy, or layering of sediments, of the area. It may be possible in the future to carbon date the shoes to confirm their age.

Why they were left in the temple in antiquity and not retrieved is a mystery. "There's no reason to store them without having the intention of getting them back at some point," Veldmeijer said in an interview with LiveScience, adding that there could have been some kind of unrest that forced the owners of the shoes to deposit them and flee hastily. The temple itself predates the shoes by more than 1,000 years and was originally built for pharaoh Amenhotep II (1424-1398 B.C.).

Design discoveries

Veldmeijer made a number of shoe design discoveries. He found that the people who wore the seven shoes would have tied them using what researchers call "tailed toggles." Leather strips at the top of the shoes would form knots that would be passed through openings to close the shoes. After they were closed a long strip of leather would have hung down, decoratively, at either side. The shoes are made out of leather, which is likely bovine.

Most surprising was that the isolated shoe had what shoemakers call a "rand," a device that until now was thought to have been first used in medieval Europe. A rand is a folded leather strip that would go between the sole of the shoe and the upper part, reinforcing the stitching as the "the upper is very prone to tear apart at the stitch holes," he explained. The device would've been useful in muddy weather when shoes are under pressure, as it makes the seam much more resistant to water.

In the dry (and generally not muddy) climate of ancient Egypt, he said that it's a surprising innovation and seems to indicate the seven shoes were constructed somewhere abroad.

Health discoveries

The shoes also provided insight into the health of the people wearing them. In the case of the isolated shoe, he found a "semi-circular protruding area" that could be a sign of a condition called Hallux Valgus, more popularly known as a bunion.

"In this condition, the big toe starts to deviate inward towards the other toes," Veldmeijer writes in the journal article. "Although hereditary, it can also develop as a result of close fitting shoes, although other scholars dispute this ...."

Another curious find came from the pair of adult shoes. He found that the left shoe had more patches and evidence of repair than the shoe on the right. "The shoe was exposed to unequal pressure," he said, showing that the person who wore it "walked with a limp, otherwise the wear would have been far more equal."

Still, despite their medical problems, and the wear and tear on the shoes, the people who wore them were careful to keep up with repairs, Veldmeijer said. They did not throw them away like modern-day Westerners tend to do with old running shoes.

"These shoes were highly prized commodities."

Veldmeijer hopes to have the opportunity to examine the shoes, now under the care of the Ministry of State for Antiquities, firsthand.
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References:

Jarus, Owen. 2013. “Lost and Found: Ancient Shoes Turn Up in Egypt Temple”. Live Science. Posted: February 26, 2013. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/27464-ancient-egypt-shoes-discovered.html

Ancient Egyptians sold themselves into temple slavery

2,200 years ago in the ancient Egyptian city Tebtunis, Egyptians voluntarily entered into slave contracts with the local temple for all eternity. And they even paid a monthly fee for the 'privilege'. Egyptologist Kim Ryholt from the University of Copenhagen is the first researcher who has studied this puzzling phenomenon.

"I am your servant from this day onwards, and I shall pay 2½ copper-pieces every month as my slave-fee before Soknebtunis, the great god." This is a translation of a formulaic pledge found in 100 2,200-year-old papyrus slave contracts from the temple city of Tebtunis. University of Copenhagen Egyptologist Kim Ryholt is the first researcher to have analysed these collectively in his recent article "A Self-Dedication Addressed to Anubis - Divine Protection against Malevolent Forces or Forced Labour?" from the forthcoming publication Lotus and Laurel - Studies on Egyptian Language and Religion.

Today, it is difficult to comprehend why anybody would voluntarily join the ranks of the temple slaves and even pay the temple a monthly fee. But when you as Kim Ryholt can read the contracts, which were written in the ancient Egyptian language Demotic, a plausible explanation surfaces:
"90 per cent of the people who entered into these slave contracts were unable to name their fathers, although this was normally required. They were presumably children of prostitutes. This is a clear indication that they belonged to the lower classes which the king could subject to forced labour, for example digging canals, if he so desired. However, we know from other contemporary records that temple slaves were exempt from forced labour," says Kim Ryholt.

"Many therefore chose to live as temple slaves because it was the only way of avoiding the harsh and possibly even deadly alternative; the temple was simply the lesser of two evils for these people. And for the temples, this was a lucrative practice that gave them extra resources and money."

According to Kim Ryholt, the possibility of avoiding forced labour by entering into slave contracts with temples was limited to a 60-year-period – from roughly 190 BC to 130 BC. There is no indication that the practice existed in any other period in ancient Egypt; probably because the royal family could not, in the long run, afford to yield that many resources to the temples.

A global papyrus jigsaw puzzle

The papyrus slave contracts were found in a rubbish dump next to the Tebtunis temple durit illicit excavations and were subsequently scattered across Egypt, Europe and the United States. So it has taken Kim Ryholt years to collect and analyse the contracts.

"The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection at the University of Copenhagen contains a large number of contracts, but many are fragmentary, and in order to study the whole material I have had to visit many other collections where there would be a chance to find Tebtunis contracts, including the British Museum, university collections in New Haven, Michigan and Florence, and not least Tebtunis itself where I participate in the modern excavations. In some cases, a contract might be physically divided between, for instance, Copenhagen and the British Museum, and the fragments are then scanned and put together virtually on the computer," Kim Ryholt says.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2013. “Ancient Egyptians sold themselves into temple slavery”. EurekAlert. Posted: December 19, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/uoc-aes121912.php

Talisman of Ancient Googly-Eyed God Discovered

A newly identified googly-eyed artifact may have been used by the ancient Egyptians to magically protect children and pregnant mothers from evil forces.

Made of faience, a delicate material that contains silica, the pale-green talisman of sorts dates to sometime in the first millennium B.C. It shows the dwarf god Bes with his tongue sticking out, eyes googly, wearing a crown of feathers. A hole at the top of the face was likely used to suspend it like a bell, while a second hole, used to hold the bell clapper, was apparently drilled into it in antiquity.

Carolyn Graves-Brown, a curator at the Egypt Centre, discovered the artifact in the collection of Woking College, the equivalent of a high school for juniors and seniors. The college has more than 50 little-studied Egyptian artifacts, which were recently lent to the Egypt Centre at Swansea University where they are being studied and documented.

Graves-Brown told LiveScience in an interview that at first she didn't know what the object was. It wasn't until she learned of a similar artifact in the British Museum that she was able to determine that it is a faience Bes bell, one of a very few known to exist.

"If you try to rattle it much it would (have) broken easily," she said.

However, while faience is breakable, it held magical properties. "Faience is very often used for objects that have a magical or religious significance in ancient Egypt," Graves-Brown said.

Making the find more intriguing is the quirky character of Bes himself. A dwarf god and protector of pregnant mothers and young children, Bes may look goofy to us with his tongue sticking out, however, his appearance, tongue and all, had a purpose. Graves-Brown explained that he would sometimes bare sharp teeth and "it's assumed, but it's not known, that this [appearance] was supposed to scare off evil spirits and evil entities." That may well have been the intent of this object. Flinders Petrie, an archaeologist who encountered items similar to this, wrote in 1914 in his book "Amulets" (Constable and Company, 1914) that bells like these were probably "worn by children against the evil eye."

Graves-Brown exercises caution. She points out that none of the few surviving examples of this artifact have been found in their original archaeological context. It could be that faience Bes bells, like this one, were worn by pregnant mothers and/or children as magical protection against evil forces. Another possibility is that the bell was placed near a child, perhaps where the child slept.

However there could be another explanation for the object altogether.

"The Egyptians often made models of objects used in everyday life out of faience [and] gave them as gifts to the gods," she said, leaving open the possibility that this artifact was actually deposited in an Egyptian temple.

Whatever its exact use was in antiquity, Egyptologists can take heart in the fact that Bes, a protector of young children, will be going to work for the kids again. Graves-Brown said the Egypt Centre has a program for school kids of all ages and, given that the artifacts are from Woking College, they hope to use them to get teenagers interested in Egyptology.
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References:

Jarus, Owen. 2012. "Talisman of Ancient Googly-Eyed God Discovered". Live Science. Posted: June 20, 2012. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/21058-talisman-ancient-egypt-god.html

A Mummy Switcheroo

Min, the ancient Egyptian god of phallus and fertility, might have brought some worldy advantages to his male worshippers, but offered little protection when it came to spiritual life.

Researchers at the Mummy Project-Fatebenefratelli hospital in Milan, Italy, established that one of Min's priests at Akhmim, Ankhpakhered, was not resting peacefully in his finely painted sarcophagus.

"We discovered that the sarcophagus does not contain the mummy of the priest, but the remains of another man dating between 400 and 100 BC," Egyptologist Sabina Malgora said.

According to the researchers, the finding could point to a theft more than 2000 years ago. The relatives of the mysterious man may have stolen the beautiful sarcophagus, which dates to a period between the 22nd 23rd Dynasty (about 945-715 BC), to assure their loved one a proper burial and afterlife.

"It's just an hypothesis. However, this was a rather common practice, especially during periods of economical and political crisis, when the necropolis were left without much surveillance," Malgora, co-director of the Mummy Project with Luca Bernardo, director of Maternal and Child Unit Operations at the Fatebenefratelli hospital, told Discovery News.

Indeed, by the end of the 20th Dynasty, tomb robbery was such a serious problem at Thebes (the modern Luxor) that royal mummies and their relatives were secretly moved to a secure hidden tomb in Deir el-Bahri, now known as Theban Tomb (TT) 320.

Discovered near the end of the 19th century, the Deir el-Bahri cache revealed an extraordinary array of mummified remains belonging to more than 50 kings, queens and nobility.

Kept at the Archaeological Museum in Asti, where it arrived in 1903 from a private collection, the sarcophagus boasted a mysterious history -- it is not known how it arrived to Italy -- and a puzzling mummy.

"It had a simple bendage with no amulets at all. We know that a high priest would have been buried differently," Malgora said.

Finally, CTscan images revealed that inside the wrappings rested a skeleton placed on a reed support. This suggests that the body was recovered some time after the death, placed on a kind of stretcher and then wrapped.

While the fate of Ankhpakhered's mummy remains unknown, Malgora and colleagues have managed to shed new light on the man that for more than two millennia usurped the priest's coffin.

He did not use drugs, did not suffer from any particular disease, and did not die from any violent or traumatic event.

Some 2950 images from the CT scan made it possible to reconstruct a 3D life size image of his skull. Carried by Jonathan Elias, director of the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium, the subsequent face reconstruction revealed a man with a prominent nose, a slightly asymmetric eye and eyebrow and a slightly hollow left cheek, caused by the lack of some teeth.

"He had nothing to do with a high priest. He was a hard worker. His knees show signs of wear and tear, as if he was carrying weight or stones," Malgora said.
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References:

Lorenzi, Rossella. 2012. "A Mummy Switcheroo". Discovery News. Posted: May 15, 2012. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/ankhpakhered-tomb-120515.html

Mummy Has Oldest Case of Prostate Cancer in Ancient Egypt

Some 2250 years ago in Egypt, a man known today only as M1 struggled with a long, painful, progressive illness. A dull pain throbbed in his lower back, then spread to other parts of his body, making most movements a misery. When M1 finally succumbed to the mysterious ailment between the ages of 51 and 60, his family paid for him to be mummified so that he could be reborn and relish the pleasures of the afterworld.

Now an international research team has diagnosed what ailed M1: the oldest known case of prostate cancer in ancient Egypt and the second oldest case in the world. (The earliest diagnosis of prostate cancer came from the 2700-year-old skeleton of a Scythian king in Russia.) Moreover, the new study now in press in the International Journal of Paleopathology, suggests that earlier investigators may have underestimated the prevalence of cancer in ancient populations because high-resolution computerized tomography (CT) scanners capable of finding tumors measuring just 1 to 2 millimeters in diameter only became available in 2005. "I think earlier researchers probably missed a lot without this technology," says team leader Carlos Prates, a radiologist in private practice at Imagens Médicas Integradas in Lisbon.

Prostate cancer begins in the walnut-sized prostate gland, an integral part of the male reproductive system. The gland produces a milky fluid that is part of semen and it sits underneath a man's bladder. In aggressive cases of the disease, prostate cancer cells can metastasize, or spread, entering the bloodstream and invading the bones. After performing high-resolution scans on three Egyptian mummies in the collection of the National Archaeological Museum in Lisbon, Prates and colleagues detected many small, round, dense tumors in M1's pelvis and lumbar spine, as well as in his upper arm and leg bones. These are the areas most commonly affected by metastatic prostate cancer. "We could not find any evidence to challenge this diagnosis," Prates says.

"I would agree that it's a case of metastatic prostate cancer," says Andreas Nerlich, a pathologist at the Academic Hospital Munich-Bogenhausen in Germany, who was not involved in the research project. "This is a very well-done study."

Researchers have long struggled to detect evidence of cancer in the skeletons and mummified flesh of the ancient dead. But recorded cases of cancer in ancient populations are rare. Indeed, one study published in 1998 in the Journal of Paleopathology calculated that just 176 cases of skeletal malignancies had been reported among tens of thousands of ancient humans examined. The low number of cases prompted a theory that cancer only began flourishing in the modern industrial age, when carcinogens became more widespread in food and in the environment and when people began living longer, giving tumors more time to grow and proliferate.

But ancient populations, says Albert Zink, a biological anthropologist at the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, were no strangers to carcinogens. Soot from wood-burning chimneys and fireplaces, for example, contains substances known to cause cancer in humans. And the bitumen that ancient boat builders heated to seal and waterproof ships has been linked to lung cancer as well as tumors in the respiratory and digestive tracts. "I think cancer was quite prevalent in the past," Zink says, "more prevalent than we have been able to see."

But that situation may be changing, Prates says, as physical anthropologists gain access to the new generation of high-resolution CT scanners. The equipment that Prates and his colleagues used to study M1, for example, has a pixel resolution of 0.33 millimeters, allowing radiologists to visualize even fleck-sized lesions.

For scientists studying the origins of cancer and the complex interplay of environment, diet, and genes on the prevalence of the disease, such improved detection could shed new light on a disease that has plagued humanity for many thousands of years, if not longer. "And for sure there's always the hope that reaching a better understanding of the roots of cancer will help contribute in some way to a cure," Zink concludes.
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References:

Pringle, Heather. 2011. "Mummy Has Oldest Case of Prostate Cancer in Ancient Egypt". Science. Posted: October 26, 2011. Available online: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/10/mummy-has-oldest-case-of-prostat.html

Deadly Ancient Egyptian Medication? German Scientists Shed Light On Dark Secret of Queen Hatshepsut's Flacon

The corpus delicti is a plain flacon from among the possessions of Pharaoh Hatshepsut, who lived around 1450 B.C., which is on exhibit in the permanent collection of the Egyptian Museum of the University of Bonn. For three and a half millennia, the vessel may have held a deadly secret. This is what the Head of the collection, Michael Höveler-Müller and Dr. Helmut Wiedenfeld from the university's Pharmacology Institute just discovered.

After two years of research it is now clear that the flacon did not hold a perfume; instead, it was a kind of skin care lotion or even medication for a monarch suffering from eczema. In addition, the pharmacologists found a strongly carcinogenic substance. Was Hatshepsut killed by her medicine?

When Michael Höveler-Müller became the curator of the Egyptian Museum of the University of Bonn in 2009, it occurred to him to examine the interior of the vessel that, according to an inscription, belonged to Pharaoh Hatshepsut. Its neck had been blocked with what was generally considered "dirt," but Höveler-Müller suspected that it might also be the original clay stopper. So possibly, some of the original contents might still be inside. In Dr. Helmut Wiedenfeld from the Pharmacy Institute, he found just the right partner, to get to the bottom of this question and of the flacon.

At the Radiology Clinic of the Bonn Universitätsklinikum, the flacon was subjected to a CAT scan. Here, the Egyptologist's suspicion was confirmed -- not only was the closure intact, but the vessel also held residue of a dried-up liquid. In the summer of 2009, Professor Dr. Friedrich Bootz from the Klinik und Poliklinik für Hals-, Nasen- und Ohrenheilkunde (laryngology, rhinology and otology) of the University of Bonn took samples, using an endoscope.

Too greasy for perfume

This allowed Dr. Wiedenfeld and his team to analyze the old substances for their ingredients. And it became obvious very quickly that what they had found was not dried-up perfume. The mix contained large amounts of palm oil and nutmeg apple oil. "I didn't think anybody would put so much grease on her face," said Dr. Wiedenfeld. "That would make her look as greasy as a plate of ribs." Two additional components clued the pharmacologist in to the actual purpose of the mix, "We found a lot of unsaturated fatty acids that provide relief for people with skin diseases." And this is where the Egyptologist was able to add another piece of the puzzle, "It is indeed known that there were cases of skin disease in Hatshepsut's family." Inflammatory skin diseases such as psoriasis have a largely genetic component.

And the third group of ingredients also points to the fact that this substance was not about providing a nice fragrance, but instead, for fighting a big itch -- the pharmacologists found a lot of hydrocarbons derived from creosote and asphalt. To this day, creams containing creosote are used to treat chronic skin diseases. Due to the potentially carcinogenic effects of some of its ingredients, creosote has meanwhile been banned from cosmetics completely, and medications containing creosote are now prescription-only.

What the pharmacologists detected in Hatshepsut's little bottle was in particular benzo(a)pyrene, a hazardous aromatic hydrocarbon consisting of several carbon rings. "Benzo(a)pyrene is one of the most dangerous carcinogenic substances we know," explained Dr. Wiedenfeld. For example, the risk of contracting lung cancer from cigarette smoke results essentially from this substance.

Did the lotion cause the Pharaoh's death from cancer?

Did Hatshepsut maybe poison herself without knowing it? "There is a lot that speaks for this hypothesis," Dr. Wiedenfeld said. "If you imagine that the Queen had a chronic skin disease and that she found short-term improvement from the salve, she may have exposed herself to a great risk over the years." The Egyptologist also thinks that this is very likely. "We have known for a long time that Hatshepsut had cancer and maybe even died from it," said Michael Höveler-Müller. "We may now know the actual cause."

But at this point, the Bonn scientists can only surmise how Hatshepsut obtained her lotion. "Egyptian physicians were general practitioners and good surgeons, but they were lousy internists," explained Dr. Wiedenfeld. "It is quite possible that they owe their knowledge of certain medications to their contacts with Persia and India where the healing arts were very advanced even in Antiquity."
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References:

Science Daily. 2011. "Deadly Ancient Egyptian Medication? German Scientists Shed Light On Dark Secret of Queen Hatshepsut's Flacon". Science Daily. Posted: August 22, 2011. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110819131513.htm

Ancient DNA: Curse of the Pharaoh's DNA

Some researchers claim to have analysed DNA from Egyptian mummies. Others say that's impossible. Could new sequencing methods bridge the divide?

Cameras roll as ancient-DNA experts Carsten Pusch and Albert Zink scrutinize a row of coloured peaks on their computer screen. There is a dramatic pause. "My god!" whispers Pusch, the words muffled by his surgical mask. Then the two hug and shake hands, accompanied by the laughter and applause of their Egyptian colleagues. They have every right to be pleased with themselves. After months of painstaking work, they have finally completed their analysis of 3,300-year-old DNA from the mummy of King Tutankhamun.

Featured in the Discovery Channel documentary King Tut Unwrapped last year and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)1, their analysis — of Tutankhamun and ten of his relatives — was the latest in a string of studies reporting the analysis of DNA from ancient Egyptian mummies. Apparently revealing the mummies' family relationships as well as their afflictions, such as tuberculosis and malaria, the work seems to be providing unprecedented insight into the lives and health of ancient Egyptians and is ushering in a new era of 'molecular Egyptology'. Except that half of the researchers in the field challenge every word of it.

Enter the world of ancient Egyptian DNA and you are asked to choose between two alternate realities: one in which DNA analysis is routine, and the other in which it is impossible. "The ancient-DNA field is split absolutely in half," says Tom Gilbert, who heads two research groups at the Center for GeoGenetics in Copenhagen, one of the world's foremost ancient-DNA labs.

Unable to resolve their differences, the two sides publish in different journals, attend different conferences and refer to each other as 'believers' and 'sceptics' — when, that is, they're not simply ignoring each other. The Tutankhamun study reignited long-standing tensions between the two camps, with sceptics claiming that in this study, as in most others, the results can be explained by contamination. Next-generation sequencing techniques, however, may soon be able to resolve the split once and for all by making it easier to sequence ancient, degraded DNA. But for now, Zink says, "It's like a religious thing. If our papers are reviewed by one of the other groups, you get revisions like 'I don't believe it's possible'. It's hard to argue with that."

Visit the site to read the rest of this article.
Or, you can download the entire article.
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References:

Marchant, Jo. 2011. "Ancient DNA: Curse of the Pharaoh's DNA". Nature. Posted: April 27, 2011. Available online: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110427/full/472404a.html

Egypt’s Head Archeologist Avoids Jail Time

Zahi Hawass will not get jail time for refusing to implement a court ruling about a bookstore inside the Egyptian Museum, according to the Egyptian archaeologist’s blog.

Hawass, the minister of state for antiquities affairs in Egypt, has faced criticism in Egypt for his close ties to the regime of now-deposed president Hosni Mubarak. Shortly after Mubarak stepped down, Hawass resigned in protest of the criticisms; within a month, he accepted a reappointment to his post. [Read: Egypt’s ‘Indiana Jones’ at Center of Archaeology Uproar]

The current court case, however, derives from more mundane business. According to Ahram Online, the English-language website of Egypt’s largest news organization, the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), now the Ministry of State for Antiquities Affairs (MSAA), opened a bidding process to rent out a bookstore in the Egyptian Museum. The previous renter, a merchant named Farid Attiya, was not allowed to place a bid. According to the MSAA, Attiya constantly paid his rent late and broke his lease.

Attiya filed a lawsuit with an administrative court, which forced the MSAA (then the SCA) to allow him to bid. However, the verdict came too late, a MSAA supervisor told Ahram Online. By the time the court issued its decision, another company had already been chosen.

That’s where Hawass comes in. Because the court verdict was never enacted, Attiya filed a suit in criminal court against Hawass as the head of the SCA. That court announced Sunday (April 17) that Hawass would have to resign his government duties, pay a 1000-pound (168 dollar) fine and serve one year in jail.

However, Hawass announced on his blog today that the Department of Legal Affairs at the MSAA had appealed the decision, and the court had accepted the appeal.

“Due to this decree, I will not serve any jail time, and will remain in my position as Minister of State for Antiquities,” Hawass wrote.

Visit Dr. Hawass' website. There is no obvious link to his blog from his website, however, you can visit the blog here.
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References:

Pappas, Stephanie. 2011. "Egypt’s Head Archeologist Avoids Jail Time". Live Science. Posted: April 18, 2011. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/13758-egypts-head-archeologist-avoids-jail.html

Egyptian Princess Mummy Had Oldest Known Heart Disease

An ancient Egyptian princess might have been able to postpone her mummification if she had cut the calories and exercised more, medical experts say.

Known as Ahmose Meryet Amon, the princess lived some 3,500 years ago and died in her 40s. She was entombed at the Deir el-Bahri royal mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile, opposite to the city of Luxor.

The princess's mummified body is among those now housed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Recent scans of 52 of the museum's mummies revealed almost half of the dead have clogged arteries—including the princess. In fact, she is now the earliest known sufferer of coronary atherosclerosis, a condition caused by a buildup of arterial plaque, which can lead to heart attack or stroke.

Ahmose Meryet Amon—"Child of the Moon, Beloved of Amun"—had blockages in five major arteries, including those that supply blood to the brain and heart, said study co-leader Gregory Thomas, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Irvine.

"If the princess was in a time machine and I was to see her now, I would tell her to lay off the fat, take plenty of exercise, then schedule her for heart surgery," Thomas said.

"She would require a double bypass."

Egypt Princess Lived in Times of Bread and Honey

Although the mummies' actual hearts had been removed before entombment, the CT scans uncovered calcium deposits elsewhere in the bodies that are indicative of artery damage. But the study team could not confirm that any of the mummies died of heart disease, because most of the mummies' organs were either disintegrated or missing.

However, a medical text dating back to the time the princess lived—between 1550 and 1580 B.C.—describes the pain in the arm and chest that precedes a potentially fatal heart attack.

In general, blocked arteries and heart attacks are health risks we associate with today's lifestyle and diet, not those of the ancient Egyptians, noted study co-author Michael Miyamoto of the University of California, San Diego's School of Medicine.

"They lacked a lot of the risk factors that we consider to be important in the development of atherosclerosis in modern populations—namely smoking, high rates of diabetes and obesity, and foods rich in trans fats," Miyamoto said.

But as a daughter of the Pharaoh Seqenenre Tao II, the princess—like the other examined mummies—was a member of the elite. That means she was possibly more prone to heart disease than the rest of the population.

"Since they were the elite, they presumably led more pampered lifestyles, were more sedentary, and also—maybe importantly—had access to foods which were dense in calories, particularly meats," Miyamoto said.

Adel Allam, study co-author and professor of cardiology at Egypt's Al Azhar University, added that the princess lived during a prosperous period of Egyptian history.

"Even the very poor people would eat a lot of pork, and the bread became mixed with honey," he said. "If ordinary people at this time did get a lot of carbohydrates and fat in their diets, then of course the elite would have got even more unhealthy food," he said.

Royal's Damaged Arteries a Family Affair?

Perhaps backing up diet as a contributing factor, researchers had previously found some evidence among ancient Egyptians for diabetes, a condition often associated with obesity, Allam added. Also, Egyptian papyrus documents by ancient physicians refer to diabetes symptoms.

However, although body fat is not preserved on ancient mummies, the signs are that Ahmose Meryet Amon was probably petite, Allam said. In fact, the team suspects some factor other than diet and lifestyle may have contributed to her vascular disease.

For instance, "in her family there were a couple of other queens and princesses that had atherosclerosis, so a genetic element cannot be excluded," Allam said.

The new study suggests that genetics may be even more important than thought in causing atherosclerosis, and the mummies might hold clues to which genetic factors are involved.

Another possibility is that atherosclerosis can be brought on by chronic inflammation caused by a person's immune system responding to infection, which in turn can lead to inflammation of the blood vessel walls.

"The princess was known to have arthritis and inflammation of the joints," Allam noted. "Also, she had severe dental disease, which is another inflammation."

The US-Egyptian research team is undertaking further studies on a total of 72 mummies to investigate the individuals' genetic links, evidence of other health issues including arthritis and cancer, and whether their bones can reveal how active they were.

The team's most recent findings are published in the April issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Imaging.
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References:

Owen, James. 2011. "Egyptian Princess Mummy Had Oldest Known Heart Disease". National Geographic Daily News. Posted: April 15, 2011. Available online: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/04/110415-ancient-egypt-mummies-princess-heart-disease-health-science/

Looting in Revolutionary Egypt and its aftermath

I am publishing two different articles about the looting of the Cairo Museum during the recent Revolution.

About '1,000 Relics' Stolen During Egypt Uprising

Thieves stole around 1,000 relics from museums and archeological sites across Egypt since protests against the government broke out in January, Egypt's minister for antiquities Zahi Hawass said Sunday in a newspaper interview.

"We are investigating all the incidents to find the items. Up until now we have identified many culprits, criminals who were looking for gold or mummies and who lacked knowledge of the value of the items they stole," he told Spanish daily El Mundo.

"They were not organized, they lived near the archeological sites where the objects were kept. They would take advantage of the night to enter the archeological sites and pillage," he added.

"About 1,000 objects were stolen, none of them major items. There is an inventory of everything and it will be difficult for the items to leave the country."

The inventory of all the items that were stolen during the uprising and the weeks of unrest that followed will be given to UNESCO, the UN cultural agency, Hawass said.

The tomb of Hetep-ka at Saqqara and the tomb of Em-pi at Giza as well as the Egyptian museum in Cairo, which houses most of the King Tutankhamen collection, were among the places targeted by thieves, he added.

Hawass was named minister of antiquities last month. He had served as head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and later became minister of state under ousted president Hosni Mubarak.

Priceless Egyptian Treasures Returned

A statue of King Tutankhamun, which was looted during Egypt's anti-government protests, has been returned to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo along with three other pharaonic artifacts, Zahi Hawass, Minister of State for Antiquities, announced today.

Stolen when vandals and looters broke into the Cairo museum during the January revolution that brought down President Hosni Mubarak, the statue, cataloged as JE 60710.1, is one of three gilded wooden statues of King Tutankhamun that were declared missing in March (the official list of the items that were stolen from the Egyptian museum included a total of 63 objects).

Showing the boy king standing in a boat and throwing a harpoon, the statue suffered a minor damage.

"A small part of the crown is missing as well as pieces of the legs. The boat is still in the museum, and the figure of the king will be reunited with it and restored," Hawass, who was named minister of antiquities last month, said in a statement.

One is the pharaoh's gilded bronze and wooden trumpet (JE 62008).

"It was received in excellent condition and will be put on display immediately," Hawass said.

Also returned was a part of Tutankhamun's fan. One face is in good condition, while the other has been broken into 11 pieces.

The fourth retrieved piece is a shabti statue cataloged as JE 68984. It is one of 10 missing shabtis belonging to the pharaonic couple Yuya and Tjuya, which recent DNA tests identified as King Tut's great-grandparents.

"It is still in very good condition. It does not require restoration and will be placed on display again immediately," Tarek El-Awady, director of the Egyptian Museum, said in a statement.

About 1,000 relics have been stolen from museums and archeological sites across Egypt since protests against the government began in January.

Hawass announced today that a special police force will be set up to protect sites and museums around the country.
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References:

AFP. 2011. "About '1,000 Relics' Stolen During Egypt Uprising". Discovery News. Posted: April 10, 2011. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/egypt-uprising-looted-artifacts-110410.html

Lorenzi, Rossella. 2011. "Priceless Egyptian Treasures Returned". Discovery News. Posted: April 12, 2011. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/priceless-rgyptian-artifacts-returned-110412.html