Ancient Egypt

Pharaoh Ramses I FOUND!!!!. Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has confirmed that they have the Pharoah's mummy and will make arrangements to return it to egyptian soil. In the early 1860's, it is believed a Canadian doctor had the mummy of Ramses I smuggled out of Egypt from the Deir el-Bahri cache of royal mummies that was hidden in the Valley of Kings and known only to the egyptian family that discovered the cache of mummies in modern times. The mummies had been placed there in antiquity by egyptian priests to protect them from tomb robbers and remained hidden for centuries until found by this family who kept it a secret for years as they sold off mummies and other artifacts. !!!!!!!!.

NEW DISCOVERIES IN THE MEIDUM PYRAMID - see my page on Pyramids for the information !!!!!!!!.

6/16/02-Ancient tomb unearthed in the Giza pyramids area. A Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) mission working in the Giza pyramids area unearthed the tomb of Neso-sert, the supervisor of the administrative area of workers.SCA Secretary-General Zahi Hawas said this find asserts that Egyptian workers have built the pyramids in accordance with an advanced administrative system. The tomb is of a magnificently unique style as two holes were found in the rock-hewn burial chamber like those existing in Pharaohs Khufus' burial chamber and the Queens burial chamber in the Great Pyramid, said Hawas, noting the tomb is complete in architectural terms and is composed of an open yard leading to the tomb facade. The mission also found a limestone sarcophagus with a tightly fitting cover, which indicated that the sarcophagus has not been opened since it was laid in the tomb 4600 years ago. Broken earthenware showing that the tomb dates back to the 4th dynasty were found, in addition to 80 cone-shaped beer/wine vessels and 25 bread molds, said the (SCA) secretary-general. He added that four treasure collections, possibly belonging to the family of the deceased, were also found. Upon opening the sarcophagus, the bones of Neso-sert were found. During the early dynasties most people were not mummified except those of high station.

Egypt home of the first written language? A German archeology team believes they may have found evidence that ancient Egyptians created the earliest written text more than 5,000 years ago. It has been commonly believed that the Sumerians, the ancient people of what is now Iraq, were the first to make written records. They were used to maintain tax records and have been dated roughly at some 5,000 years old. But the new Egyptian finds are said to predate these by a few hundred years. The Egyptian hieroglyphics have been carbon dated at some 5,300 years old. They were discovered in Abydos an ancient religious center, near Luxor in the south of Egypt. The hieroglyphics, found in the tomb of king Scorpion are also tax records. They used symbols such as the sun, mountains, plants and animals which represent sounds in their spoken language.

February 9, 2006 - Archaeologists have discovered an intact, ancient Egyptian tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the first since King Tutankhamun's was found in 1922. A University of Memphis-led team found the previously unknown tomb complete with sarcophagi and five mummies. The archaeologists have not yet been able to identify them. But Egypt's chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass says they "might be royals or nobles" moved from "original graves to protect them from grave robbers". "We don't really know what kind of people are inside but I do believe they look royal. Maybe they are kings or queens or nobles," he told Reuters news agency. Bob Partridge, of Ancient Egypt magazine, said it could possibly be the tomb of Queen Nefertiti, who co-ruled Egypt between 1379 and 1358 BC. Her tomb has never been found. "Nefertiti was probably buried to the north of Egypt at a place called Akhetaten," he told BBC News24. "It's believed that the burials there, which included Nefertiti and some of her daughters, were brought back to the Theban area, and the Valley of the Kings would be the obvious place." The Valley of the Kings, near the city of Luxor in southern Egypt, was used for burials for around 500 years from 1540BC onwards. The newly-found tomb is thought to date from the 18th Pharaonic Dynasty, the first dynasty of the New Kingdom which ruled between 1539BC and 1292BC and made its capital in Thebes, now Luxor. It is the 63rd tomb to be discovered since the valley was first mapped in the 18th century, and was unexpectedly found only five metres away from King Tutankhamun's. The team of archaeologists had not been looking for it. "The excavation team was focused on the tomb of a 19th Dynasty pharaoh, King Amenmesses," Patricia Podzorski, curator of Egyptian Art at the University of Memphis, told the BBC's World Tonight. "They were working in front of the tomb looking for foundation deposits possibly related to that tomb, and clearing away some workmen's huts from the 19th Dynasty that were both to the left and right side of the tomb," she explained. "Underneath these workmen's huts, they found a shaft." Four metres below the ground was a single chamber containing sarcophagi with coloured funerary masks and more than 20 large storage jars bearing Pharaonic seals. The sarcophagi were buried rapidly in the small tomb for an unknown reason. The discovery has come as a surprise to many, Ms Podzorski said. "People have been saying the valley was done for 100 years," she said.

See the Page on Hatshepsut for one of the biggest finds since the discovery of King Tutankhamun in his tomb in the 1920's.

The Turin King List Although a list of Egyptian kings was recorded by Manetho, a historian writing in Greek in the 3rd century BCE, the most comprehensive and reliable such document, which dates from the reign of Ramesses II (12th century BCE) was purchased by Bernadino Drovetti, an Italian adventurer of the early 19th century. The papyrus scroll was then almost perfectly preserved, but after Drovetti threw it into a box and took it back toEurope,where he sold it to the king of Sardinia, it was nothing but a pile of jumbled fragments. The ancient Egyptians kept lists of their kings for two main reasons. One was to honour the royal ancestors in temples, by listing and repeating their names so they could share in the offerings made to the gods every day and their souls endure forever. The other, more pragmatic one, was that the Egyptians reckoned years not in a continuous dating system like ours, but by the years of the reigns of their kings. These records were important for record keeping and especially for locating legal documents pertaining to property and inheritance which were an object of constant litigation in a country with limited agricultural land and large families. For modern scholarship, these ancient lists provide an indespensible framework in which to place texts and archaeological remains and relate them to our own system of dating. Without them, there would be no possibility of constructing a “history’ of ancient Egypt in the modern sense. Scholarship and the Kinglist Papyrus Since its arrival in Europe and incorporation into the Egyptian Museum in Turin, the Turin Kinglist has been exhaustively studied by Egyptologists. Although almost all of the kings listed have been verified in other ancient sources, scholars have been continually frustrated by the fragmentary condition of the documents, constantly disagreeing on how much was missing and how to put the pieces together. It was not until 1938 that Guilio Farina succeeded in making a definitive restoration of the document which was then preserved between two pieces of glass, although there was still some disagreement about his reconstruction. Enter British Scholarship Last year, when the British Museum offered to make available advanced new techniques for conserving papyri to the Turin Museum, they offered the services of Egyptologist Richard Parkinson and conservator Bridget Leach. A surprise awaited these two specialists when they arrived in Turin. According to La Stampa, as Parkinson examined the King List, he noted that a number of unplaced fragments noted by the great British Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner, where missing. Turin Museum staff went on a search and finally located them in a forgotten store cupboard. A revamped list of kings? With permission of the Italian government, the Turin Kinglist will travel to British Museum in London, where it will be subjected to advanced techniques that examine not only its content but the state and content of the document itself before being conserved in a way that ensures its more permanent preservation. The incorporation of the unplaced fragments and an overall rearrangement promise to usher in a whole new era in our understanding of Egyptian history and chronology