Long-Lost Mummy of Pharaoh's Foster Brother Found

By Rossella Lorenzi

The mummy of the pharaoh Amenhotep II's foster brother may have been found in a former monastery, according to archival research into 19th-century documents.

The mummy, now reduced to a skeleton, is believed to be that of Qenamun, the chief steward of Amenhotep II (about 1427–1400 B.C.) who was the 7th Pharaoh of Egypt's 18th Dynasty and likely Tutankhamun's great-great-grandfather.

Qenamun was effectively Amenhotep II's foster brother, as his mother, Amenemipet, was the chief royal nurse of the future king. The two grew up together and the bond endured in adult life, with Qenamun enjoying a high and powerful status.

But the whereabouts of Qenamun's afterlife journey had remained a mystery -- no coffin nor mummy was found in his large and beautifully decorated tomb in Thebes.

"Identifying Qenamun has been like fitting together long-lost puzzle pieces," Marilina Betrò, professor of Egyptology at Pisa University, told Discovery News.

It all began two years ago when a skeleton resting in a cardboard box was found in a store room of a 14th-century monastery. Located in Calci, a village near Pisa, the monastery now houses one of the world's oldest natural history museums.

"Intriguingly, the skull bore an inscription in black ink stating it was one of the mummies brought from Egypt by Ippolito Rosellini, Europe's first Egyptology professor," Marilina Betrò told Discovery News. She holds the same chair at Pisa University that Rosellini did.

Luxor necropolis among new Egyptian finds

By Waleed Abu al-Khair in Cairo

In an archaeological find Egyptian experts are calling very important, an Italian mission -- headed by Angelo Sesana and working in the mortuary temple of Amenhotep II on Luxor's west bank -- recently discovered a necropolis containing tombs dating back to the beginning of the Third Intermediate Period (roughly 1075-664 BCE).

Amenhotep II, son of King Thutmose III and Merytre-Hatshepsut, was the seventh pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty.

"The site of the discovery is located near the Ramesseum temple, one of the most important funerary temples not only in Egypt but in the world," said Niazi Ali, a professor of pharaonic antiquities at Cairo University's Faculty of Archaeology.

Mission members have found a number of burial chambers, with a well in front of each and remnants of wooden sarcophagi containing some skeletal remains, Ali said. The sarcophagi are believed to be made of decay-resistant wood.

A set of funereal articles commonly used during that period -- jewellery, toiletries and food left for the deceased to consume in his second life -- also were found at the site, along with a number of canopic jars containing the mummified internal organs of the deceased.

"Amenhotep II is known for his great interest in building funerary temples, and the tombs were likely built for athletes and warriors, whom he held in great esteem, particularly horse riders and archers," Ali said.

Piece of glass has been identified as part of 3,000-year-old Egyptian vase

by James Rush

A piece of glass on display at Swansea University has been identified as a lost fragment of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian vase at Cairo Museum.

The fragment is believed to have come from a 15in high vase from the tomb of queen Tiye, the wife of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III, who reigned from 1386 to 1349BC.

The piece of glass, which is on loan to the university's Egypt Centre from Swansea Museum, is part of an amphora, a kind of vessel usually used for transporting wine.

The rest of the vessel is currently on display in Cairo.

Although it was found in the tomb of the wife of Amenhotep III, the 4cm fragment bears the name of his grandfather Amenhotep II, who is thought to have ruled Egypt between 1427-1401BC and was given to the museum by the family of Harold Jones in 1959. Mr Jones  was an artist in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings in the early 20th century.

Photo Credit: D. Legakis Photo/Athena Pictures

The long piece of glass displays two names of the king picked out in red and yellow on a background of brilliant blue.

The names are surmounted by red sun-disks and yellow feathers. The missing piece was originally prefabricated separately and then sunk into the body of the 40cm high glass amphora.

The complete vessel consists of a white amphora decorated with brown and light blue decoration.

Photo Credit: D. Legakis Photo/Athena Pictures

Dr Carolyn Graves-Brown, Curator of the Egypt Centre, said: 'Glass of this date is extremely rare in Egypt and was usually given as diplomatic gifts between the kings of the region.

'Vessels and other artefacts from the reign of Amenhotep II are part of an extraordinary array of sophisticated techniques from an innovative period of glass production.

'Large vessels such as that in Cairo Museum, from which our fragment originated, were not attempted even in later years. At this date the manufacture of glass was a royal monopoly and as valuable as gold and silver.'

Amenhotep III's reign is said to mark the zenith of civilisation in ancient Egypt, for both its cultural achievement and political power.

He is thought to have died around 1354 BC and was buried in a tomb in the secluded western branch of the Valley of the Kings.

The Swansea piece which bears his grandfather’s name would have been prefabricated and placed upon the body of the vessel while it was still in a molten state.

Interestingly, one of the names for glass in ancient Egyptian was ‘the stone that flows’.

Garethe El-Tawab, Curator of Swansea Museum said: 'The loan of this very rare piece of ancient glass by the Museum to our colleagues in the Egypt Centre is a marvellous example of partnership working in international research.'

Visitors will be able to see the rare piece of Egyptian glass for themselves when they come to the centre which is open from Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 4pm and is free to the public.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262577/Ancient-glass-fragment-Swansea-University-discovered-3-000-year-old-vase-tomb-Egyptian-queen-Tiye.html

Archaeologists unearth five ancient tombs on Luxor's west bank

Collection of tombs from Egypt's turbulent Third Intermediate Period are found in King Amenhotep II's funerary complex by Italian archaeological mission

by Nevine El-Aref , Thursday 10 Jan 2013

An Italian archaeological mission has accidently uncovered a collection of five private rock-hewn Third Intermediate Period tombs while brushing sand from parts of King Amenhotep II’s temple, located on the northern side of the Serapaeum on Luxor's west bank.

Each tomb includes a deep shaft leading to a burial chamber containing a wooden painted sarcophagus. The sarcophagi are decorated with funerary and religious scenes painted in black and red and house skeletons of the deceased.

Mansour Boreik, supervisor of Luxor antiquities, said that 12 very well preserved mud brick and sandstone Canopic jars were also unearthed. These jars, explained Boreik, were used by ancient Egyptians to store and preserve the deceased's bodily organs for use in the afterlife.

They are medium-sized containers covered with lids depicting the heads of the four sons of Horus: Imsety, with a human head to protect the liver; Hapi, with a baboon head for the lungs; Duamutef, with a jackal head for the stomach; and Qebehsenuef, with a falcon head for the Intestines.

The jars are now housed in the area storehouse for restoration and study.

"It's a very important discovery that highlights the importance of King Amenhotep II's temple years after the pharaoh's death," said Minister of State for Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim. He told Ahram Online that King Amenhotep II also had a tomb in the Valley of the Kings that housed a collection of royal mummies discovered in 1882.

King Amenhotep II was the seventh pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty.  He inherited a vast kingdom following the death of his father, Thutmose III, and held it by means of several military campaigns in Syria. His reign witnessed the end of hostilities between Egypt and Mitanni, the two major kingdoms struggling for power in Syria.

Source: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/9/40/62200/Heritage/Ancient-Egypt/Archaeologists-unearth-five-ancient-tombs-on-Luxor.aspx

Hatshepsut - The King Herself

What motivated Hatshepsut to rule ancient Egypt as a man while her stepson stood in the shadows? Her mummy, and her true story, have come to light.

By Chip Brown

There was something strangely touching about her fingertips. Everywhere else about her person all human grace had vanished. The raveled linen around her neck looked like a fashion statement gone horribly awry. Her mouth, with the upper lip shelved over the lower, was a gruesome crimp. (She came from a famous lineage of overbites.) Her eye sockets were packed with blind black resin, her nostrils unbecomingly plugged with tight rolls of cloth. Her left ear had sunk into the flesh on the side of her skull, and her head was almost completely without hair.

I leaned toward the open display case in Cairo's Egyptian Museum and gazed at what in all likelihood is the body of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, the extraordinary woman who ruled Egypt from 1479 to 1458 B.C. and is famous today less for her reign during the golden age of Egypt's 18th dynasty than for having the audacity to portray herself as a man. There was no beguiling myrrh perfume in the air, only some sharp and sour smell that seemed minted during the many centuries she had spent in a limestone cave. It was hard to square this prostrate thing with the great ruler who lived so long ago and of whom it was written, "To look upon her was more beautiful than anything." The only human touch was in the bone shine of her nailless fingertips where the mummified flesh had shrunk back, creating the illusion of a manicure and evoking not just our primordial vanity but our tenuous intimacies, our brief and passing feel for the world.

The discovery of Hatshepsut's lost mummy made headlines two summers ago, but the full story unfolded slowly, in increments, a forensic drama more along the lines of CSI than Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indeed the search for Hatshepsut showed the extent to which the trowels and brushes of archaeology's traditional toolbox have been supplemented by CT scanners and DNA gradient thermocyclers.

Final section, completing rare ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, on view at the Brooklyn Museum

BROOKLYN, N.Y.- Following a three-year-long conservation project, the final section of the rare, thirty-five-centuries-old Egyptian Book of the Dead of the Goldworker of Amun, Sobekmose will go on long-term view on September 28. One of the most important funerary texts of the New Kingdom, in part because it is an early version of the Book of the Dead and casts light on the development of all later manuscripts, the papyrus is about twentyfive feet long. In an unusual feature, it is inscribed on both sides.

The Book of the Dead is a present-day name for ancient Egyptian texts containing a number of magic spells intended to assist the deceased in the afterlife, and which were placed in the coffin or burial chamber. The Book of the Dead of Sobekmose, created during the Eighteenth Dynasty, probably during the reign of Thutmose III or Amunhotep II (circa 1479–1400 b. c.e.), contains nearly one hundred “chapters,” almost half of the total known group of Book of the Dead texts. Several of the chapters are close in content to those found in the Coffin Texts, the collection of funeral texts used in the previous historical period.

The texts on the front are written in approximately 530 columns of hieroglyphs reading down and from right to left. English translations are provided in the gallery for certain key passages. Although portions of these funeral texts have been translated, understanding them is often challenging even to Egyptologists, who do not yet know the meaning of certain phrases and sentences.

The final third of the Book of the Dead of Sobekmose will join the previously completed sections, which have been on view in the Mummy Chamber installation in the Egyptian galleries since May 2010. That installation marked the first time the object had been on view in the Brooklyn Museum. It entered the collection in 1937 as a part of a purchase from the New-York Historical Society but had never previously been displayed because it was in poor condition.

The conservation project, supported by the Leon Levy Foundation, has made it possible for this exceptionally rare object to be put on public view.

Source: www.artdaily.org

Heb Sed, The Ritual Jubilee

Introduction

Off all the many ancient Egyptian festivals, local as well as nationwide, there was one which differed quite a bit from the rest. While they all were aimed at the relationship between the gods, the king and the people, the Heb Sed was more directly focussed around the kingship as such and its complete renewal.

The name Heb Sed, also known as The Sed festival or Feast of the Tail, derives from the name of an Egyptian wolf god, one of whose names was Wepwawet or Sed. The less formal feast name, the Feast of the Tail, is derived from the name of the animal's tail that typically was attached to the back of the pharaoh's garment in the early periods of Egyptian history. This suggests that the tail was the vestige of a previous ceremonial robe made out of a complete animal skin.

A Heb Sed was first held during the 30th regnal year of a pharaoh, and from then on, every three years, but several pharaohs however, held their first Heb Sed at a much earlier date: Hatshepsut held her first jubilee during her 16th regnal year, while Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten chose to dedicate his festival to his solar-god Aten at the early beginnings of his reign. Ramesses II often left two instead of three years between his Heb Seds, he was able to celebrate 14 such jubilees during his 67 years of reign.