Meet King Tut’s Father, Egypt’s First Revolutionary

Akhenaten upended the religion, art, and politics of ancient Egypt, and then his legacy was buried. Now he endures as a symbol of change.

By Peter Hessler
Photograph by Rena Effendi

Sometimes the most powerful commentary on a king is made by those who are silent. One morning in Amarna, a village in Upper Egypt about 200 miles south of Cairo, a set of delicate, sparrowlike bones were arranged atop a wooden table. “The clavicle is here, and the upper arm, the ribs, the lower legs,” said Ashley Shidner, an American bioarchaeologist. “This one is about a year and a half to two years old.”

The skeleton belonged to a child who lived at Amarna more than 3,300 years ago, when the site was Egypt’s capital. The city was founded by Akhenaten, a king who, along with his wife Nefertiti and his son, Tutankhamun, has captured the modern imagination as much as any other figure from ancient Egypt. This anonymous skeleton, in contrast, had been excavated from an unmarked grave. But the bones showed evidence of malnutrition, which Shidner and others have observed in the remains of dozens of Amarna children.

“The growth delay starts around seven and a half months,” Shidner said. “That’s when you start transition feeding from breast milk to solid food.” At Amarna this transition seems to have been delayed for many children. “Possibly the mother is making the decision that there’s not enough food.”

Until recently Akhenaten’s subjects seemed to be the only people who hadn’t weighed in on his legacy. Others have had plenty to say about the king, who ruled from around 1353 B.C. until 1336 B.C. and tried to transform Egyptian religion, art, and governance. Akhenaten’s successors were mostly scathing about his reign. Even Tutankhamun—whose brief reign has been a subject of fascination since his tomb was discovered in 1922—issued a decree criticizing conditions under his father: “The land was in distress; the gods had abandoned this land.” During the next dynasty, Akhenaten was referred to as “the criminal” and “the rebel,” and pharaohs destroyed his statues and images, trying to remove him from history entirely.

26th Dynasty ushabti figure coming home from Brussels

The torso of a 26th Dynasty green faience ushabti figure stolen during the January 25 Revolution is to return to Egypt next week from Brussels

by Nevine El-Aref , Saturday 7 Dec 2013

Next week Egypt is to recover a 26th Dynasty ushabti torso that was reported missing from the Egyptian Museum on 28 January 2011, in the throes of the January 25 Revolution.

Minister of State for Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim said that the artifact was broken into two pieces. The lower part remained in the museum while the torso was stolen and smuggled out of the country and sold to a Belgian citizen.

A few days ago, continued Ibrahim, the Belgian citizen presented the torso to a French archaeologist to ascertain its authenticity and value. The French archaeologist recognised that the torso had been in collection the Egyptian Museum. He had studied it in 1989 at the museum.

The French archaeologist reported the find to the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA), which in turn undertook the required procedures to recover it. The MSA contacted the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Egyptian embassy in Brussels, Interpol and UNESCO in order to help in the restitution of the artifact.

"The torso was among the pieces stolen from the Egyptian Museum on 28 January 2011, but regretfully it was not included in the report issued at that time about the missing objects," Ibrahim told Ahram Online.

Ibrahim added that he referred the case to the prosecutor general for investigation on why the torso was not included in the missing items report.

Ali Ahmed, head of the Antiquities Repatriation Department at the MSA, explained that the whole statue was found in the Memphis necropolis in 1858 and belonged to a nobleman of various titles, among them the holder of the north stamps.

The ushabti is 29 centimetres tall and is well known among archaeologists.

Source: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/9/40/88491/Heritage/Ancient-Egypt/th-Dynasty-ushabti-figure-coming-home-from-Brussel.aspx

Egyptian Museum exhibit puts spotlight on restored artefacts

Several antiquities looted and damaged during the 2011 uprising are being exhibited after being restored to their former glory

By Yomna El Saeed

Under the title Damaged and Restored, the Egyptian museum in Cairo is hosting an exhibition of antiquities that were lost and damaged, and subsequently restored, during the 25 January Revolution.

The exhibition is staged in hall 44 of the museum and was opened by the minister of antiquities Dr Mohamed Ibrahim, the head of the museums sector, Mr Ahmed Sharaf, the general manager of the Egyptian museum, Mr Sayed Aamer and the general manager of the conservation department of the Egyptian museum, Dr Hoda Abdel Hameed. In total 29 artefacts are on display, 11 of which were looted and recovered and 18 which were damaged but not stolen from the museum during the revolution.

Among the displayed artefacts are two statues of King Tutankhamen made of cedar wood and covered with gold, a statue of King Akhenaton, Ushabtis statues which belonged to the Nubian kings, a mummy of a child and a small plychrome glass vase.

Eid Rizk Mertah from the conservation department of the Egyptian museum explained what happened to the artefacts on display. “Some looters found that after they stole the archeological pieces they could not sell them, so they damaged them, put them in bags and threw them in the garden, in the garbage bin and on the roof of the museum. This is where the employees of the museum found them. The pieces were very badly damaged.”

The eloquent peasant

Egyptologist Bassam Al-Shamaa tells  Abeya
El-Bakry about the history of revolt in Egypt

January 2011 was not the first revolution in Egypt in the last 100 years. Unlike the July 1952 Revolution and the regime to which it gave birth, the January Revolution was not military. It was a civil revolution calling for civil rights and civil government. But nor was the July Revolution in any way unprecedented. As the Egyptologist, tour guide and writer who launched the 2005 Save the Sphinx campaign Bassam Al-Shamaa explains, there was a precedent for the January Revolution in the workers’ strike of 1155 BC. Al-Shamaa traces the Egyptians’ revolutionary character and how it has changed over an incredibly long period of time, indicating that at least some native traits have endured. Of course he is aware of the fact that revolution goes by many names, including “coup d’etat” when it involves military intervention. In ancient Egypt it was called sbi, he explains, meaning roughly rebellion; but by the time the army officer Ahmed Orabi led major protests in 18th century Egypt, it was known by the Arabic word hoga, literally meaning “frenzy” but perhaps more accurately translated as uprising, for which the accepted English term for the Arab world — following Palestinians protests — is “intifada”.

Revolutions were frequent before the unification of upper and lower Egypt, Al-Shamaa says, in the time of what he calls “the very ancient Egyptians”. There were two places in Upper Egypt — the southern half of the country — particularly known for protests: a city whose location is in the present-day town of Ballas, and Naqqada, 27 kilometres north of Luxor. “History works in steps, in my opinion,” Al-Shamaa says. “There is no such thing as an invention, only progress.” King Menes is credited with unifying the country but in fact there were several figures associated with this achievement when “the Lord of the Land(s)” became “the Lord of the Two Lands” and the double crown emerged. This period was in fact very similar to the situation we currently have with the breakdown in security and sharp polarisation between supporters and opponents of General Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi. At the time, Al-Shamaa says, governors and district heads seceded from the central government, which almost happened twice in the last year, in the cities of Al-Mahalla and Port Said.

Egypt prepares to safeguard heritage before 30 June

Broad range of actors join call to protect Egypt heritage from looting during upcoming protests; enact tight security measures around sites

by Nevine El-Aref , Friday 28 Jun 2013

In advance of  mass protests planned for 30 June, fears of looting in Egypt's archaeological landmarks, museums, and sites are growing.

These fears have roots in the January 2011 revolution, during which looting occurred in Tahrir's Egyptian Museum as well as in archeological sites across the country. Although several objects were recovered, many others are still missing.

“I am very worried about Egypt’s archaeological sites,” said Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud, deputy of the head of the Ancient Egyptian Antiquities Section at the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA).

Abdel Maqsoud told Ahram Online that since the 2011 revolution, the lack of security in the country has posed many problems for the protection of antiquities.

While the 2011 revolution lootings were carried out haphazardly by thugs and vandals, Abdel Maqsoud fears that the 30 June protests will be different because antiquities thieves and traders had enough time to plan their robberies, especially of archeological sites in remote areas.

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


By Joshua Hammer
Smithsonian magazine, June 2013


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.

Egypt’s ancient treasures being lost to looters

By Betsy Hiel 

Published: Saturday, February 16, 2013, 10:20 p.m.

Updated: Sunday, February 17, 2013 

DAHSHOUR, Egypt — From a distance, it looks as though an animal has burrowed around the 4,000-year-old Black Pyramid of Amenemhat III.

But thieves dug these holes. And Egyptian archaeologist Monica Hanna calls that “a catastrophe.”

“See the ancient mud bricks?” says Hanna, 29, peering into a pit. “It is very well structured.”

She walks to another, followed by three pyramid custodians, and points into the 25-foot hole with a tunnel to one side. Here, she says, looters exposed what might be a burial shaft.

One custodian, Said Hussein, 32, tells her that as many as 30 armed men come nightly to dig for antiquities. They beat two custodians, broke an arm of one and “attacked the armed guards on the gate.”

“Do they find anything?” she asks.

“They only find pottery, stuff like that,” he replies. “A wooden coffin, that's what they take.”

These “massive looting pits,” Hanna says, have made “Swiss cheese” of a 2-mile-long field of five pyramids listed as a United Nations World Heritage Site.

“This should not happen here,” she declares. “I feel so sad … because it is history being lost forever.”

Egyptian Idol

BY IAN STRAUGHN | NOVEMBER 15, 2012

In March 2001, Mullah Omar and the Afghan Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, exploding the statues and reducing to rubble some of Afghanistan's most important cultural relics. That act seemed to epitomize the cultural intolerance of the Taliban regime but also drew attention to the ways in which cultural heritage preservation has become used as a measure of civilized behavior of states in an era of global cosmopolitanism. For those concerned about the future of the world's antiquities, this week another threat emerged on the horizon. In an interview with Egyptian Dream TV over the weekend, Salafist leader Murgan Salem al-Gohary called on Muslims to destroy the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx as a religiously mandated act of iconoclasm. "The idols and statutes that fill Egypt must be destroyed. Muslims are tasked with applying the teachings of Islam and removing these idols, just like we did in Afghanistan when we smashed the Buddha statues," said Gohary, who claims to have participated in the destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan and was arrested on several occasions under the Mubarak regime.

Forget for a minute the gross improbability of Gohary's threat to destroy millions tons of sheer rock and stone, monuments that have survived foreign invasions, rapacious pillagers, and environmental threats. It is a move almost guaranteed to draw media attention, particularly with the high level of anxiety surrounding the new political clout of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of the Salafist al-Nour party as a significant force in both the government and the charting of a new constitution. Fears over how Islamists might fare in post-Mubarak Egypt have only intensified amid a roiling debate over issues such as the role of women, the inclusion of minorities, and the country's position toward Western interests. Amid this debate, Egypt's Pharaonic remains have now become the latest touchstone for controversy.

Revolution Brings Hard Times for Egypt's Treasures

By FARAH HALIME

Published: October 31, 2012

CAIRO — Cairo’s salmon-colored Egyptian museum is a conspicuous landmark on Tahrir Square, where it stands in almost perfect condition despite the intense protests that took place on its doorstep almost two years ago.

At the height of the revolution last year, a human chain formed to protect the priceless artifacts within the museum. A few yards away, the burnt out husk of former President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party headquarters is a reminder of a different possible fate.

But the revolutionary, carnival enthusiasm of the square has since given way to neglect and disrepair and the difficult job of retrieving stolen antiquities is proving to be an uphill struggle.

Despite the efforts of its protectors, looters managed to make off with 50 of the museum’s treasures, including a statue of King Tutankhamun carried by a goddess, and a sandstone head of a princess from Amarna, a vast archaeological site in the southern province of Minya.

Of the stolen pieces, 29 have since been recovered. The most valuable, a statue of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, was found by a protester soon after it was taken and returned to the museum, the Antiquities Ministry said at the time.

At the same time, however, reports have started to come in of sophisticated and systematic looting occurring across major Egyptian archaeological sites, according to Egyptian and U.S. officials involved in the repatriation of antiquities.

The number of illegal excavations and thefts has worsened to the point that groups are organizing heavy machinery to carry out extensive digs.