Egypt and the Birth of Egyptology

video credits:
Ohlone College Art 103A
Professor Kenney Mencher
(Art History Stone Age Technology through the Early Renaissance)
www.kenney-mencher.com

Ancient Egyptian chariot trappings rediscovered

Forgotten drawers in Egyptian museum yield 'astonishing' leather find.

by Jo Marchant

The beautifully preserved leather trappings of an ancient Egyptian chariot have been rediscovered in a storeroom of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Researchers say that the find, which includes intact harnesses, gauntlets and a bow case, is unique, and will help them to reconstruct how such chariots were made and used.

The ancient Egyptians used chariots — typically with one or two riders and pulled by two horses — for hunting and warfare as well as in processions. They are frequently shown in ancient Egyptian art, and several examples of the wooden frames survive, including six dismantled chariots found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb, dating to around 3,300 years ago.

But researchers knew little about the leather trappings and harnesses used with such chariots, as leather decomposes quickly if any moisture is present. Barely any leather survives on the chariots from Tutankhamun’s tomb, though some fragments are known from chariots found in other tombs, such as that of Yuya and Thuya, Tutankhamun’s great-grandparents.

Archaeology meets politics: Spring comes to ancient Egypt

As the country struggles to refashion its government, archaeologists are looking warily towards the future.

23 November 2011

In a secluded stretch of desert about 300 kilometres south of Cairo, hundreds of bodies lie buried in the sand. Wrapped in linen and rolled up in stiff mats made of sticks, they are little more than bones. But their ornate plaited hair styles and simple personal possessions help to reveal details about the individuals in each grave. The bodies date from around 3,300 years ago, when the Pharaoh Akhenaten renounced Egypt's traditional polytheistic religion and moved his capital to remote Amarna, to worship just one god: the Sun disc Aten.

The cemetery offers a window on a unique episode in Egyptian history, a revolution that some see as the birth of monotheism. Barry Kemp, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and director of the Amarna Project, has been working with his colleagues to excavate the skeletons, and says that they are starting to reveal “an alarming picture of a stressful life”. Many Amarnans died young, with retarded growth and signs of multiple injuries. Some young men had marks where their shoulder blades had been pierced, perhaps as part of a brutal ritual.

Kemp can't say much more about the skeletons because he had to flee the site in January, putting his team on flights out of the country and walling up his storehouses as a present-day revolution sent the country into chaos. Although the situation soon calmed — in fact, Amarna did not suffer a single episode of looting — Kemp has spent months waiting for permission to resume excavations. Other teams working in the country tell a similar story. “We've lost a year,” says Frank Rühli, a palaeopathologist from the Centre for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who was scheduled to start work in February on human remains at the pyramids of Saqqara, near Cairo, and in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor.

The block on excavations has been the latest in a series of obstacles for archaeologists working in Egypt — the home of perhaps one-third of the world's antiquities, which reveal a vanished culture in unmatched detail.

On This Day: King Tut’s Tomb Discovered

November 26, 2011 06:00 AM

by findingDulcinea Staff

On Nov. 26, 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter made a small hole in a sealed doorway and, holding up a candle, shed light onto King Tutankhamen’s tomb in Luxor, Egypt, for the first time in more than 3,000 years.

Tutankhamen’s Tomb Discovered

When Carter first arrived in Egypt, in 1891, as part of a British-sponsored archaeological survey, most of the ancient tombs had been discovered and plundered; it seemed unlikely that any undisturbed burial chambers remained.

Carter, however, believed that the tomb of Tutankhamen, the boy king from 14th century B.C., still laid in the Valley of the Kings, on the eastern side of the Nile River. Sponsored by Lord Carnarvon, a collector of antiquities, Carter began excavating in the area in 1914.

On Nov. 4, 1922, Carter found the first signs of what proved to be Tutankhamen's tomb. But it was not until Nov. 26, after days spent clearing a passage down a long, steep stairway, that he and Lord Carnarvon reached a second sealed doorway, behind which were hidden treasures of the boy king’s last resting place.

In his diary, Carter described the inside the tomb as a “strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another.”

“We questioned one another as to the meaning of it all,” he wrote. “Was it a tomb or merely a cache? A sealed doorway between the two sentinel statues proved there was more beyond, and with the numerous cartouches bearing the name of Tut.ankh.Amen on most of the objects before us, there was little doubt that there behind was the grave of that Pharaoh.”

On Feb. 16, 1923, after three months of removing the treasures, Carter was at last able to unseal the door of the burial chamber, revealing King Tut’s solid gold coffin and mummified remains.

Though they might seem today to be treasures beyond imagining, the contents of King Tut's tomb were modest by Pharaonic standards. In addition to jewelry and gold, Carter discovered a chariot, statuary and weapons.

The most stunning find was a stone sarcophagus containing three coffins nested within each other. Inside the final coffin, made of solid gold, was the mummified body of Tutankhamen, preserved for 3,200 years.

Biography: Tutankhamen

Tutankhamen ruled Egypt from 1336 to 1327 B.C. His father Akhenaten left the 9-year-old heir with a country in ruins as a result of religious extremism.

The young king was originally named Tutankhaten, or "the living image of Aten," after the sun god. While he was young, the military and priesthood used him as a puppet while they pushed a return to traditional ways and religion. As a result, they renamed him Tutankhamen, after Amen, a traditional god.

Tutankhamen died suddenly at the age of 19, and the circumstances of his death are still debated. A 1968 x-ray revealed loose bone fragments in Tut’s skull, which fueled speculation that he was murdered.

Recent scholarship has found that it is unlikely that Tut died of head trauma; the damage to the skull was more likely caused by the embalmers or by Carter’s excavators. Most scientific theories for Tut’s death focus on disease or infection.

Source: http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/on-this-day/November/King-Tuts-Tomb-Discovered.html

Ashmolean museum: the critic's view

Historically important and mesmerising, the Egyptian galleries have something for everyone, writes Jonathan Glancey

"Can you see anything?" whispered Lord Carnarvon as, with the light of a candle, Howard Carter peered for the first time into the tomb of Tutankhamun. "Yes, wonderful things," came the famous reply. Those wonderful things came to light on 26 November 1922, sparking a popular and enduring fascination around the world with all things ancient, mummified and Egyptian.


The Ashmolean, Britain's oldest public museum (founded in 1683), will this Saturday open the doors of six newly refurbished galleries devoted to its collection of some 40,000 Ancient Egyptian and Nubian antiquities – a collection of outstanding quality.

Spanning the Nile's cultural history, from its prehistoric roots to the days of Egypt under Roman rule, the objects on display here are hugely important from a historical point of view. Mesmerising, too. The new galleries mark the completion of a second phase of the £66m renovation and transformation of the Ashmolean by its director, Christopher Brown and his architect, Rick Mather. The first opened to critical acclaim in 2009.

A mummy revealed in Richmond

By Teresa Annas
The Virginian-Pilot
© November 19, 2011

RICHMOND

John Taylor has been digging into the background of a guy with a tongue-twisting name - Nesperennub.

That's nez-pair-ren-newb. Nez for short.

Taylor is an assistant keeper, or curator, in the ancient Egypt and Sudan department of London's British Museum. He has gotten to know Nez pretty well, but the curiosity is not reciprocated.

Nez has been dead for nearly 3,000 years. Still, he left a trail of clues.

Picture Taylor as a scholarly Sherlock Holmes, magnifying glass in hand, piecing together the mystery of this man's life, death and afterlife in what was the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes - now Luxor.

Taylor's findings can be examined - bring your own magnifier, if you wish - at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where the international touring show "Mummy: Secrets of the Tomb" goes on view today.

The show, which covers 2,000 years of Egyptian history with about 100 objects, is premiering in Richmond for its only American stop. Next, it goes to Queensland, Australia.

All of the artifacts are on loan from the British Museum, which has the most comprehensive collection of Egyptian artifacts outside of Egypt. The exhibition includes everyday items, such as jewelry, and objects related to an ancient Egyptian's afterlife, including canopic jars for storing a dead person's dried organs.

Ancient Egypt: Predynastic Period

By Alistair Boddy-Evans

This period corresponds to the Late Neolithic (Stone Age), and covers the cultural and social changes which occurred between the late Palaeolithic period (hunter gatherers)and the early Pharaonic era (the Early Dynastic Period). During the Predynastic Period Egyptians developed a written language (centuries before writing was developed in Mesopotamia) and an institutionalised religion. They developed a settled, agricultural civilization along the fertile, dark soils (kemet or black lands) of the Nile (which involved the revolutionary use of the plough) during a period in which Northern Africa was becoming more arid and the edges of the Western (and Saharan) desert (the deshret or red lands) spread.

Although archaeologists know that writing first emerged during the Predynastic Period, very few examples still exist today. What is known about the period comes from remains of its art and architecture.

The Predynastic Period is divided into four separate phases: the Early Predynastic which ranges from the 6th to 5th millennium BCE (approximately 5500 - 4000 BCE), the Old Predynastic which ranges form 4500 to 3500 BCE (the time overlap is due to diversity along the length of the Nile), the Middle Predynastic which roughly goes form 3500 - 3200 BCE, and the Late Predynastic which takes us up to the First Dynasty at around 3100 BCE. The reducing size of the phases can be taken as an example of how social and scientific development was accelerating.