Each month the Egypt Centre at the University of Wales, Swansea, UK, runs an interesting Object Of The Month display.
This month the puzzling object from the collection's storeroom is this "mysterious" red clay item:
The object is 299mm long, 157mm wide and 107mm high and it is vaguely catalogued as an "offering tray." Does any one know what this is?
Pictures: courtesy of Egypt Centre/University of Wales.
The Griffith Institute, which has "the largest specialized Egyptological archive in the world," is selling prints of photographs taken by Harry Burton in the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Burton was the only photographer allowed to take photographs inside the tomb of Egypt's Boy King when it was discovered in November 1922.
Over the following ten years, Burton photographed many of the more than 5,000 objects found in the burial on some 1,400 glass-plate negatives.
The black&white glossy contact prints on sale have been printed from these original glass negatives, and have been made in the photographic studio of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford sometime during the past fifty years.
“There are no plans to print more of them in the future, so this opportunity is unlikely to occur again,” the Griffin Institute states on its website
The price is reasonable: £20 for one 10 by 8 in. (25 by 20 cm) photograph -- VAT and postage included. Each additional print costs £10.
Here is a gallery of photos which are being offered for sale; to buy them you have to email: griffith.institute@orinst.ox.ac.uk
Picture: Rossella Lorenzi
It's good news: looted artifacts are returning home these days.
Last week the looted Axum obelisk was returned to Ethiopia after a 70-year exile in Rome. Today Egypt's culture minister Faruk Hosni announced that Switzerland has agreed to return a pharaoh's eye.
The eye was stolen 36 years ago from the statue of Amenhotep III, the 18th dinasty pharaoh who was most likely Tutankhamun's grandfather.
About 50cm long, the eye was removed from Amenhotep III's statue when a a fire broke out in the King's temple in Luxor.
"The thieves sold it to an American antiquities dealer who then auctioned it at Sotheby's," Hosni said.
The eye was then bought by a Swiss antiquities dealer. In 2002, it ended up in the Antikenmuseum in Basel, Switzerland.
Following a two year negotiation, the Swiss museum unconditionally accepted to return Amenhotep III's eye back to Egypt within four weeks.
World Architecture News has an interesting update on the Grand Egyptian Museum:
"The Grand Museum of Egypt’s design team, consisting of international multi disciplinary engineering consultancy Buro Happold, architects Hparc and Arup, has completed the submission of 5,000 drawings to form the construction documentation for this major Egyptian artefact conservation project... The Museum will house 50,000 exhibits including the whole of Carter’s Tutankhamen collection, with the total number of exhibits rising to 100,000 in the future. To house the collection, the gallery floor area will take up 25,000 sq m out of a total of 100,000 sq m built area..."
Most interesting are the rendering images provided by the architects:
Some of the top mummy experts believe so. "I go for Tut as father!," Robert Connolly, a scientist who carried serological analysis on the mummified remains of two female fetuses buried in the tomb of Tutankhamun, told me.
Egyptologists have long debated whether these mummies were the stillborn children of King Tut and his wife Ankhesenamun or if they were placed in the tomb with the symbolic purpose of allowing the boy king to live as newborns in the afterlife.
Never publicly displayed, the two tiny fetuses will soon undergo CT scans and DNA testing to determine possible diseases and their relation to the famous pharaoh.
To know more about this fascinating story, just read my article . To experience the legendary treasure, just as it was when it was first discovered, I strongly suggest the exhibition "Tutankhamun: his tomb and his treasures" at Zurich's Toni Areal, which is basically a walk-in reconstructon of the tomb complex .
More than 1,000 items of Tutankhamun’s burial treasure have been faithfully reconstructed by Egyptian artisans over five years.
Why replicas? Basically, because you can't move the original items. Just think that the insurance for the original gold mask of the Pharaoh, weighing eleven kilograms, currently costs six billion US dollars, making it the most valuable work of art in history.
Here is a slideshow of some items on display -- and here is a video
Picture: Rossella Lorenzi/Semmel Concerts
Good news for tourists to Egypt. From now on, a trip to the Giza’s Pyramids will be a more relaxed experience: no more hawkers relentlessly offering camel rides, T-shirts and pharaonic trinkets.
A 12-mile (20 km) fence, complete with infra-red sensors, security cameras and alarms, has been erected to create an exclusion zone around the three Giza pyramids and the Sphinx.
"It was a zoo. Now we are protecting both the tourists and the ancient monuments," Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.
Under the new scheme, tourists enter through a new brick entrance building and pass through several gates equipped with metal detectors and X-ray machines .
The fence, which reaches a height of 13ft (4 metres) at some points, is the first step in a project that begun seven years ago to modernise the 5,000-year-old site. A new lighting system, a cafeteria, and a visitors centre and bookshop will also be installed.
Picture: courtesy of Dr. Sabry Abd El Aziz /SCA
Cleopatra VII, the great Cleopatra, the big nose of geopolitical power, is in Paris. It is a matter of justice, because what would be better for a woman like her? Specifically, she is buried in the gardens of the National Library of France, at its old headquarters of the Rue Vivienne, near the Louvre and the Palais Royal. That is what Juan Angel Torti, former Chilean journalist and possibly the most elegant retiree in Paris, has been sustaining for years. This former reporter for Agence France-Presse, whose headquarters is a stone’s throw from where the Egyptian queen supposedly lies, looks forward to the moment when archaeologists reach access to the end of the 120 meters long tunnel at the temple of Tabusiris Magna, 50 kilometers from Alexandria, where the sarcophagi of Cleopatra and Marco Antonio are allegedly located. That is expected to happen later this year, as announced by the Egyptian authorities. But Torti is certain they are in for a big disappointment: "The tomb of Cleopatra is empty."
A full read of this article, published in lavanguardia.es and translated in English by Ben Morales-Correa, reveals that the mummy of Cleopatra came to Paris as part of a batch of three mummies given to Napoleon in his failed expedition to Egypt.
"They were among the few things that the future Napoleon I was able to draw from Egypt after the French defeat by the English. Those three mummies were exhibited at the National Library upon his return, to a wide audience. The whole world would see Cleopatra and all newspapers spoke of the event," Torti said.
Of course, the revolutionary theory isn't very popular with Egyptian authorities. In November, as the summer heat abates, they will employ a team of 12 archeologists, 70 excavators and radars to search for the hidden tomb at the temple of Tabusiris Magna.
According to Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, the last queen of Egypt is buried right there, sharing her last resting place with Mark Antony, the Roman general who became her lover and had three children with her.
Here is what Dr. Sabry Abd El Aziz , Head of the Egyptology Sector at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told me about the search:
This video clip came to my mind as I was writing about Khufu's boats and the Great Pyramid. It's taken from one of my past interviews with Dr. Zahi Hawass. I asked this great Egyptologist who he would wish to be if he believed in reincarnation. Here is the answer:
Let's start the week with another ambitious project -- let's call it Archaeorama Podcast.
We begin with "On The Phone", an interview podcast series in which some of the world's top archaeologists discuss their latest findings and projects.
Archaeorama's friend Dan Kirsch joined me in this new challenge as I interviewed maritime archaeologist Cheryl Ward and Dr. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
In this first podcast, we talk about a glorious heap of beams and planks buried beside the Great Pyramid of Khufu 4,500 years ago. The ancient wood fragments will soon be excavated and reassembled, Ikea style, into a unique pharaonic boat .
The vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces from another pit in 1954. Painstakingly reconstructed, this ship now stands resurrected in a museum built above the place where it was discovered.
Beautifully engineered, the boats reveal a level of skill that rivals the pyramids themselves. And like the pyramids, they raise many questions: What was their purpose? Was the embalmed Khufu taken to his pyramid in one of these ships? And why were there two boats?
But most of all, why did the ancient Egyptians first build and then disassemble and buried two expensive, full-sized royal ships at the base of the Great Pyramid?
Zahi Hawass and Cheryl Ward answer these questions in "On the Phone", Archaeorama's interview podcast series.
So here we go:
PUZZLE OF THE PYRAMID BOATS -- Length: 00:07:03 -- Dr. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, and Dr. Cheryl Ward, associate professor of anthropology at Florida State University, talk to Rossella Lorenzi about two pharaonic boats buried beside the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) at Giza.
Written and produced by Rossella Lorenzi. Narrated by Dan Kirsch.
Listen:
Download audio file (just right click on this link)
Subscribe to Archaeorama Podcast, and you'll be kept up-to-date about the latest archaeology news.
A great scientist and a great woman:
Nadia Lokma, General Director of Conservation, Head of GEM Conservation Center, Egypt, Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Click on the picture to watch the video
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