Jewelry Recovered from 18th Dynasty Tomb in Upper Egypt
A British mission from Cambridge University working at Tell El-Amarna necropolis in Minya governorate in Upper Egypt discovered a small collection of gold and steatite (soapstone) jewellery in an 18th Dynasty (1550 to 1292 BC) cemetery.
Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, explained that the jewellery had originated from the interment of a young adult female, who was buried wearing a necklace of petal-shaped pendants and three finger rings.
She had been wrapped in textile and plant-fibre matting and interred in a small shaft-and-chamber tomb, along with several other individuals.
Ana Steven, deputy director of the mission said that her burial is located at the Amarna North Desert Cemetery in the low desert west of the North Tombs. It includes a small number of burial shafts and tombs, as well as pit graves.
The Amarna Project has been investigating the cemeteries of Amarna since 2005, with the aim of exploring life experiences and burial customs at the ancient city of Akhetaten.
The ancient Egyptian city of Amarna continues to transform our understanding of how human society has developed. Not only was it home to the monotheistic King Akhenaten, his wife Nefertiti and the young Tutankhamun, it remains one of the world’s pre-eminent archaeological sites for understanding how people lived in the pre-Classical world.
The Cambridge University mission started excavations in Tel El-Amarna in 1977 at several sites including the grand Aten Temple, the Al-Ahgar village, the northern palace and the Re and Banehsi houses, according to Director-General of Antiquities in Middle Egypt Gamal El-Semestawi.
The mission has also carried out restoration works at the Small Atun Temple and the northern palace.
Tel El-Amarna, which lies around 12 kilometres southwest of Minya city, holds the ruins of the city constructed by King Akhenaten and his wife Queen Nefertiti to be the home of the cult of the sun god Aten.
The ruins of this great city include magnificent temples, palaces and tombs.
Ireland to return mummified remains and sarcophagus to Egypt
Mummified human remains and a sarcophagus is among the ancient objects that an Irish university says it plans to repatriate to Egypt.
This wooden sarcophagus is thought to have belonged to a man called Hor
All of the artifacts being returned by the University College Cork (UCC) date from between 100AD and 975BC. An inscription on the wooden sarcophagus, which was donated to UCC, suggests it belonged to a man named Hor.
UCC said it plans to return the items in 2023.
The human remains are thought to be that of an adult male and were donated to the UCC in 1928.
The items also include a set of four canopic jars – containers used by ancient Egyptians during mummification – and funerary head and body coverings known as cartonnage.
The jars are the oldest items, likely dating between 945-700BC, and were bought by the UCC from an antique dealership in Yorkshire.
There are no records indicating how the cartonnage made its way to the university.
The sarcophagus was excavated by Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli in the early 1900s.
The announcement of the items’ return follows ongoing discussions between UCC, the Egyptian and Irish governments, and the National Museum of Ireland.
Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney, said he was “delighted” that his department could help in what he described as an “important project”.
Egypt’s ambassador to Ireland, Mohamed Sarwat Selim, expressed his thanks to everyone involved in the repatriation.
The items’ return will be documented in a creative project called Kinship, which is being lead by the Irish artist Dorothy Cross.
“The essence of Kinship is the return of a mummified body of an Egyptian man from Ireland to Cairo, mirroring the tragic displacement and migration of thousands of people from their homelands today,” Ms. Cross said.
The 2,300-year-old mummy under the floorboards that UCC has been in custody dispute with Egypt over has been spotted on the move in the library #UCCpic.twitter.com/CDpIqddSTZ
Denisovan Genes May Have Boosted Modern Human Immunity
When modern humans first migrated from Africa to the tropical islands of the southwest Pacific, they encountered unfamiliar people and new pathogens. But their immune systems may have picked up some survival tricks when they mated with the locals—the mysterious Denisovans who gave them immune gene variants that might have protected the newcomers’ offspring from local diseases.
Ancient Denisovans like this reconstruction from a 146,000-year-old potential Denisovan skull from Harbin, China, gave immune-related DNA to people in Papua New Guinea.
Some of these variants still persist in the genomes of people living in Papua New Guinea today, according to a new study.
Researchers have known for a decade that living people in Papua New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia, a subregion of the southwest Pacific Ocean, inherited up to 5% of their DNA from Denisovans, ancient humans closely related to Neanderthals who arrived in Asia about 200,000 years ago.
Scientists assume those variants benefited people in the past—perhaps by helping the modern humans better ward off local diseases—but they have wondered how that DNA might still be altering how people look, act, and feel today.
It’s been difficult to detect the function of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in Melanesians, however, because scientists have analyzed so little genetic data from living humans in Papua New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia.
The new study overcomes that problem by using genetic data from 56 individuals from Papua New Guinea that were recently analyzed for another paper, part of the Indonesian Genome Diversity Project.
The researchers, mostly from Australia and New Guinea, compared those genomes with those of Denisovans from Denisova Cave in Siberia, as well as Neanderthals.
They found the Papuans had inherited unusually high frequencies of 82,000 genetic variants known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, which arise from differences of a single base or letter in the genetic code—from Denisovans.
The team then looked for those variants in a database that links genes to various functions in different tissues in humans. They homed in on immune-related gene variants that might promote or enhance a nearby gene’s production of proteins, for example, or shut off or dampen its function. These tweaks can help optimize an immune system for the specific pathogens in its environment; too strong an immune response can be as deadly as the infection itself.
In Papuans, the scientists found many Denisovan variants that were located near genes known to impact human immune responses to viruses and other pathogens, such as the flu and chikungunya. Next, they tested the function of eight Denisovan gene variants associated with the expression of proteins produced by two genes, in particular, OAS2 and OAS3, “lymphoblastoid”—cell lines of B cells, a type of white blood cell that makes antibodies critical to the body’s immune response. Those cell lines were collected from Papuans by study co-author Christopher Kinipi, a Papuan physician and health services director at the University of Papua New Guinea.
Two of the Denisovan genetic variants found in those Papuan cell lines lowered the transcription or production of proteins that regulate cytokines, part of the immune system’s defense against infections, reducing inflammation. This subdued inflammatory response could have helped Papuans weather a rash of new infections they would have encountered in the region.
“One of the strengths of the study is that they tested the Denisovan variants in Papuan cell lines, which are essentially the cell environment in which they evolved,” says functional genomicist Francesca Luca of Wayne State University, who was not part of the study.
Taken together, these experiments suggest those Denisovan gene variants “might be fine-tuning the immune response” to optimize it to its environment, says human evolutionary geneticist Irene Gallego Romero of the University of Melbourne, lead author of the new study published in PLOS Genetics. “In the tropics where people have high loads of infectious disease, you might want to tone down the immune response a little and not go overboard.”
These findings dovetail with earlier work on the role of Neanderthal variants in living Europeans. Studies of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in different populations are showing how mating with archaic humans—long-adapted to their regions—provided a rapid way for incoming modern humans to pick up beneficial genes, says computational biologist Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
The study shows this sort of gene swap was “an important mechanism for how humans adapted quickly [to new challenges], specifically pathogens,” says human geneticist Luis Barreiro of the University of Chicago.
But he would like to see future work test whether the Denisovan gene variants actually give Papuans a better shot at warding off or surviving specific diseases.
Overall, this study shows “matings which took place tens of thousands of years ago are still influencing the biology of contemporary individuals,” says population geneticist Joshua Akey of Princeton University.
Why the discovery of Cleopatra’s tomb would rewrite history
The south wall of the temple of Hathor at Dendera. Cleopatra and her son Caesarian are depicted on the left side.
It couldn’t have been a case of better timing. Egyptologists celebrating the centenary of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, now have a promising new archaeological discovery that appears to have been made in Egypt.
Excavators have discovered a tunnel under the Taposiris Magna temple, west of the ancient city of Alexandria, which they have suggested could lead to the tomb of Queen Cleopatra.
Evidence that this is really the case remains to be seen, but such a discovery would be a major find, with the potential to rewrite what we know about Egypt’s most famous queen.
According to the ancient Greek writer Plutarch – who wrote a biography of Cleopatra’s husband, the Roman general Mark Antony, and is responsible for the lengthiest and most detailed account of the last days of Cleopatra’s reign – both Antony and Cleopatra were buried inside Cleopatra’s mausoleum.
Bust of Cleopatra’s husband, Roman General Mark Antony, at the National Archaeological Museum of Madrid.
According to Plutarch, on the day that Augustus and his Roman forces invaded Egypt and captured Alexandria, Antony fell on his sword, died in Cleopatra’s arms, and was then interred in the mausoleum. Two weeks later, Cleopatra went to the mausoleum to make offerings and pour libations, and took her own life in a way that is still unknown (a popular misconception is that she was bitten by an asp). She too was then interred in the mausoleum.
In the days that followed, Antony’s son Marcus Antonius Antyllus and Cleopatra’s son Ptolemy XV Caesar (also known as Caesarion, “Little Caesar”), were both murdered by Roman forces, and the two young men may likewise have been interred there.
If the mausoleum of Cleopatra has not already vanished beneath the waves of the Mediterranean along with most of the Hellenistic city of Alexandria, and is one day found, it would be an almost unprecedented archaeological discovery.
A discovery that could rewrite history
While the tombs of many famous historical rulers are still standing – the mausoleum of Augustus, Antony, and Cleopatra’s mortal enemy, in Rome, is one example – their contents have often been looted and lost centuries ago.
The Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome.
One notable exception is the tomb of Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, uncovered at Vergina in the late 1970s.
The tomb was found intact, and this has enabled decades of scientific investigation into its contents, advancing our knowledge of members of the Macedonian royal family and their court. The same would be true if Cleopatra’s tomb were discovered, and found to be intact.
The number of new information Egyptologists, classicists, ancient historians, and archaeologists could glean from its contents would be immense. For the most part, our knowledge of Cleopatra and her reign comes from ancient Greek and Roman literary sources, written after her death and inherently hostile to the Egyptian queen.
We do not have much evidence revealing the Egyptian perspective on Cleopatra, but what we do have, such as honorific reliefs on the temples that she built and votives dedicated by her subjects, gives us a very different view of her.
The ethics of unearthing Cleopatra’s remains
To date, no other Ptolemaic ruler’s tomb has been found. They were reportedly all situated in the palace quarter of Alexandria and are believed to be under the sea with the rest of that part of the city.
The architecture and material contents of the tomb alone would keep historians busy for decades, and provide unprecedented amounts of information about the Ptolemaic royal cult and the fusion of Macedonian and Egyptian culture. But if Cleopatra’s remains were there too, they could tell us a great deal more, including the cause of her death, her physical appearance, and even answer the thorny question of her race.
The mummy of an ancient Egyptian woman decorated with gold and enamel in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
But should we be hoping to find Cleopatra’s remains, and analyze them? From Tutankhamun to the ordinary ancient Egyptians whose mummies have been excavated over the centuries, there has been a long history of mismanagement and mistreatment.
While the days when mummies were unwrapped as a form of entertainment at Victorian dinner parties have thankfully passed, concerns are increasingly being raised by those who work in heritage about the appropriate treatment of our ancestors.
While the discovery of Cleopatra’s tomb would be priceless for Egyptologists and other scholars, is it fair to deny the queen the opportunity for peace and privacy in death that she did not receive in life?
Rare Archaeological Discoveries In The Sacred Animal Necropolis In Saqqara
Egypt is a land of great interest to anyone interested in archaeology and ancient history, but at present times the Coronavirus outbreak doesn’t allow us to admire the treasures of the land of the Pharaohs.
However, we can still use online resources to learn more about archaeological findings in Egypt.
On their official website, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has told the public about some intriguing archaeological discoveries.
In the sacred animal necropolis in Saqqara, archaeologists have brought to light a beautifully decorated tomb of Wahti and the cachette of the sacred mummified birds and animals. Some of these animal mummies are very rare.
The latest discovery was at the bottom of an 11-meter-deep shaft where scientists uncovered five sealed stone coffins/sarcophagi, four niches in a room containing wooden coffins, and Late Period human burials were uncovered.
A massive anthropoid wooden coffin with hieroglyphs written in yellow pigment was discovered in one niche.
“We found several other artifacts around the coffin,” the ministry said.
“They included 365 faience Ushabti figurines, some of which bear hieroglyphs texts; a small wooden obelisk about 40 cm tall, all four of its sides bearing painted scenes depicting the deities Isis and Nephthys, and the deity Horus; wooden statues of the god Ptah-Sokar-Osiris; and three pottery canopic jars in which the viscera removed during mummification was kept, in addition to many other artifacts.”
Ushabti were servants who worked for their owners in the afterlife.
According to archaeological expert Abdel-Rahman Rihan, the discovery should be dated to the late Pharaonic kingdom following the third transitional era and prior to the Ptolemaic Era, dating back to 332 B.C.
“Egyptian archaeologists do not all agree on the beginning of the late era. However, they do agree that it was around the late 25th Dynasty and before or during the 26th Dynasty,” Arab News reports.
Credit: Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities
The 25th Dynasty rulers were from Sudan, particularly Sudan’s northern area of Nabta, which was the capital of the kingdom of Kush in ancient times. The region is about 300 km from the capital Khartoum.
“The discovery is certainly very important as it coincides with the expected inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is at the top of the Egyptian state’s priorities after the coronavirus pandemic is over,” Rihan said.
The ministry was using technology to introduce its archaeological discoveries to the world, and these would be “awaiting visitors” after the pandemic ended, he said.
New Dates Obtained for Ethiopia’s Early Christian Churches
Excavation of one of the early churches found in Adulis, which likely served as the city’s cathedral.
Archaeologists have made an important discovery in the Kingdom of Aksum, a major ancient power in Northeastern Africa, identifying two churches from shortly after the Aksumite’s conversion to Christianity. These are some of the first churches in the Kingdom reliably dated to this key period.
The Aksumite Kingdom ruled much of the northern Horn of Africa in the first millennium AD, stretching from Ethiopia to Arabia, and was an important contemporary of the Roman Empire. Like their Mediterranean neighbor, the Aksumite leader—King Ezana—converted to Christianity in the 4th century AD but securely dated churches from this period are rare.
However, two churches from the important Aksumite port of Adulis, in modern Eritrea, are helping fill this gap.
One is an elaborate cathedral, complete with the remains of a baptistry, that is located near the center of the city and was first excavated in 1868. The other, first excavated in 1907, is in the east and features a ring of columns that show it once had a dome.
Over a hundred years since these churches were first excavated, archaeologists are re-examining these buildings with modern techniques.
Dr. Gabriele Castiglia, from the Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, is part of a team digging them back up and carrying out radiocarbon dating on the site. This new data has allowed them to accurately reconstruct their history, with their findings published in the journal Antiquity.
Excavations at the domed church, revealing a room near the entrance.
“This study provides one of the first examples of Aksumite churches excavated with modern methods and chronological data coming from modern dating methods,” said Dr. Castiglia.
The research revealed construction began on the cathedral between AD 400–535, whilst the domed church was built AD 480–625.
This makes them some of the earliest securely dated churches in the Aksumite Kingdom, and the oldest known outside the capital’s heartlands. This shows a relatively rapid spread of Christianity through the Kingdom of Aksum.
“Having a precise chronology for these churches is key to understanding how the process of conversion to Christianity shaped the geographical and cultural area,” said Dr. Castiglia.
Crucially, the buildings show that the spread of Christianity was not the result of a single factor, like a mandate by King Ezana.
The churches have elements from many traditions, reflecting the diverse influences on the kingdom’s conversion. The domed church, for example, is unique in the Aksumite Kingdom and appears to be inspired by Byzantine churches. Meanwhile, the cathedral is built on a large platform in the Aksumite tradition.
The churches can also shed light on the later arrival of Islam. Adulis underwent a period of gradual decline and the churches eventually fell into disuse.
Dr. Castiglia found that this was not the end of their lives –the cathedral was re-appropriated as a Muslim burial ground. The continued use of existing sacred spaces could indicate the region’s conversion to Islam was also a multicultural phenomenon, with local customs mixed in with the new religion.
“This is one of the first times we have the material evidence of re-appropriation of a Christian sacred space by the Islamic community,” said Dr. Castiglia.
Together, these buildings show the religious history of the Horn of Africa was cosmopolitan, with diverse groups influencing the spread of beliefs.
Huge funerary building and Fayoum portraits discovered in Egypt Fayoum
The Egyptian archaeological mission working in the Gerza archaeological site in Fayoum revealed a huge funerary building from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, as well as a number of Fayoum portraits.
These are the first mummy portraits discovered at Fayoum during an archaeological dig since Flinders Petrie discovered 146 of them in a Roman-era cemetery in 1910–1911.
Dr. Mostafa Waziri, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, explained that what was discovered at the site illustrates the diversity and difference in the accuracy and quality of the embalming process during the Ptolemaic and Roman eras, which indicates the economic stature of the deceased, starting from high-quality embalming to simple burials.
Also, a rare terracotta statue of the goddess Isis-Aphrodite was also found in one of the burials inside a wooden coffin.
Fayum-type funerary portrait.
Regarding the architectural remains, Dr. Adel Okasha, head of the Central Department of Egyptian Antiquities in Central Egypt, indicated that what has been found is a huge building of funerary house type, with a floor made of colored lime mortar and decorated with interchangeable tiles. On its southern side, there is a colonnade of which four columns survive. Through the building, there is also access to a narrow street.
He added that among the many and diverse artifacts found and recorded, the portraits of mummies, or what is known as Fayoum portraits, are of great importance.
Mummy portraits, also known as Fayum portraits, are the most amazing body of painting to have come to us from the ancient world; they are remarkable for their social significance as well as their artistic quality.
Αchitectural remains at Gerza-Philadelphia.
” Fayoum Portraits ” is the name that has been given to describe them because more have been found in the Fayoum Oasis than anywhere else in Egypt.
For his part, Dr. Basem Jihad, the supervisor of the central training unit and head of the mission, said that the mission also succeeded in uncovering a number of coffins of different styles, some of them in the human form and others in the Greek form with a gabled roof.
Find from Gerza-Philadelphia.
Under the rule of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the village of Gerza was established as Philadelphia (309–246 BC). Since 2016, there have been ongoing excavations, and many artifacts have been found that date from the city’s founding to Roman rule in the third century A.D.
3,300-Year-Old Tomb with Pyramid Entrance Discovered in Egypt
The tomb, found at the site of Abydos, dates back around 3,300 years. Within one of its vaulted burial chambers, a team of archaeologists found a finely crafted sandstone sarcophagus, painted red, which was created for a scribe named Horemheb.
The sarcophagus has images of several Egyptian gods on it and hieroglyphic inscriptions recording spells from the Book of the Dead that helped one enter the afterlife.
There is no mummy in the sarcophagus, and the tomb was ransacked at least twice in antiquity. Human remains survived the ransacking, however. Archaeologists found disarticulated skeletal remains from three to four men, 10 to 12 women and at least two children in the tomb.
Newly discovered pyramid
The chambers that the archaeologists uncovered would have originally resided beneath the surface, leaving only the steep-sided pyramid visible.
“Originally, all you probably would have seen would have been the pyramid and maybe a little wall around the structure just to enclose everything,” said Kevin Cahail, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, who led excavations at the tomb.
The pyramid itself “probably would have had a small mortuary chapel inside of it that may have held a statue or a stela giving the names and titles of the individuals buried underneath,” Cahail told Live Science. Today, all that remains of the pyramid are the thick walls of the tomb entranceway that would have formed the base of the pyramid. The other parts of the pyramid either haven’t survived or have not yet been found.
Military ties
It was not uncommon, at this time, for tombs of elite individuals to contain small pyramids, Cahail said. The tomb was excavated in the summer and winter field seasons of 2013 and Cahail will be presenting results at the annual meeting of the American Research Center in Egypt, to be held in Portland, Ore., from April 4-6.
Cahail believes that Horemheb’s family had military ties that allowed them to afford such an elaborate tomb. Another burial chamber, this one missing a sarcophagus, contains shabti figurines that were crafted to do the work of the deceased in the afterlife. The writing on the figurines say that they are for the “Overseer of the Stable, Ramesu (also spelled Ramesses).” This appears to be a military title and it’s possible that Ramesu was the father or older brother of Horemheb, Cahail said.
He noted it’s interesting that both Horemheb and Ramesu share names with two military leaders, who lived at the same time they did. Both of these leaders would become pharaohs.
“They could actually be emulating their names on these very powerful individuals that eventually became pharaoh, or they could have just been names that were common at the time,” Cahail said.
Multiple wives?
The bones the team discovered in the tomb indicate that considerably more women than men were buried in the tomb. This brings up the question of whether Horemheb and Ramesu had multiple wives at the same time. Cahail said that polygamy was a common practice among the pharaohs, but it’s uncertain if it was practiced among non-royalty.
Another possibility is that the tomb was used for multiple generations by the same family and contains the remains of daughters, mothers and other female relatives. Yet another possibility is that the tomb was re-used, without permission, at a later date.
Radiocarbon tests, which can provide a date range for the bones, may be done in the future to help solve the mystery.
“You’re left with the question, who are all these people?” Cahail said.
A Jasper treasure
One of the most interesting artifacts the team found was a heart amulet, made of red and green jasper. The hard stone amulet was broken into three pieces.
“It’s a beautiful object and possibly one of the best carved examples of these very rare type of amulets,” Cahail said. “It was probably on the chest of one of the deceased individuals and there probably would have been some sort of necklaces and gold and things like that.”
The purpose of this heart-shaped amulet was probably related to spells from the Book of the Dead that tell the heart of the deceased not to lie. The ancient Egyptians believed that, after death, their hearts would be put on a scale and weighed against a feather representing ma’at, an Egyptian concept that includes truth and justice. If their heart weighed the same or less they could obtain eternal life, but if it weighed more they were destroyed.
“Essentially, your heart and your good deeds and everything that you’ve done in your life is weighed against the measure of truth,” Cahail said.
