The Egyptian archaeological mission affiliated with the Supreme Council of Antiquities has been working at Tell al-Deir ruins in the new city of Damietta.
Together they discovered 20 tombs dating back to the Late Period of ancient Egypt, while completing the excavation work it is conducting at the site, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziri, said.
He also pointed out the importance of this discovery in rewriting the history of Damietta Governorate.
He added that the discovered tombs varied between tombs made of mud bricks and simple pits.
The mud brick tombs may date back to the Sawi era, specifically the 26th Dynasty, as the architectural planning of the discovery tombs was a widespread and well-known model in the late period.
There are also the technical features and pottery vessels discovered inside it, Ayman Ashmawy, head of the Egyptian antiquities sector at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said.
The mission also discovered golden chips that covered the remains of human burials.
These are embodying the deities Isis, Heqet, and Bastet, as well as the embodiment of the protective eye of Horus (Udjat), and Horus in the form of a falcon while spreading his wings.
Many funerary amulets of different shapes, sizes, and stones, such as scarabs, the headrest, the two feathers of Amun, and many deities: including Isis, Nephthys, Djehuty, and Taweret, were also discovered, Qotb Fawzy, head of the Central Department of Antiquities of Lower Egypt and Sinai and head of the archaeological mission, stated.
The miniature models of canopic vessels for preserving the viscera of the deceased during the mummification process, and statues of the four sons of Horus were also found.
The mission is continuing its excavation work at the site in order to uncover the secrets of the Tell Al-Deir necropolis, Reda Salih, Director of the Damietta Antiquities District, said.
In previous seasons the mission uncovered many burial customs and methods of successive civilizations on the land of Egypt in the Greco-Roman era, at Tel Al-Deir.
Archaeologists have unearthed two early Aksumite Churches in Africa
New discoveries in the port city of Adulis on Eritrea’s Red Sea coast show that two ancient churches discovered more than a century ago were built during the reign of the legendary Kingdom of Aksum, which ruled Northeast Africa for the entire first millennium AD.
The two ancient religious structures have finally been dated to the mid-1st millennium AD, thanks to a detailed analysis performed by a team of archaeologists from the Vatican-sponsored Pontificio Instituto di Archeologia Cristiana, with dates of construction beginning no later than the 6th and 7th centuries, respectively.
The Aksumite Kingdom arose in the former territories of the fallen D’mt Kingdom in the mid-first century AD.
From an early stage, the kingdom played an important role in the transcontinental trade route between Rome and India, rising to become one of the most powerful empires of late antiquity.
Archaeologists excavating at Adulis’ port discovered two churches built after the kingdom’s conversion to Christianity in the 4th century AD. One of the churches is a large cathedral with the remains of a baptistry, while the other is smaller but has a ring of columns that supports a dome roof.
Excavation of one of the early churches found in Adulis, which likely served as the city’s cathedral.
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.
The churches incorporate elements from a variety of traditions, reflecting the various influences on the kingdom’s conversion. The domed church is one of a kind in the Aksumite Kingdom, and it appears to be inspired by Byzantine architecture. Meanwhile, the cathedral is built on a large platform in the Aksumite tradition.
To accurately date the structures, the researchers used modern scientific methods such as radiocarbon dating on materials recovered from both sites.
Adulis sector 4 – eastern church
“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. Gabriele Castiglia.
In a study published in the journal Antiquity, the cathedral was built between AD 400 and 535, while the domed church was built between AD 480 and 625. Both structures are some of the earliest Christian churches from the Aksumite Kingdom, and the oldest known outside the capital’s heartlands.
From this vantage point, the construction of these two striking and ambitious structures in a port city far from the Aksumite capital suggests that Christianity spread relatively quickly throughout the kingdom.
Work on the first of the two structures may have begun less than a century after King Ezana’s conversion, indicating that the people of the region were open to new spiritual belief systems.
Excavations at the domed church, revealed a room near the entrance.
With the arrival of Islam, the churches fell into decline and disuse; however, they were later re-appropriated as a Muslim burial ground, indicating that the region’s conversion to Islam was also a multicultural phenomenon, with local customs mixed with the new religion.
“This is one of the first times we have the material evidence of the re-appropriation of a Christian sacred space by the Islamic community,” said Dr. Castiglia.
Cambridge University Will Repatriate Benin Bronzes
The university said it was “working with the commission to finalise next steps” regarding the return of the objects
The Charity Commission has granted consent for the University of Cambridge to return 116 artefacts to Nigeria.
The objects, known as the Benin Bronzes, were taken by British armed forces during the sacking of Benin City in 1897, the university said.
The legal ownership of the items will be transferred to the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments. The Charity Commission concluded the university was “under a moral obligation” to return the artefacts.
A spokesperson for the university said it was “working with the commission to finalise next steps regarding these Benin Bronzes”.
The university said some items would remain in Cambridge on loan
The university said the 1897 attack was “mounted by Britain in response to a violent trade dispute”.
“British forces burned the city’s palace and exiled Benin’s Oba, or king,” the university said.
“Several thousand brasses and other artefacts – collectively known as the ‘Benin Bronzes’ – were taken by the British, and subsequently sold off in London to recoup the costs of the military mission.”
The artefacts ended up dispersed across many museums in the UK, the rest of Europe, and the US.
The university said 116 of the items were at its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Prof Nicholas Thomas, director of the museum, said: “Across the international museum sector, there is growing recognition that illegitimately acquired artefacts should be returned to their countries of origin.”
A brass penannular bracelet is one of the items at the Cambridge museum
The university said it hosted the Benin Dialogue Group in 2017 and had visited Benin City before receiving a formal claim from the National Commission for Museums and Monuments of Nigeria in January 2022.
The university supported the claim for the items to be returned to the west African country and submitted the case to the Charity Commission for authorisation in July.
The commission has granted consent for the transfer.
A spokesman for the commission said it “carefully” assessed the matter.
“The trustees made the decision to transfer the artefacts, concluding that they were under a moral obligation to take this step,” he said.
A spokesperson for the university said some of the artefacts would remain in Cambridge on “extended loan, ensuring that this West African civilisation continues to be represented in the museum’s displays, and in teaching for school groups”.
“Those that return physically will be transferred to the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, as is required legally by the Republic of Nigeria – an approach formally supported by the Oba of Benin.”
Study Suggests Walking May Be Linked to Treetop Foraging
An adult male chimpanzee walks upright to navigate flexible branches in the open canopy, in behaviour characteristic of the Issa Valley savanna-mosaic habitat.
The ancestors of humans may have begun moving on two legs to forage for food among the treetops in open habitat, researchers have suggested, contradicting the idea that the behaviour arose as an adaptation to spending more time on the ground.
The origins of bipedalism in hominins around 7m years ago has long been thought to be linked to a shift in environment, when dense forests began to give way to more open woodland and grassland habitats.
In such conditions, it has been argued, our ancestors would have spent more time on the ground than in the trees, and been able to move more efficiently on two legs.
But now researchers studying chimpanzees in Tanzania say that trait may have different origins. “I think we have long told this very logical story, that at least our data don’t really support,” said Dr Alex Piel, a biological anthropologist at University College London and a co-author of the research.
Writing in the journal Science Advances, the researchers report how they spent 15 months studying 13 chimpanzees living in Issa Valley in western Tanzania, an environment similar to that experienced by our ancient ancestors.
The results reveal that these chimpanzees spent a greater proportion of their time on the ground, and in movement, when in an open environment of woodland and grasses than in densely forested parts of the same area.
However, even in the open environment, the proportion of time the chimpanzees spent on the ground was similar to that previously recorded for other populations of the apes living in densely forested areas, including Gombe and Mahale.
“Even though we have far fewer trees, [the chimps are] no more terrestrial,” said Piel.
The team then combined the data for the different environments in Issa Valley and analysed how often the chimpanzees either stood or moved on two feet.
The results reveal that while bipedal behaviour accounted for less than 1% of recorded postures, only 14% related to chimpanzees on the ground.
“Most of the time that they are on two legs is in the trees,” said Piel, adding that the behaviour, at least amid the branches, appears to be most commonly linked to foraging for food.
Rhianna Drummond-Clarke, first author of the research from the University of Kent, said that open woodland could favour bipedalism in chimpanzees, and by extension early human ancestors, because such environments have more sparsely distributed trees than dense forests.
“[Bipedalism may help them] safely and effectively navigate the flexible branches and access as many fruits as possible when they find them,” she said.
The team says that while the study cannot prove that our human ancestors showed the same patterns of bipedal behaviour, it calls into question common assumptions of how humans ended up walking on two legs, and suggests that trees continued to play a role in our evolutionary story even as the environment shifted.
“Rather than time on the ground stimulating [bipedalism], it may have catalysed it, but it was already there,” said Piel. “And that fits perfectly with the fossil record because all the all these early hominins have both arboreal and terrestrial adaptations.”
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?
