3,300 Years Ago Ancient Egyptians Collected and Revered Ancient Fossils Now Known as the ‘Black Bones of Set’

Some of the first people ever to stumble upon prehistoric fossils lived in Egypt 3,300 years ago. Their story likely started with a sandstorm. Some strong wind rose up and blew the desert sands away, exposing a secret hidden underneath: the hard, pitch-black bones of what looked like a gigantic monster.

We can only imagine what must have gone through the minds of the men who found them. They didn’t write a word about it – or, if they did, it’s been long lost to the decay of time.

All we know is what they left behind: a tomb filled with prehistoric fossils, some of them as much as two million years old, hidden until 1922 AD. It’s a fascinating mystery that we’re only starting to unravel today. We don’t know for sure what sense they made of the bones of the massive prehistoric giants that they found. Slowly but surely, though, archaeologists are unravelling a few clues.

A Tomb Full Of Prehistoric Bones

It’s taken nearly a century of research to discover anything about the prehistoric fossils found in ancient Egypt. When the first archaeologists, Guy Brunton and Flinders Petrie, found them, they didn’t even fully understand what they’d discovered. All they knew, at first, was that they’d found bundles wrapped in linen, with no idea what could be inside.

The Egyptians, after all, hadn’t put these bones on display. Instead, they’d taken them to a rock-cut tomb near a town called Qau el-Kebir. There, they’d given the massive, prehistoric bones the sort of dignified burial fit for royalty. They’d wrapped them up in fine linens and placed them in the tomb, buried with ivory tools to help them through the afterlife.

Whatever it was they thought they’d found, they believed it was something worthy of their respect. The tombs of Qau el-Kebir weren’t just makeshift graves thrown together for the occasion; they were the ancient resting places of powerful Egyptian lords, built 1,500 years before the fossils were found.

It was a place for the revered ancient dead; a place fit for the bones of a creature that, 2 million years ago, had terrorized the land that would become Egypt.

Three Tons Of Fossils Transported Over Miles

We still have no idea where the Egyptians found them. In 1926, shortly after they were uncovered, a geologist named K. S. Sandford combed every spot within 500 miles ( km) of Qau trying to track them down without success. To this day, nobody’s been able to figure it out for sure.

All we know is that they were moved. There were more than three tons of them and they had been dragged across miles of wild country, just to bury them again. It must have felt like nothing short of a holy act. It would have taken an incredible amount of effort to move those bones, and a whole team of people must have been involved.

Their destination, Qau el-Kebir, was no ordinary town. It was the centre of a cult dedicated to the god Set, the god of darkness, storms, and confusion. He was the lord of the black land; a monstrous, evil force who was often drawn looking like a monster with a hippopotamus’s head.

Without question, the bones were taken there on purpose. Whatever the Egyptians believed they’d found, they thought they belonged to the god of Chaos, and they were willing to do anything to bring them to him.

A Breakthrough In a 90-Year-Old Mystery

After more than 3,000 years buried in a tomb, Gun Brunton and Flinders Petrie pulled the fossils out, only to lock them up once again. They sent their discovery off to a museum, where they were left in unopened crates. Brunton planned on writing a book about them, but he never did. And for nearly 80 years, they just sat in those crates; an incredible discovery was forgotten.

It took until 2007 before anyone looked inside. In part, it was a matter of technology. Nobody wanted to tear open a 3,000-year-old linen bundle and risk destroying a priceless artefact. We had to wait for x-ray scanning machines that could show us what was hidden inside.

But finally, in 2014, the bones were revealed. Little pieces from countless extinct animals were inside: giant wildebeests, crocodiles, boars, horses, buffalos, and even human beings.

But the creature they saw the most of were the bones of massive, prehistoric hippopotamuses – the animal of the god Set. And every fossil had been polished over millions of years by river sands until they shimmered with the colour of the chaos god: pitch black.

The Black Bones Of Set

Nobody knows for sure what the Egyptians thought they’d found – but there are theories. It’s very likely that, 3,300 years ago, the people who found those bones believed that they had stumbled upon the remains of a god.

The Egyptians had come to a similar conclusion before. Early Roman and Greek historians wrote that when the Egyptians found fossils from the coiled shells of nummulites near the pyramids of Giza, they took it as proof that Set had once ruled over their land. The small fossils were taken to a temple in Tienna and, there, were given up as an offering to the gods.

They may have felt the same way about the gigantic fossils they put to rest in Qau el-Kebir. The bones had been fossilized – they were incredibly hard – and their religion had long taught that the gods had bones made of iron.

Perhaps they thought what they had found was something more than an animal or a man. Perhaps, as palaeontologist Kenneth Oakley has suggested, they recognized the fossilized remains of humans and giant hippopotamuses and assumed they’d all come from the same place: the remains of the half-human, half-bestial god of chaos, Set.

An Ongoing Mystery

That, at least, is one theory – but to this day, nobody knows for sure what the ancient Egyptian fossils meant to the people who uncovered those prehistoric bones. All we have to work off of are a few archaeological finds – and so far, they’ve left us with more questions than answers.

We still don’t know where the bones were found. We still don’t know why they were buried, or why nothing was written about such an incredible find. And we still don’t know for sure what it meant to them.

But bit by bit, we’re uncovering more and more clues that give us a better image of our pasts – just like our ancestors did before us, 3,300 years ago.

A dried-up arm of the Nile provides another clue to how Egyptians built the pyramids

To understand what environmental issues lie ahead for our warming planet, geographers often look back to the past for answers.

A new study published on August 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details how the landscape of ancient Egypt allowed them to create the pyramids of Giza—one of the most iconic human-made phenomenons in the world. On a now-dried-up arm of the Nile River called the Khufu branch, the study authors found that people needed the waterway to transport tools and other materials such as stones and limestones to the Giza Plateau for pyramid construction.

The Nile was a vital resource not only for transportation, but for food, land for farming, and water for ancient Egypt, explains Sheisha Hader, a physical geographer at the Aix-Marseille University in France and the lead author of the study.

“Good [Nile] levels promised stability [to] the ancient Egyptian society,” Hader says. “By contrast, the drought as a result of low Nile levels would be catastrophic and a reason for social unrest and sometimes, civil wars.”

In May 2019, Hader and the team studied pollen grains taken after drilling the land next to where the Khufu branch of the Nile once stood. Two of the study sites were in the supposed Khufu basin.

About 109 samples dating between the Predynastic and Early Dynastic-Old Kingdom periods were collected for analysis and divided into different groups based on seven vegetation patterns.

The vegetation patterns combined with other data sets involving nearby volcanic activity that could drive weather changes, solar radiation, and African water levels at the time, helped the geographers trace back changing water levels and painted a picture of how the climate looked over the last 8,000 years in Egypt.

This timeline encapsulated the dates when the three pyramids of Giza—Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure—were estimated to be completed, between 2686 and 2160 BCE.

Hader says she wasn’t as much surprised but rather in awe of the “clever old kingdom’s engineers who could thoroughly harness their environment and the Nile dynamics for turning the impossible into reality.” With the river, she says the ancient Egyptians were capable of designing a harbour on the edge of the desert where the small Khufu channel would drive in water without the risk of flood. “They dredged the floodplain on the western part of the channel and let the water flow, and the ships navigate to provide the logistic supply for builders.”

Joseph Manning, a professor of classics and history at Yale University says that, before this study, how water got to the Giza pyramids was not well understood. “We’d known there was water that came pretty close to the Giza Plateau, which is how they’re getting stone from the Tura quarries [the Egyptians’ main source of limestone] across the river over to Giza,” he explains. “I thought they were building canals that connected, but it looks like it’s a natural river channel.“

Manning says that finding natural river features frames how humans interacted and took advantage of their environment, creating not-so-simple projects like the pyramids. However, one concern he points out in the study is how the researchers analyzed the data on volcanic eruptions during that time period.

Their findings suggest volcanic eruptions played a major role in fluctuations in the Khufu branch, which in this case, led to a decrease in Nile summer flooding. “Just because you have a volcanic sequence doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about Nile conditions,” he explains.

For instance, some large eruptions in high latitude regions, such as Iceland or Alaska, have been known to impact the East African monsoon—which can change the water levels on the Nile. But not every eruption has an effect, Manning says, explaining that other factors such as the time of year, location, and the scale of the eruption will affect monsoon responses in the Middle East, instead. 

Christophe Morhange, an expert in geomorphology at Aix-Marseille University and senior study author, says the study goes beyond knowing the origin of these massive monuments. “It’s also the human imprints on the environment [and] the importance of landscape archaeology.”

The rise and fall of the ancient Egyptian empire were hinged on changes in the Nile, explains Hader. Looking back on a society that rose to power by tapping into the local ecosystem can teach/inform climate scientists today. 

It’s important to know how “the path of their history and how the environment could direct a flourishing empire like the old kingdom,” Hader says. “[But] the climate-environmental change being the same reason for which the empire collapsed is a crucial point to understand if we want to face our present and future environmental challenges.”

Did archaeologists discover the grave of Alexander the Great?

An Egyptian official has claimed that he has evidence that Alexander the Great’s tomb is in Siwa, Egypt, the Egypt Independent reported on Friday.

The report says that Mohamed Omran, the director of Siwa’s Tourism Department, “announced evidence suggesting the potential discovery of the tomb of alexander the Great might be in the Marai area.”

Omran said that between 1995 and 1996 a temple was found in the area that historians believed could be consistent with Alexander the Great’s tomb. Omran also pointed to the discovery of a temple that could be traced back to the Greek and Roman era three years ago.

It is important to note that Omran’s purported evidence has not yet been verified. The tomb of Alexander the Great is considered one of the “Holy Grails” of archaeological discovery and has been said to have been found several times in the past, with each time failing to substantiate any results.

We will have to wait and see if Siwa is truly the home of the Greek leader’s tomb, and if it is, it will be a momentous day in history. Alexander the Great is one of the most exalted figures in history— and the whereabouts of his tomb would command the attention of historians and archaeologists across the world.

The story of Alexander the Great

Alexander III, the “Basileus of Macedon”, the “Hegemon of the Hellenic League”, the “Shahanshah” of Persia, the “Pharaoh” of Egypt and the “Lord of Asia” — better known as Alexander the Great — was one of the most significant figures in human history.

Born in Pella, in modern-day Central Macedonia, northern Greece, in 356 B.C., he was the son of Philip II, the King of Macedon and his wife, Olympias. But Alexander was no royal place-holder. He became renowned at a very early age for both his military and political capabilities.

Alexander, whose name in Greek (Alexandros) means “defender of men”, knew as the son of a king that his destiny was already written, putting him at the forefront of history.

This was why, while he was still a teenager, he began to be tutored by one of Greece’s most respected men, the giant of philosophy and science, Aristotle.

Since his education included philosophy, politics, ethics, and science, Alexander was clearly not brought up to become just a warrior but a thoughtful leader of men and society.

Fate dictated that, following his father’s assassination when Alexander was only twenty, he would take into his hands not only the Kingdom of Macedon but also the generalship of the Hellenic League of Greece.

Several years prior to that, his father Philip II of Macedon had managed to unite most of Greece’s city-states, urging them to address the Persian threat as a united and solid front. Alexander fearlessly took on this enormous responsibility after the death of his father and began the great march of the Hellenes to the East.

The greatest leader of all time

Thousands of soldiers followed him. What is now the modern-day countries of Turkey, Syria, Israel, Egypt, and the entirety of the modern-day Arab world, became Greek in less than ten years’ time. In a few short years, Alexander had conquered all the way east to the western borders of India.

Battle after battle, fight after fight, Alexander and his men were able not only to beat many enemies while conquering the vast Achaemenid Empire but to establish a new status quo which would respect the local people. At the same time, the Greek overlords would introduce into their everyday life and cultural elements of the Greek way of thinking and acting.

Alexander’s original plans included the conquest of the last centimetre of the East. It is recorded in history that he stated his vision was to literally reach “the end of the world”. But Alexander’s long military campaigns finally led his men to demand his return to their beloved homeland of Greece.

Alexander wisely eventually listened to his officers and men, who once had blindly followed him eastward, and he reluctantly began his long journey home from the borders of present-day India.

His plans called for the city of Babylon to become the new capital of his vast empire. But the Fates did not pay heed to the conqueror’s grandiose plans.

Alexander, at the very young age of 33, suddenly fell gravely ill; to this day the cause of his illness remains a mystery. In the span of just a few days, his strong body betrayed him, and he died in his bed.

Untouched and Unlooted 4,400-yr-old Tomb of Egyptian High Priest Discovered

Archaeologists in Egypt have made a new tomb discovery — the final resting place of a high priest, untouched for 4,400 years, decorated with hieroglyphics. The secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziri, described the find as “one of a kind in the last decades.”

The tomb was found buried in a ridge at the ancient necropolis of Saqqara.

It was untouched and unlooted. Officials say they expect more discoveries when archaeologists further excavate the site in the months to come.

The high priest was devoted to his mother, evidence shows. “He mentions the name of his mother almost everywhere here,” said Waziri in an interview, pointing to the dozens of hieroglyphics, statues, and drawings.

“The colour is almost intact even though the tomb is almost 4,400 years old,” he added.

The high priest “Wahtye” served during the Fifth Dynasty reign of King Neferirkare (between 2500-2300 BC), at the Saqqara necropolis in Egypt. In addition to the name of the deceased, hieroglyphs carved into the stone above the tomb’s door reveal his multiple titles.

The grave’s rectangular gallery is said to be covered in painted reliefs, sculptures, and inscriptions, all in excellent shape considering how much time has passed.

The reliefs depict Wahtye himself, his wife Weret Ptah, and his mother Merit Meen, as well as everyday activities that include hunting and sailing and manufacturing goods such as pottery, according to National Geographic.

The team of Egyptian archaeologists found five shafts in the tombs. They had removed a last layer of debris from the tomb on December 13, 2018, and found five shafts inside, Waziri said.

One of the shafts was unsealed with nothing inside, but the other four were sealed. They are expecting to make discoveries when they excavate those shafts. He was hopeful about one shaft in particular.

“I can imagine that all of the objects can be found in this area,” he said in an interview, pointing at one of the sealed shafts. “This shaft should lead to a coffin or a sarcophagus of the owner of the tomb.”

The tomb is 33 feet long, 9 feet wide, and just under 10 feet high, Waziri said.

Various drawings depict “the manufacturing of pottery and wine, making the religious offerings, musical performances, boats sailing, the manufacturing of the funerary furniture, and hunting,” according to the site Egypt Today. Also, NPR is reporting that the Saqqara site is part of a larger complex where archaeologists have discovered art and architecture that yield insight into daily life in ancient Egypt.

The Fifth Dynasty ruled Egypt from about 2500 BC to 2350 BC, not long after the great pyramid of Giza was constructed.

Saqqara served as the necropolis for Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt for over 2 millennia.

Ancient Egyptians mummified humans to preserve their bodies for the afterlife, and animal mummies were used as religious offerings.

The rate of discoveries seems to be increasing. In November 2018, archaeologists unearthed eight new limestone sarcophagi containing mummies at a site that is 25 miles south of Cairo.

Egypt’s Antiquities Ministry said the mummies were dated to the Late Period (664-332 BC) and have an outer layer of cartonnage — papyrus or linen which is covered in plaster — decorated with a painted human form. Three of the mummies are well-preserved.

Images show the sarcophagus painted with the colours deep ochre and blue. Moreover, days before the eight mummies were found, the perfectly-preserved mummy of a woman was found inside a coffin in Egypt dating back more than 3,000 years.

That sarcophagus was opened on November 24th, which was one of two coffins discovered in El-Assasif, Luxor, on the bank of the Nile.

Book of the Dead: The ancient Egyptian guide to the afterlife

The “Book of the Dead” is a modern-day name given to a series of ancient Egyptian texts that the Egyptians believed would help the dead navigate the underworld, as well as serve other purposes. Copies of these texts were sometimes buried with the dead. 

The “‘Book of the Dead’ denotes the relatively large corpus of mortuary texts that were typically copied onto papyrus scrolls and deposited in burials of the New Kingdom [circa 1550 B.C. to 1070 B.C.],” wrote Peter Dorman, professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, in an article published in the book “Book of the Dead: Becoming God in Ancient Egypt(opens in new tab)” (Oriental Institute Museum Publications, 2017). 

The “Book of the Dead” became popular during the New Kingdom, but it was derived from the “Coffin Texts” — so named because they were often written on coffins — and the “Pyramid Texts” that were inscribed on the walls of pyramids, Dorman noted. The Coffin Texts were popular during the Middle Kingdom (circa 2030 B.C. to 1640 B.C.), while the Pyramid Texts first appeared in the Old Kingdom’s fifth dynasty (circa 2465 B.C. to 2323 B.C.).

BOOK OF THE DEAD’S SPELLS

The “Book of the Dead” includes individual chapters or spells. “The ancient Egyptians used the word rꜢ to designate each composition. The word rꜢ is generally translated as ‘spell’ or ‘utterance.’ It is written with the hieroglyph of a human mouth because the term was related to speech,” Foy Scalf, the head of research archives at the University of Chicago who holds a doctorate in Egyptology, told Live Science in an email. 

There wasn’t a standard book found in every tomb. Instead, each copy contained different spells. “No one such ‘book’ contains all known spells, but only a judicious sampling,” Dorman wrote, noting that “no single ‘Book of the Dead scroll is identical to another.”

The ancient Egyptians called these texts the “Book of Coming Forth by Day,” Dorman wrote, noting that this name reflected “the Egyptians’ belief that the spells were provided to assist the deceased in entering the afterlife as a glorified spirit, or akh.” 

These texts “prepared the Egyptians for life after death and [had] the power to conjure up all the parts of one’s body for the spiritual journey,” wrote Barry Kemp, professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge, in his book “How to Read the Egyptian Book of the Dead(opens in new tab)” (W.W. Norton & Company, 2007). “The Book of the Dead, by means of its spells, conferred on the owner the power to navigate successfully — for eternity — through [the underworld’s] various realms,” Kemp wrote.

Some spells appear more frequently in copies of the “Book of the Dead” than others, and some were considered almost essential. One of these essential spells is now known as Spell 17, which discusses the importance of the sun-god Re (also called Ra), one of the most important Egyptian gods, Dorman noted. 

The ancient Egyptians believed that the body of the deceased could be renewed in the afterlife leaving a person to navigate a place of “gods, demons, mysterious locations and potential obstacles,” wrote Kemp. The chapters of the “Book of the Dead” described some of the things one might encounter — such as the weighing of the heart ceremony in which a person’s deeds were weighed against the feather of the goddess Maat, a deity associated with justice. 

The spells were often illustrated. “Pictures [were] of great importance in the New Kingdom collection of funerary texts now called the Egyptian Book of the Dead,” wrote Geraldine Pinch, an Egyptologist, in her book “Egyptian Myth: A Very Short Introduction(opens in new tab)” (Oxford University Press, 2004). “Many owners of Books of the Dead would have been unable to read the hieroglyphic texts, but they could understand the complex vignettes that summarized the contents of the spells,” Pinch wrote. 

The spells were not gender-specific. It didn’t have “spells that were used particularly by women” or spells that were used primarily by men, Marissa Stevens, an Egyptologist and assistant director of the Pourdavoud Center for the Study of the Iranian World at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Live Science in an email.

MULTIPLE PURPOSES

The “Book of the Dead” is most famous for its guidance to the deceased, but it likely also served other purposes. “Too often has the ‘Book of the Dead’ been called a ‘guide’ to the afterlife; it was so much more than that,” Scalf told Live Science. “Probably the most important function of the ‘Book of the Dead,’ which can only be inferred from indirect evidence, is that it helped to assuage people’s fears about the unknowns of death,” Scalf said, noting that wealthy ancient Egyptians also arranged to have their bodies mummified and get their coffins decorated with religious texts in an effort to control what happened to them once they died. 

Additionally, the spells in the “Book of the Dead” could be used when a person was still alive. “Most of the spells from the ‘Book of the Dead’ are not designed to ‘navigate’ the underworld,” Scalf said. “Most of the spells are about transformation and transcendent experience. In the earthly life, a ritualist may use rites and incantations to transcend everyday experience [use the spells in a ceremony to have a religious experience],” said Scalf said, noting that “many of the spells include instructions for how to use them on Earth” — which shows that they were likely used by living people too, Scalf said.

Many of these spells could then also be used in the afterlife, the Egyptians believed. “A person may use these same spells to help transform their existence, but in many ways, it is a similar transcendent experience. The spells are largely about elevating to the plane of existence of the gods; only then would the person travel the underworld along with the gods themselves,” Scalf said.

COPIES FOR BURIAL

Many copies of the “Book of the Dead” that have been discovered were unearthed in tombs and were likely not read much. And many of the “Book of the Dead” manuscripts that survive today were probably not read much before they were buried with the deceased, Scalf told Live Science.

“The longest of the papyrus manuscripts is over thirty meters [98 feet] in length; it would have been a very difficult manuscript to navigate when reading. These manuscripts [found in tombs] were prestige copies, largely meant for deposition in the grave,” Scalf said. 

Additionally, spells from the “Book of the Dead” were not always written down on manuscripts. For instance, Scalf noted that the spells were sometimes written down on the bandages that wrapped a person’s mummy. They were also inscribed on the walls of tombs and even on Tutankhamun’s golden death mask. 

It’s possible that people who couldn’t afford a copy of the spells may have had the spells read to them. “If you did not have a scroll in your tomb, hired priests or family members might have recited it for you during the funeral, or when visiting the tomb afterwards,” Lara Weiss, a curator of the Egyptian and Nubian collection at the Netherland’s National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, told Live Science in an email. 

The last known copies of the “Book of the Dead” were created in the first or second century A.D., Scalf wrote in a study published in the book “Book of the Dead: Becoming God in Ancient Egypt.” Another series of funerary texts known as the “Books of Breathing” became popular in its place — which was derived, in part, from the “Book of the Dead,” Scalf wrote.

The mummified face of Pharaoh Seti I hailed for its superior preservation

The mummified face of Menmaatre Seti I known as Sety I of the New Kingdom’s Nineteenth Dynasty pleasantly surprised Egyptologists with its superior preservation. His face is regarded as one of the best preserved in the world as well as in Ancient Egypt’s annals.

Dying about 3,298 years ago, Seti I is reckoned to have ruled when Egypt was at one of its most affluent peaks from 1290 to 1279 BCE. He was the father to perhaps ancient Egypt’s most beloved pharaoh Ramesses II. His father, Ramses I, reigned for only two years.

The tomb of this extremely powerful and handsome ruler was brought to the world’s attention by the rebellious researcher Giovanni Battista Belzoni on October 16, 1817.

The tomb located in the Valley of the Kings, known as KV17, is the longest tomb in the entire necropolis. It’s about 137 meters (449 ft.).

Seti’s mummified body was neatly prepared and covered with a yellow shroud. However, tomb looters had messed with his bandages and smashed his abdomen. Worse still, Seti’s head was separated from the rest of his battered body.

Fortunately, his face remained untouched. Now, the remains of Seti I rest among other royal mummies in the Cairo museum.

In the early years of his reign, Seti led his army northward to restore Egyptian prestige, which had been partly lost during the troubled years of the late 18th dynasty under Akhenaton.

He battled in northern Palestine and Syria and fought at least one battle with the Hittite king Muwatallis; he subsequently concluded a peace treaty that may have established the frontier at Kadesh on the Orontes River between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountains.

Seti in his 11 or 15-year rule did much to promote the prosperity of Egypt. He fortified the frontier, opened mines and quarries, dug wells, and rebuilt temples and shrines that had fallen into decay or been damaged; and he continued the work begun by his father on the construction of the great hypostyle hall at Karnak, which is one of the most impressive monuments of Egyptian architecture.

Another important work is his memorial temple at Abydos, which he dedicated to Osiris and six other deities of which much of the original colour remains.

Seti’s tomb is the finest in the Valley of the Kings in western Thebes.

Although his son Ramses II is more famous, Seti is thought by many scholars to have been the greatest king of the 19th dynasty.