Category Archives: AFRICA

Ancient Mural Paintings Of Nubian Pyramids Depict Giant Carrying Two Elephants And Giant Kings

Ancient Mural Paintings Of Nubian Pyramids Depict Giant Carrying Two Elephants And Giant Kings

Almost every culture that prevails around the world talks consists of ancient accounts that narrate the tales of giants living on the Earth. One more addition to such accounts is the ancient mural painting in the Nubian pyramids that portrays a ‘Giant’ carrying two elephants.

Moving north from Khartoum along a narrow desert road toward the ancient city of Meroë, one will definitely enjoy a breathtaking view emerging from beyond the mirage that is dozens of steep pyramids piercing the horizon.

However, irrespective of the number of visits one pays to this place, there is always an awed sense of discovery. Meroë is the former capital of the Kingdom of Kush, and here the road divides the city.

Sudan’s Forgotten Nubian Pyramids

A royal cemetery consisting of somewhat around 50 sandstone and red brick pyramids of varying heights and broken tops is located towards the East. The royal city including the ruins of a palace, a temple, and a royal bath is located towards the West. Each structure has a distinctive architecture that draws on local, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman decorative tastes―evidence of Meroe’s global connections.

Past Associated With the City of Kush

The kingdom of Kush

The first civilization that was established in northern Sudan dates back 300,000 years. It is home to the oldest sub-Saharan African kingdom, the kingdom of Kush (about 2500-1500 BC). This civilization manufactured some of the most beautiful pottery in the Nile valley, including Kerma beakers.

The 200 years from the fall of Kush to the middle of the 6th century is an unknown age in Sudan. Nubia was inhabited by a people called the Nobatae by the ancient geographers and the X-Group by modern archaeologists, who are still at a loss to explain their origins. 

Map of Kush and Ancient Egypt, showing the Nile up to the fifth cataract, and major cities and sites of the ancient Egyptian Dynastic period (3150 BC to 30 BC)

Sudan was extremely desired for its rich natural resources particularly gold, ebony, and ivory. The British Museum collection has many objects made from the resources acquired from Sudan.

Just like every other kingdom, ancient Egyptians were also attracted to Sudan with the intention of grabbing a hold on rich natural resources. Concerning the control over trade, there were constant conflicts between the Egyptians and the Sudanese.

Around 1700 BC, the Kingdom of Kush was the strongest state in the Nile valley. The conflict between Egypt and Kush followed, culminating in the conquest of Kush by Thutmose I (1504-1492 BC). In the west and south, Neolithic cultures remained as both areas were beyond the reach of the Egyptian rulers.

City of Meroë And The Ancient Mural Painting of a Giant carrying two elephants

The city of Meroë is home to a remarkable number of pyramids, however, the majority of them are ruined. The pyramids of this city have the distinctive size and proportions of Nubian pyramids.

Meroë came into the picture and to the knowledge of Europeans in 1821 by the French mineralogist Frédéric Cailliaud (1787-1869). Numerous enigmatic and mysterious objects were discovered which included the reliefs and paintings on the walls of the sepulchral chambers. One such mysterious find was a painting that depicts a giant of enormous proportions carrying two elephants.

Sudan Meroitic depiction of a Nubian carrying two elephants

Though the features of the painted giant are not Nubian but caucasian and his hair is light in colour. Is this ancient mural painting proof of the existence of a race of red-haired giants with six fingers in antiquity?

Did Giants Really Live Around the Nile Valley?

Back in 79 AD, a Roman historian, Josephus Flavius put in writing that the last of the race of Egyptian giants did live in the 13th century BC, during the reign of King Joshua.  It was further added by the historian that the giants had humongous bodies, and their facial features were not at all human, and their one sight was a treat to eyes.

They had a heavy, rough voice that was almost like a lion roaring.

Moreover, many of the wall paintings of ancient Egypt depict the builders of Pyramids as “Giant People” by the size of 5 to 6 meters tall.
It is believed by researchers and experts that the giants had the ability to lift 4 to 5 tons of blocks individually.

Some of those ancient mural paintings showed giant kings ruling ancient Egypt, while some depicted comparably little-sized servants under the giant people.

A guy massaging the giant king’s legs

Gregor Spörri, a Swiss entrepreneur and a passionate admirer of the history of Ancient Egypt, met with a gang of robbers of ancient burials through one of the private suppliers in Egypt in 1988.

According to Gregor Spörri, the owner of the giant finger was a grave robber that acquired the piece while searching through an undisclosed thumb in Egypt.

When Gregor Spörri, a 56-year-old entrepreneur offered to purchase the giant finger, the owner responded: NEVER.

As per Gregor Spörri, the grave robber who discovered the finger also had a certificate of Authenticity and an X-ray image, both of which are from the 1960s.

The mummified Egyptian Giant Finger.

To Conclude

The discovery of numerous ancient mural paintings in Egypt has compelled many to believe that in the distant past, the ancient Egyptians were indeed giant. They were massive in size. These giant humans of Egypt had Giant Animals and Birds as well. People of regular size like us cohabited along with these ancient Egyptian humans. Did giants once really roam on earth along with humans? Is it even possible historically and scientifically?

Ancient Human Relative, Australopithecus sediba, “Walked Like a Human, But Climbed Like an Ape”

Ancient Human Relative, Australopithecus sediba, “Walked Like a Human, But Climbed Like an Ape”

An international team of scientists has discovered a two-million-year-old fossil vertebrae from an extinct species of ancient human relative. New lower back fossils are the “missing link” that settles a decades old debate proving early hominins used their upper limbs to climb like apes and their lower limbs to walk like humans.

Ancient Human Relative, Australopithecus sediba, “Walked Like a Human, But Climbed Like an Ape”
Life reconstruction of Australopithecus sediba com-missioned by the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History.

An international team of scientists from New York University, the University of the Witwatersrand, and 15 other institutions announced today, in the open access journal e-Life, the discovery of two-million-year-old fossil vertebrae from an extinct species of ancient human relative.

The recovery of new lumbar vertebrae from the lower back of a single individual of the human relative, Australopithecus sediba, and portions of other vertebrae of the same female from Malapa, South Africa, together with previously discovered vertebrae, form one of the most complete lower backs ever discovered in the early hominid record and give insight into how this ancient human relative walked and climbed.

The fossils were discovered in 2015 during excavations of a mining trackway running next to the site of Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, just northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. Malapa is the site where, in 2008, Professor Lee Berger from the University of the Witwatersrand and his then nine-year old son, Matthew, discovered the first remains of what would be a new species of ancient human relative named Australopithecus sediba.

Fossils from the site have been dated to approximately two million years before present. The vertebrae described in the present study were recovered in a consolidated cement-like rock, known as breccia, in near articulation.

Australopithecus sediba silhouette showing the newly-found vertebrae (colored) along with other skeletal remains from the species.

Rather than risking damaging the fossils, they were prepared virtually after scanning with a Micro-CT scanner at the University of the Witwatersrand, thus removing the risk of damaging the closely positioned, delicate bones during manual preparation.

Once virtually prepared, the vertebrae were reunited with fossils recovered during earlier work at the site and found to articulate perfectly with the spine of the fossil skeleton, part of the original Type specimens of Australopithecus sediba first described in 2010.

The skeleton’s catalogue number is MH 2, but the researchers have nicknamed the female skeleton “Issa,” meaning protector in Swahili. The discovery also established that like humans, sediba had only five lumbar vertebrae. 

“The lumbar region is critical to understanding the nature of bipedalism in our earliest ancestors and to understanding how well adapted they were to walking on two legs,” says Professor Scott Williams of New York University and Wits University and lead author on the paper. “Associated series of lumbar vertebrae are extraordinarily rare in the hominin fossil record, with really only three comparable lower spines being known from the whole of the early African record.”

The discovery of the new specimens means that Issa now becomes one of only two early hominin skeletons to preserve both a relatively complete lower spine and dentition from the same individual, allowing certainty as to what species the spine belongs to.

“While Issa was already one of the most complete skeletons of an ancient hominin ever discovered, these vertebrae practically complete the lower back and make Issa’s lumbar region a contender for not only the best-preserved hominin lower back ever discovered, but also probably the best preserved,” says Berger, who is an author on the study and leader of the Malapa project. 

He adds that this combination of completeness and preservation gave the team an unprecedented look at the anatomy of the lower back of the species.

Previous studies of the incomplete lower spine by authors not involved in the present study hypothesised that sediba would have had a relatively straight spine, without the curvature, or lordosis, typically seen in modern humans. They further hypothesised Issa’s spine was more like that of the extinct species Neandertals and other more primitive species of ancient hominins older than two million years.

Lordosis is the inward curve of the lumbar spine and is typically used to demonstrate strong adaptations to bipedalism. However, with the more complete spine, and excellent preservation of the fossils, the present study found the lordosis of sediba was in fact more extreme than any other australopithecines yet discovered, and the amount of curvature of the spine observed was only exceeded by that seen in the spine of the 1.6-million-year-old Turkana boy (Homo erectus) from Kenya and some modern humans.

Australopithecus sediba silhouette showing the newly-found vertebrae along with other skeletal remains from the species. The enlarged detail (a photograph of the fossils in articulation on the left; micro-computed tomography models on the right) shows the newly discovered fossils, in color on the right between previously known elements in grey.

“While the presence of lordosis and other features of the spine represent clear adaptations to walking on two legs, there are other features, such as the large and upward oriented transverse processes, that suggest powerful trunk musculature, perhaps for arboreal behaviors,” says Professor Gabrielle Russo of Stony Brook University and an author on the study.

Strong upward oriented transverse spines are typically indicative of powerful trunk muscles, as observed in apes. Professor Shahed Nalla of the University of Johannesburg and Wits, who is an expert on ribs and a researcher on the present study, says: “When combined with other parts of torso anatomy, this indicates that sediba retained clear adaptations to climbing.”

Previous studies of this ancient species have highlighted the mixed adaptations across the skeleton in sediba that have indicated its transitional nature between walking like a human and climbing adaptations. These include features studied in the upper limbs, pelvis, and lower limbs.

“The spine ties this all together,” says Professor Cody Prang of Texas A&M, who studies how ancient hominins walked and climbed. “In what manner these combinations of traits persisted in our ancient ancestors, including potential adaptations to both walking on the ground on two legs and climbing trees effectively, is perhaps one of the major outstanding questions in human origins.”

The study concludes that sediba is a transitional form of ancient human relative and its spine is clearly intermediate in shape between those of modern humans (and Neandertals) and great apes.

“Issa walked somewhat like a human, but could climb like an ape,” says Berger.

Female pharaoh’s temple reveals teamwork of Egypt’s ‘ancient masters’

Female pharaoh’s temple reveals teamwork of Egypt’s ‘ancient masters’

The artists and sculptors of ancient Egypt may not be household names like Michelangelo, Raphael, or Caravaggio, but a new study of a female pharaoh’s temple suggests they had a lot in common with their Renaissance brethren. Instead of being solo artisans, sculptors worked in teams, with talented masters overseeing large crews of rookie chiselers and other assistants.

Two offering bearers at the Temple of Hatshepsut reveal sculptors of varying skill—the wig on the left was probably carved by an apprentice, the one on the right by a master.

Archaeologists say the study’s approach of scrutinizing the sculptors’ thousands of strokes is novel in Egyptology, which has long focused on interpreting written records. It reveals both the resources—and passion—ancient Egyptians poured into their art.

“The artists who created all this really flew below the Egyptological radar,” says Dimitri Laboury, an Egyptologist at the University of Liège who was not involved in the study. “But those artists were key figures in a society which invested so much in artistic production.”

For almost 2 centuries, researchers regarded tomb and temple decorations not as works of art in their own right, but as sources of information about ancient Egyptian religious beliefs. And artists in ancient Egypt didn’t sign their work, further pushing them into the background.

As a result, little is known about individual Egyptian artists and their methods, despite the key role paintings and reliefs played at a time when most people were illiterate.

Textual evidence hints at the presence of sculptors and painters but rarely the details of their work or who they were.

To better understand the work that went into decorating ancient temples, University of Warsaw archaeologist Anastasiia Stupko-Lubczynska and colleagues studied the temple of Hatshepsut, who ruled between 1478 B.C.E. and 1458 B.C.E. and was one of Egypt’s few female pharaohs. Her temple, which stretches 273 meters by 105 meters, was built almost 3500 years ago at Deir el-Bahari, near modern-day Luxor.

In a 70-square-meter room at the back known as the chapel of Hatshepsut, two 13-meter-long walls are carved with seemingly endless processions of men carrying offerings—sheaves of wheat, baskets of birds, and other goodies—to the seated Hatshepsut. The 200 figures occupy two-thirds of the room’s wall space.

Stupko-Lubczynska was there as part of a painstaking—and ongoing—effort by the University of Warsaw’s Polish-Egyptian expedition to clean and restore the temple’s damaged walls. Before conservationists cleaned the figures, Stupko-Lubczynska and a team of draftspeople spent hundreds of hours between 2006 and 2013 documenting the chapel walls by hand, copying the carvings on sheets of plastic film at a one-to-one scale. “We had to repeat the process done by the carvers, drawing all their lines, duplicating their steps,” she says.

Anastasiia Stupko-Lubczynska spent hundreds of hours tracing the hundreds of near-identical figures on the walls of Hatshepsut’s chapel.
Female pharaoh’s temple reveals teamwork of Egypt’s ‘ancient masters’

In the process, the archaeologist identified tiny details in the soft limestone of the chapel, including clumsy chisel strokes and later corrections.

“Because we have so many figures with repetitive details, we can compare the details and workmanship,” Stupko-Lubczynska says. “If you look at enough of them, it’s easy to see when someone was doing it properly.”

Slowly, she and her colleagues began to see subtle variations in what had seemed like an army of cut-and-paste icons. And some figures were visibly worse—legs and torsos with sloppily chiseled edges, or multiple chisel blows to shape wig curls that only took two or three expert strokes elsewhere.

The analysis also showed the work was a team effort, done in phases by different artists, Stupko-Lubczynska reports today in Antiquity. “The wig can be awfully done, and in the same figure, the face is perfect,” she says.

“Maybe the master artisans came in at the end to finish the figure.” With no natural light in the cavernous, windowless hall, there must have also been assistants holding oil lamps crowding onto the scaffolds.

Laboury likens the effort to the busy workshops of Renaissance painters, where the master focused on the most challenging tasks while delegating backgrounds, supporting characters, and prep work to trainees.

Evidence that more skilled hands were correcting beginners’ mistakes suggests that even a pharaoh’s temple was seen as a place to school rookies. “You have more experienced hands next to less experienced hands,” Laboury says. “The master was training apprentices on the spot.”

“This study really adds to our understanding of craftsmanship and the way these ancient artists worked,” says Gabriele Pieke, an Egyptologist at the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim, Germany. She and others hope the look behind the scenes at Hatshepsut’s chapel will help raise the profile of the skilled artists responsible for so much of what we marvel at in ancient Egyptian tombs and temples.

After spending so much time tracing the work of long-gone artists, Stupko-Lubczynska says she began to feel a connection with—or at least empathy for—the long-suffering apprentices. “I like it more when somebody made a mistake or failed,” says. “You can feel that they were normal people like us, who could be tired or hungry or ill.”

Ancient Walls of Benin Were Four times longer than walls of china

Ancient Walls of Benin Were Four times longer than walls of china

In Benin, the capital city of present-day Edo State stood the walls of Benin (800 – 1400AD) which are the longest ancient earthworks in the world and apparently the largest man-made structure on earth.

The walls are a set of earthworks comprising of banks and ditches called Iya in the native tongue. It comprises 15 kilometres (9.3 miles) of “Iya” (banks and ditches) city and an estimated 16,000 kilometres (9,900 miles) in the rural areas surrounding Benin.

As at that time, with its enormous length, it was speculated to be double the length of the Great Wall of China, until it was declared in the year 2012 (after five years of thorough measurement by Chinese surveyors) that the Great Wall has a length of around 21, 0000 km.

The time of construction is not precisely known which gives it different assumptions as to the date

  • First view: Graham Connah predicted the walls may have been built between the thirteenth and mid-fifteenth century CE.
  • Second view: Patrick Darling predicted the walls of Benin (in the Esan region) may have been built during the first millennium CE.

How the walls were built

The walls were built with a ditch and dike arrangement. The ditch was bored to form an inner moat with the excavated earth used to create the exterior rampart.

Remains

The Walls of Benin were destroyed by the British in 1897 during the named Punitive expedition. Disjointed pieces of the wall remain in Edo, with a large proportion of them being used by the residents for construction purposes. The little that remains of the wall is continually demolished for real estate developments.

Fred Pearce in an article in the New Scientist (September 11th 1999) said “They extend for some 16,000km in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries.

They cover 2, 510 sq. miles (6, 500 square kilometres) and were all dug by the Edo people. In all, they are four times longer than the Great Wall of China and consume a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet.”

An ethnic mathematician named Ron Eglash explained the planned blueprint of the city using fractals at the ground level, not just in the city, also in the villages and in the rooms of houses.

He stated that “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganised and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”

The walls of Benin were famously described by the Guinness Book of Records (1974 edition) as being “the world’s largest earthworks prior to the mechanical era.” 

Also, Benin city was in the league of the first cities to have a likeness of street lighting with large metal lamps, a large number of feet high, built and placed around the city.

The most dangerous place on Earth 100 million years ago

The most dangerous place on Earth 100 million years ago

The world feels like a scary place these days, but a recently published paleontology study helps put things in perspective. A review of 100 years of fossil evidence reveals that 100 million years ago a portion of the Sahara Desert was arguably the most dangerous place on the planet, with a concentration of large predatory dinosaurs unmatched in any comparable modern terrestrial ecosystem.

The analysis of fossils from the so-called Kem Kem beds — rock formations in southeastern Morocco, near the Algerian border, dating back to the Cretaceous period — shows the presence in the area of large scale carnivorous dinosaurs, flying predatory reptiles, and crocodile-like hunters, all living together in what was at the time a river system full of very large fish, rather than a desert.

The creatures found in the Kem Kem beds roamed the Earth some 95 million years before early humans appeared on the planet, but “if you had a time machine and could travel to this place, you probably wouldn’t last very long,” said palaeontologist Nizar Ibrahim, lead author of the study.

Ibrahim told CNN that the Kem Kem ecosystem was “a really mysterious place, ecologically speaking,” since typical ecosystems present a larger number of plant-eating animals than predators, and predators themselves will come in a variety of sizes, with one larger predator being dominant.

In the Kem Kem, fossils of predators outnumber those of plant-eating dinosaurs, and several of the predators living together in the area, such as the Carcharodontosaurus, the Spinosaurus, the Abelisaur and the Deltadromeus, were as big as a Tyrannosaurus rex.

This is unusual “even for dinosaur standards,” according to Ibrahim, since the T. rex, which was present in North America tens of millions of years later, was “the undisputed ruler of its ancient ecosystem.”

This is unusual “even for dinosaur standards,” according to Ibrahim, since the T. rex, which was present in North America tens of millions of years later, was “the undisputed ruler of its ancient ecosystem.”

An abelisaur, a predatory dinosaur, rests while several pterosaurs fight over leftovers from a carcass. Artwork by Davide Bonadonna, under the scientific supervision of Simone Maganuco and Nizar Ibrahim.

It is unlikely that the large predators in the Kem Kem ate one another.

What’s more realistic, according to Ibrahim, is that they ate the abundant and supersized fish present in the area — fish like coelacanths “the size of a car” and sawfish that could reach 25 feet in length.

What did some of the large predators in the Kem Kem ecosystem look like?

Matthew Lamanna, a palaeontologist and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, said the meat-eating Carcharodontosaurus would resemble a Tyrannosaurus rex in shape and size, but “with a proportionally narrower head, somewhat longer arms, and three fingers (rather than two) on each hand.”

The even larger Spinosaurus would look somewhat like “the unholy love child of Carcharodontosaurus and a crocodile,” said Lamanna, with a crocodile-like skull and teeth and a body that is a mix of both, but with longer forelimbs. A fish-eating water creature, the Spinosaurus’ most distinctive feature is “a six-foot-tall sail running the length of its back.”
The Abelisaur would be smaller than a Spinosaurus, and “vaguely bulldog-faced,” according to Lamanna.

The Deltadromeus, known only from an incomplete skeleton, was also presumably similar in size to a T. rex, said Lamanna. According to Ibrahim, the Deltadromeus presents very slender proportions in its legs and a very long tail, and it remains mysterious in the absence of fossil evidence of its neck and skull.

Among the other species present in the Kem Kem were “predatory crocodiles that would be at least as big as any that are alive today” and flying reptiles like Pterosaurs “that would dwarf any modern flying bird,” Lamanna told CNN.

The study of the Kem Kem beds carried out by Ibrahim and a group of international researchers across the US, UK, Europe and Africa draws attention to the importance of learning more about the palaeontology of Africa, among other areas of the Southern Hemisphere.
Forgotten continent

“Africa, in many ways, remains palaeontology’s forgotten continent,” said Ibrahim, and this study “addresses this bias.” Even though the accessibility of evidence and its degree of preservation in the African continent varies widely, there remains so much more to be discovered in Africa.

What the Kem Kem research shows is that African ecosystems “do not simply replicate the ones we know from North America, or Europe, or other better-known places,” and it also reveals clues about what happens to life when dramatic changes in climate come into play.

Evidence in the rock layers in the Kem Kem Group shows that the river system where predators and large fish thrived eventually became flooded with seawater, turning the area into a warm, shallow sea. Fast forward to today and that same area is in the largest hot desert in the world.

Palaeontology can help us understand “the long term consequences of biodiversity loss, which we are experiencing right now,” said Ibrahim.

700,000 Ancient African Books survived in Timbuktu University, Mali

700,000 Ancient African Books survived in Timbuktu University, Mali

Many writers on African history did not believe until recently that African societies had any sort of tradition of writing. This idea has gradually lost recognition since the rediscovery of ancient collections of manuscripts, some dating back to at least the 8th century A.D.

In present-day Ethiopia, about 250,000 old manuscripts from the Timbuktu libraries survive. Also, at the southern Egyptian site of Qasr Ibrim, thousands of documents from the medieval Sudanese empire of Makuria, written in at least eight different languages have been dugout.

In the western African cities of Chinguetti, Walata, Oudane, Kano, and Agadez, thousands of more ancient manuscripts have survived similarly.

Approximately 1 million manuscripts have since managed to survive from the northern edges of Guinea and Ghana to the shores of the Mediterranean, against the real and present dangers posed by fires, insects, and plundering.

National Geographic also predicts 700,000 manuscripts in the city of Timbuktu alone have survived.

Ancient texts from Timbuktu, the evidence

Local families and institutions still own and maintain over 60 libraries in Timbuktu, some of which are collections that survived the turmoil through the city, as well as the ravages of nature.

The Ahmed Baba Institute, established in 1979 and named after the famous scholar of the 16th/17th century, considered the greatest in Africa, is a true example of this.

Text saved from burning

Today, the institute has only about thirty thousand manuscripts, which are constantly being examined, catalogued and stored, but at the time of the French colonial administration of Timbuktu (1894-1959), many of the manuscripts were taken by the occupying colonialists and brought to light.

As a result, many families there are still refusing to allow researchers entry, anticipating a repeat of the French treatment. Many texts were lost due to climatic effects including drought, which forced many people to bury them and evacuate.

Of the surviving manuscripts, these are:

* Main Islamic texts include Korans, hadith collections (actions or prophet’s sayings), Sufi texts and devotional texts

* Activities of the Islamic law school in Maliki

* ‘Muslim science’ texts, including grammar, mathematics and astronomy

* Historical works from the area, including contracts, commentaries, historical chronicles, poetry, and marginal notes and jottings, proving to be a remarkably rich source of historical evidence.

For whatever reason, much of the manuscripts themselves are of great interest to the owners. For example, those who have so far claimed royalty have been found to be from the servile class because of the manuscripts’ evidence.

Certain documents also exposed one family’s atrocious relations with another, which may have occurred a very long time ago but still have meaning to this day. As in contested ownership of land and properties.

READ ALSO: BELOVED GAZA BOOKSHOP BECOMES A CASUALTY OF ISRAEL-HAMAS CONFLICT

These raise the question as to why to this day these manuscripts are of utmost importance. Many of those in possession of the manuscripts hid them during colonial times or even had them buried.

In addition, French was forcibly introduced as the region’s language and instruction, meaning that many owners lost their ability to read and understand the manuscripts in the languages they were originally written in.

Eventually, it wasn’t until 1985 that much energy was breathed into this region’s academic life, meaning it would take a long time to fully understand the full scope and import of the manuscripts that were found.

Inscribed Temple Blocks Unearthed in Heliopolis

Inscribed Temple Blocks Unearthed in Heliopolis

The Egyptian-German mission has uncovered a collection of decorated blocks and fragments from the King Nactanebo I temple at the Matariya archaeological site in Heliopolis.

A collection of decorated blocks and fragments from the western and northern fa ade of king Nactanebo I temple at Matariya was uncovered.

The discovery was made several weeks ago during excavation work at the central area of the temple.

The blocks and fragments are made of basalt and belong to the western and northern façade.

A northern extension probably connected the sanctuary with the main axis of the precinct of the sun god.

Several blocks of the Lower Egyptian geographical procession were found, among them the scene with the Heliopolis Nome while others display the representation of the additional nomes of Lower Egypt.

Aymen Ashmawy, head of the ancient Egyptian antiquities sector and head of the mission from the Egyptian side, explains that the inscriptions mention the regnal years 13 and 14 (366/365 BCE) as well as the dimensions and the materials used in this sanctuary.

“Several blocks were unfinished too and no further decoration work seems to have been commissioned after the death of Nectanebo I in 363 BCE,” he said, adding that other architectural elements attest to the building projects of Ramesses II (1279-1213), Merenptah (1213-1201 BC) and Apries (589-570 BCE).

The activity of the Ramesside Period is also represented by an inlay for relief of the early 19th dynasty (c. 1300 BCE). A statue fragment of Seti II (1204-1198) adds to the evidence for this king of the late 19th Dynasty at Heliopolis.

Dietrich Raue, head of the German mission, pointed out that the main processional axis was investigated further west. Scattered fragments point to separate building units of the Middle Kingdom, the 22nd Dynasty (King Osorkon I, 925-890 BCE) and a sanctuary for Shu and Tefnut of King Psametik II (595-589 BCE).

READ ALSO: A MUMMY DISCOVERED IN A VAST BURIAL GROUND OF EGYPT’S PHARAOHS COULD CHANGE HOW ANCIENT HISTORY IS UNDERSTOOD

Raue said that some fragments of the statuary of King Ramesses II, a part of a baboon statue, a statue base and fragments of a quartzite obelisk of King Osorkon I and parts of cult installations such as an offering table of Thutmose III, 1479-1425 BCE were found.

These finds point to the continuous royal support and investment in the temple of the sun and creator god at Heliopolis and the excavation work provided additional evidence for the 30th Dynasty and the Ptolemaic Period in the precinct.

Dietrich Raue pointed out that sculptures and limestone casts for reliefs and moulds used in the production of faience ushebti (a type of funerary figurine) testify to the activity of workshops before all evidence of the temple functioning ceases during the Roman Era.

Fossil of an early hominid child who died almost 250,000 years ago found in South Africa

Fossil of early hominid child who died almost 250,000 years ago found in South Africa

The fossil remains of an early hominid child who died almost 250,000 years ago have been discovered in a cave in South Africa by a team of international and South African researchers.

The team announced the discovery of a partial skull and teeth of a Homo Naledi child who died when it was approximately four to six years old.

The remains were found in a remote part of the cave that suggests the body had been placed there on purpose, in what could be a kind of grave, Professor Guy Berger of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, who led the team said in an announcement Thursday.

Fossil of early hominid child who died almost 250,000 years ago found in South Africa
The fossil remains of an early hominid child have been discovered in a cave in South Africa by a team of international and South African researchers

The placement “adds mystery as to how these many remains came to be in these remote, dark spaces of the Rising Star Cave system,” he added.

Homo Naledi is a species of archaic human found in the Rising Star Cave, Cradle of Humankind, 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg. Homo Naledi dates to the Middle Pleistocene era 335,000–236,000 years ago.

The initial discovery, first publicly announced in 2015, comprises 1,550 specimens, representing 737 different elements, and at least 15 different individuals.

“Homo Naledi remains one of the most enigmatic ancient human relatives ever discovered,” said Berger. “It is clearly a primitive species, existing at a time when previously we thought only modern humans were in Africa.”

He added that “its very presence at that time and in this place complexifies our understanding of who did what first concerning the invention of complex stone tool cultures and even ritual practices.”

The new discovery is described in two papers in the journal, PaleoAnthropology.