Bone Tools in Morocco May Be Earliest Evidence of Clothing
Humans living on the Atlantic coast of what’s now Morocco were making clothes from animal hides between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago, according to a new study.
Initially, researchers assumed the bones they were collecting were the remnants of an ancient meal. Scientists wanted to analyze the animal bones to better understand what Contrebandiers Cave’s early human inhabitants were eating.
But instead of evidence of an ancient menu, researchers found the remnants of clothes-making tools. Scientists detailed the breakthrough discovery in a new paper, published Thursday in the journal iScience.
“These bone tools have shaping and use marks that indicate they were used for scraping hides to make leather and for scraping pelts to make fur,” lead study author Emily Hallett said in a press release.
“At the same time, I found a pattern of cut marks on the carnivore bones from Contrebandiers Cave that suggested that humans were not processing carnivores for meat but were instead skinning them for their fur,” said Hallett, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany.
Fossils suggest humans were using bone tools to manufacture clothes in Morocco’s Contrebandiers Cave some 120,000 years ago.
In order to tell the story of human evolution, scientists must understand how early humans adapted and exploited new environs.
For the earliest migrants, survival demanded more than just food and shelter. To exploit cooler environs, humans needed protection from the elements — they needed clothes.
On the floor of the Contrebandiers Cave, researchers found evidence that humans were manipulating bones to craft tools used for manufacturing pelts and other pieces of clothing.
In total, researchers collected 60 bones that had been ground, smoothed and polished into uniform shapes for scraping and softening animal hides.
Scientists also recovered the remains of sand foxes, golden jackals and wildcats, all with marks suggesting humans had purposefully removed their skins.
“The combination of carnivore bones with skinning marks and bone tools likely used for fur processing provide highly suggestive proxy evidence for the earliest clothing in the archaeological record,” said Hallett.
“But given the level of specialization in this assemblage, these tools are likely part of a larger tradition with earlier examples that haven’t yet been found,” Hallett said.
Hallett and her colleagues also recovered the tip of an ancient cetacean tooth, which scientists determine had also been manipulated by early humans.
It’s the first time researchers have recovered the remains of a Late Pleistocene marine mammal from North Africa. The fossil serves as the earliest evidence of humans using the teeth of marine mammals.
“The Contrebandiers Cave bone tools demonstrate that by roughly 120,000 years ago, Homo sapiens began to intensify the use of bone to make formal tools and use them for specific tasks, including leather and fur working,” Hallett said.
“This versatility appears to be at the root of our species, and not a characteristic that emerged after expansions into Eurasia,” Hallett said.
Archaeologists Discover 2200-Year-old Egyptian Shipwreck in Mediterranean Sea
A Doomed ship that sank after it was hit by gigantic stone blocks following an earthquake 2,200 years ago has been found in Egypt. The wreck was discovered by archaeologists at the site of Thonis-Heracleion, a city that crashed into the water as a result of the megaquake.
A ship that sank after it was clattered by falling stone blocks following a cataclysmic earthquake has been found in Egypt.
Scattered across a series of interlinked islands off Egypt’s northern coast, the metropolis was once the country’s gateway to the Mediterranean.
It was lost to a cataclysmic event towards the end of the second century BC that buried it under layers of sand and mud.
Thonis-Heracleion was rediscovered by underwater archaeologists in the early 2000s and expeditions continue to uncover rubble and artefacts.
Earlier this month, archaeologists announced the discovery of a galley and burial ground at the site beneath the Mediterranean Sea. The expedition was led by the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology with help from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
They believe the ship plunged to the seafloor “after being hit by huge blocks from the famed temple of Amun”, according to the EIUA.
The ship sank after it was hit with ‘huge blocks’ from the temple of Amun, which slid into the ocean when the ancient city of Heracleion fell into the water
Located in the middle of the city and dedicated to the god of Amun, the massive temple was one of the dozens of buildings lost to the deadly quake.
The wreck was once a fast galley, a long and sleep vessel with large sails built to skim across the water at high speeds. It now lies beneath just over 16 feet (five metres) of clay and rubble from the temple, researchers said.
They located the ship used a new type of sonar technology.
“The finds of fast galleys from this period remain extremely rare,” said EIUA President Franck Goddio.
The team believe the warship was moored channel that flowed along the south side of the Temple of Amun.
When an earthquake struck the city, the hard clay it was built on began to behave more like a liquid, toppling buildings across the city.
Large stone blocks that tumbled from the temple likely crashed onto the boat, causing it to sink.
It’s not clear whether anyone was on board at the time. A burial ground containing various trinkets and other artefacts was also uncovered by researchers.
It was in use as far back as 2,400 years ago and contained elaborately decorated pottery and a gold amulet depicting Bes, an Egyptian god associated with childbirth and fertility.
A burial ground containing decorated pottery and other artefacts was also uncovered by researchers
A gold amulet depicting Bes, an Egyptian god associated with childbirth and fertility
2,200 Year Old Alexander the Great Statue Discovered in Alexandria
The Ministry of Antiquities in Cairo has discovered a statue of Alexander the Great within an ancient “residential and commercial zone” in Alexandria that they believe was a trade centre in the region during the Ptolemaic period.
These pots were also found at the ancient Alexandria settlement and indicate that it was a major regional trade centre during the Ptolemaic period (305-30 BC).
The archaeologists made their discovery after 9 months of excavations.
The team discovered moulds for statues of Alexander the Great at the site as well as an alabaster bust of the iconic ancient leader. Also amongst these items were materials for creating amulets for warriors.
The new Alexander the Great statue, made of alabaster, was unearthed at a large dig in Alexandria, Egypt.
As they explored this area of Alexandria, known as the al-Shatby neighbourhood, “the mission found a large network of tunnel tanks painted in pink for storing rain, flood and groundwater to be used during the draught time” said Mostafa Waziri, the Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt to the Xinhua news agency.
Waziri further explained the layout of the town: “it was composed of the main street and several branch roads that are all connected with a sanitation network.”
He believes that the area was active from the 2nd century B.C. to the 4th century A.D. Waziri also noted that the team found an array of pottery pots, coins, plates, fishing tools, and rest houses for travellers.
A wealth of pottery artefacts has been unearthed at the site.
The ruins of the area’s buildings combined with the artefacts found there have led the team to believe that the town had a lively market that sold pots and had workshops for the construction of statues, amulets, and other items.
Amulets were unearthed at the site.
The fascinating Greek history behind the Egyptian city of Alexandria
The story of Hellenism in Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city, goes back more than two millennia and is marked by Alexander the Great’s placement of the first stone as part of the city’s first street in 331 BC.
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 both for his military and political capabilities.
Hellenistic Alexandria was best known for the Lighthouse of Alexandria (the Pharos), one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; its Great Library (the largest in the ancient world); and its Necropolis, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages.
Alexandria was at one time the second-most powerful city of the ancient Mediterranean region, after Rome.
In modern times, Greeks began to settle in Alexandria again in the 18th and 19th centuries.
A new wave of immigration flooded Alexandria shortly after the Greek revolution of 1821, marking the beginning of the so-called European era of the city.
The mystery of ‘The Screaming Mummy’ is finally revealed, and it’s chilling
He’s back. Prince Pentawere, a man who tried (probably successfully) to murder his own father, Pharaoh Ramesses III, and later took his own life after he was put on trial, is now on public display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Pentawere’s mummy, popularly known as the “screaming mummy,” was not properly mummified. No embalming fluid was used, and his body was allowed to naturally mummify, with his mouth agape and his facial muscles strained in order to make it appear as if the mummy were screaming.
Whether he died screaming or whether he was made to look like that after death is unclear.
The “screaming mummy,” likely that of Prince Pentawere, a man who tried (likely successfully) to kill his own father pharaoh Ramesses III, is now on public display at the Egyptian Museum.
Those burying him then wrapped his body in sheepskin, a material the ancient Egyptians considered to be ritually impure.
Eventually, someone placed Pentawere’s mummy in a cache of other mummies in a tomb at Deir el-Bahari.
The prince can take solace in the fact that his assassination attempt appears to have been successful. In 2012, a team of scientists studying the mummy of Ramesses III (reign 1184-1155 B.C.) found that Ramesses III died after his throat was slashed, likely in the assassination attempt that Pentawere helped to orchestrate.
The scientists also performed genetic analysis, which confirmed that the “screaming mummy” was a son of Ramesses III. And, based on the mummy’s unusual burial treatment, the researchers confirmed that it is likely Pentawere’s mummy.
To kill a pharaoh
The Judicial Papyrus of Turin, as modern-day scholars call it, is a manuscript that documents the trials that occurred after Pentawere’s apparently successful attempt at killing his father in 1155 B.C.
A group of butlers who remained loyal to Ramesses III — and his successor, Ramesses IV — oversaw the trial of a vast number of people who had allegedly aided Pentawere, condemning them to death or mutilation.
These conspirators included military and civil officials, women in the royal harem (where the murder of Ramesses III may have happened), and a number of men who were in charge of the royal harem.
Prince Pentawere was allegedly assisted by his mother, a woman named Tiye (no relation to King Tutankhamun), who was one of Ramesses III’s wives.
The judicial papyrus says that Prince Pentawere “was brought in because he had been in collusion with Tiye, his mother, when she had plotted the matters with the women of the harem” (translation by A. de Buck).
Pentawere “was placed before the butlers in order to be examined; they found him guilty; they left him where he was; he took his own life,” the papyrus says.
How exactly Pentawere killed himself is a matter of debate among scholars, with poisoning and hanging (or a combination of the two) generally regarded as being the most likely methods.
While the dead Pharaoh Ramesses III was initially buried in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, his mummy was moved after the robbery of his tomb. Interestingly, his mummy was dumped in the same mummy cache at Deir el-Bahari as Pentawere’s.
The mummies of the murdered father and his killer son rested together until the family of a man named Abd el-Rassul found the cache in the 19th century.
The screaming mummy is only being displayed temporarily. The display of the mummy has received widespread media attention and it is not clear how long it will be displayed.
43 million year old fossil of previously unknown four legged whale found in Egypt
Scientists said on Wednesday they had discovered the 43 million-year-old fossil of a previously unknown amphibious four-legged whale species in Egypt that helps trace the transition of whales from land to sea.
43 million-year-old fossil of previously unknown 4-legged whale found in Egypt
The newly discovered whale belongs to the Protocetidae, a group of extinct whales that falls in the middle of that transition, the Egyptian-led team of researchers said in a statement.
Its fossil was unearthed from middle Eocene rocks in the Fayum Depression in Egypt’s the Western Desert — an area once covered by the sea that has provided a rich seam of discoveries showing the evolution of whales — before being studied at Mansoura University Vertebrate Palaeontology Centre (MUVP).
The new whale, named Phiomicetus Anubis, had an estimated body length of some three meters (10 feet) and a body mass of about 600 kg (1,300 lb), and was likely a top predator, the researchers said. Its partial skeleton revealed it as the most primitive protocetid whale known from Africa.
Laid out on a tray are parts of the 43 million-year-old fossil of a previously unknown four-legged amphibious whale called “Phiomicetus Anubis”, which helps trace the transition of whales from land to sea, which were discovered in the Fayum Depression in the Western Desert of Egypt.
“Phiomicetus Anubis is a key new whale species, and a critical discovery for Egyptian and African palaeontology,” said Abdullah Gohar of MUVP, lead author of a paper on the discovery published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The whale’s genus name honours the Fayum Depression and the species name refers to Anubis, the ancient canine-headed Egyptian god associated with mummification and the afterlife.
Despite recent fossil discoveries, the big picture of early whale evolution in Africa has largely remained a mystery, the researchers said.
Work in the region had the potential to reveal new details about the evolutionary transition from amphibious to fully aquatic whales.
With rocks covering about 12 million years, discoveries in the Fayum Depression “range from semiaquatic crocodile-like whales to giant fully aquatic whales”, said Mohamed Sameh of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency, a co-author.
The new whale has raised questions about ancient ecosystems and pointed research towards questions such as the origin and coexistence of ancient whales in Egypt, said Hesham Sellam, founder of the MUVP and another co-author.
South Africa’s Bandit Slaves And The Rock Art Of Resistance
Not all South African rock art is ancient; some dates back to the colonial period – and was created by runaway slaves. It tells a remarkable story.
With the founding of the Cape Colony in 1652, European colonists were forbidden from enslaving the indigenous Khoe, San and African farmers. They had to look elsewhere for a labour force. And so slaves, captured and sold as property, were unwilling migrants to the Cape, transported – at great expense – from European colonies like Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, the East Indies (now Indonesia), India and Sri Lanka.
Far cheaper was the illegal trade in indigenous slaves that grew in the borderlands of the colony. Khoe-San people were forced into servitude as colonists took both land and livestock. Together with immigrant slaves, they were the labour force for the colonial project.
Louis van Mauritius (a) led a rebellion of 300 enslaved people in 1808 and ‘Portrait of Júli, a Faithful [Khoe-San]’ (b) by William Burchell, 1822.
Desertion was their most common form of rebellion. Runaway slaves escaped into the borderlands and mounted stiff resistance to the colonial advance from the 1700s until the mid-1800s. In most cases, the fugitives joined forces with groups of skelmbasters (mixed outlaws), who themselves were descended from San-, Khoe- and isiNtu-speaking Africans (hunter-gatherers, herders and farmers).
Thus, we find recorded examples of mixed bandit groups hiding out in mountain rock shelters, within striking distance of colonial farms. Using guerrilla-style warfare they raided livestock and guns. In their refuge, they made rock art, images within their own belief systems that relate to escape and retaliation.
These sites can be reliably dated because they include rock art images of horses and guns. In our most recent study of rock art in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, we see that this art also provides us with the raiders’ perspective. Our fieldwork enables us to view something of the slave and indigenous resistance from outside the texts of the colonial record.
The paintings
These mountainous regions house many rock shelters with paintings of the traditional corpus of ‘San rock art’ (antelope and dances) that have become world-famous. But owing to almost 2,000 years of contact with incoming African herders and farmers, the hunter-gatherer art changed in appearance, if not in the essence of its meaning. The ‘disconnect’ was most stark, however, during colonisation. The artists’ societies were deeply affected, disrupted and decimated. Where any art continued it was that of the mixed outlaws, often referred to simply as ‘Bushmen’ but who was actually a composite of many cultural backgrounds.
In the colonial borderlands, paintings with (a) horses and guns and (b) ostriches and baboons.
The paintings themselves are also mixed – some brush-painted, some finger-painted – but are united by subject matter pertaining to spiritual beliefs concerning escape and protective power. Certain motifs, including baboons and ostriches, continued to be used, but now appearing alongside motifs such as horses and guns. This suggests some continuity in the recognition of these animals, mystical or otherwise, as subject matter pertinent to people’s changed circumstances.
Despite these changes, bandit groups, however mixed they were, held onto, and even highlighted, some specific traditional beliefs.
Ritual specialists
The location of one band of mixed outlaws, in the Mankazana River Valley in today’s Eastern Cape, comes from the record of the 1820 settler, poet and abolitionist Thomas Pringle. During our fieldwork in this area we found rock paintings of horses, riders with guns and cattle raids that can be reliably dated to approximately when Pringle was writing.
That diverse groups of bandits painted depictions of cattle raids suggests that raiding was a fundamental concern for these groups. If we have learnt anything from the last five decades of southern African rock art research, it is that images are not the mere depictions of what the artists saw around them. Rather, they are of what ritual specialists see while travelling through the spirit world.
In the case of bandit groups, the ritual specialist often performed the role of war-doctor, who supplied traditional medicines to ensure protection in dangerous situations, including cattle raids and the flight from servitude.
Finger-painted and fine-line horses attest to the mixed nature of bandit groups, note the baboons beneath the black horse.
It is telling that these images also include motifs relating to protection during raids as can be seen in the appearance of certain animals, especially baboons and ostriches.
Baboons are associated with protection across Khoe-San and African farmer society. The |Xam San people of the 1800s claimed that the baboon chewed a stick of so-/oa, a root medicine which would alert the user (animal or human) to approaching danger and keep it safe. Among the Xhosa there is a cognate belief in uMabophe – arguably the same root medicine. Like so-/oa, uMabophe was supplied by ritual specialists to those who wished to exert supernatural influence over projectile weapons, including turning ‘bullets to water’.
Protective animals
Many of these images are painted with a fine-line, unshaded technique. But there are also images that are finger-painted in black or bright orange pigment, which have a distinctly Khoe-speaker inflection. In technique they strongly resemble the art of the Korana raiders, to the north of the colony, who were known to take in runaway slaves.
Further into the hinterland, as if to mark the fighting retreat of bandit groups as the colonial frontier expanded, we discovered rock shelters in the Stormberg and Zuurberg that exhibit yet more features of an indigenous resistance idiom. In one are images of people with horses and guns, as well as baboons and ostriches.
The ostrich was recognised by Khoe-San groups as particularly adept at escaping danger. It could outrun most predators and leap over hunters’ nets. Khoe-San would, and still do, tie the tendons from ostrich legs to their own legs to combat fatigue. Ostrich eggshell was recognised as a medicine that could be ground and consumed as a fortifying tonic. In the art of bandits, images of ritual specialists transforming into ostriches or baboons attest to them drawing on the powers of protective animals to ensure their own escape from former captors or following stock raids.
The bandit’s view
Although never officially recognised as slaves, the Khoe-San were uprooted from their land and lifeways by European settlers and forced into bondage. This brought them into contact with immigrant slaves, alongside whom they often escaped. In defiance they raided their former captors and other settlers and in rocky hideouts they painted their concerns.
The rock art of bandit groups is bound up with beliefs in the ability to call upon the protection of the supernatural. Baboons and ostriches, painted with images of livestock and people on horseback with firearms, were heralded for their associated powers pertaining to escape and protection while raiding. For these runaway slaves, rock art was one of several crucial ritual observances performed to prevent the likelihood of ever returning to a life of oppression.
Egypt’s secrets revealed: Possibly a second Sphinx & mysterious hidden chambers??
According to Egyptologist Bassam El Shammaa’s 2007 study, there was a “second sphinx” on the Pyramids Plateau. El Shammaa said the famous half-lion, the half-man statue was an Egyptian deity constructed close to another Sphinx that has since been vanished without a trace.
The discovery of a lost city in Egypt was reported in many newspapers in 1935, including this report in the Sunday Express on July 7, 1935.
Today, our attention is focused on the most recent attempt to discover the true ancient story of an advanced civilization that left us with great wonders above and below the Giza plateau sands.
Ancient lost city unearthed in Egypt
The earliest reports of a “Secret City” appeared in the World Press in the first week of March 1935. Many more were discovered in July of that year, and the Sunday Express carried an article by Edward Armytage, who had just returned from Egypt to England, where he had witnessed the excavation of an ancient Egyptian metropolis thought to date back 4,000 years.
Following then, there was stillness, as if every Egyptologist alive had lost interest in this fantastic underground metropolis. Throughout the years that followed, all of his articles focused on tombs of queens and arrows. Surprisingly, at one point, such a massive find of an entire underground metropolis dating back at least 4,000 years was completely ignored.
Denial of previous findings
Zawi Hawass examining a chamber at the back of the Sphinx.
However, he retains his power – and it is not a little one. Much has been written about the Egyptian ‘Indiana Jones’ (Zahi Hawass), who smiles large one moment and goes crimson with rage the next when he is questioned. This aspect of his personality is widely chronicled in the book “Breaking the Mirror of Heaven” by Robert Bauval and Ahmed Osman.
However, such attitude does not explain why Zahi Hawass has publicly said that there is nothing beneath the Sphinx, no tunnel, or a single chamber, despite several photographs of him entering the lowering pits of the Sphinx’s head and another in the rear of the body the lion. Should we ignore what we’ve seen several times before and accept such denials without question?
Statements contradict photographic evidence
Zawi Hawass descending through a well towards a chamber filled with water that contained a large sarcophagus.
He appears to have ignored queries concerning underground tunnels underneath the Giza plateau and chambers beneath the Sphinx, claiming that it was impossible to investigate deeper since the rooms were either sealed or filled with water. This might be true, however, we can see in one of the images of a posterior axis descending on the Sphinx’s side that the ground is extremely dry.
We know that Hawass climbed the steps from the Sphinx’s rear entrance, into a deep room, and then farther down to a lower chamber containing a very big sarcophagus and filled with water; these events are all seen in a documentary made by Fox. It’s difficult to conceive how he could subsequently refute what he’d said and done.
A hole in the Sphinx’s head
Vivant Denon’s 1798 sketch of the sphinx depicts a man being pulled out of a hole in the Sphinx’s head.
Vivant Denon made a sketch of the Sphinx in 1798, although he didn’t replicate it perfectly. He must have known there was a hole in the top of his head since he had sketched the image of a guy being dragged out.
1920s aerial photo shows a hole in the Sphinx’s head.
A drawing is hardly evidence, but an aerial shot of the sphinx taken from a hot air balloon in the 1920s revealed that there is such an opening at the top of its head.
The Sphinx’s head puzzle
According to Tony Bushby in his ” The Secret in The Bible”, a fragmented Sumerian cylinder tells a story that could easily be interpreted as having taken place in Giza, involving a beast that had a lion’s head with a tunnel entrance hidden by the sand.
A new study now points out that the Sphinx’s body was carved from natural stone when there was frequent heavy rain and this takes us back to the same time that Robert Bauval and Robert Schoch calculated the construction of the Pyramids of the ‘Belt of Orion’, ie, about 10,450 BC.
The second Sphinx
Giza plateau with the second sphinx mound buried.
The Giza complex (the ancient Egyptian term Gisa meaning “Stone Hewn”) has been sketched since 1665, and some depict two heads ‘peering’ out of the sand, one with female characters, possibly the second Sphinx.
It was an ancient Egyptian custom to enlist two lions, known as Akerw, outside their doorways for heavenly protection, which would take us the right to a mystery mound near the sphinx, which Gerry Cannon (Book: The Giza Plateau Secrets and a Second Sphinx Revealed) identified and measured. Is it possible that this mound contains the buried body of a second sphinx?
One would have thought that this mysterious, large, covered shape so close to the sphinx would have been greeted with great enthusiasm by the Egyptian authorities, but Hawass and Mark Lehner didn’t want to hear or pay attention to it, according to one source.
Gerry had contacted someone at a renowned institute in Cairo who had equipment that could detect objects under the sand. This person asked the Supreme Council of Antiquities for permission to investigate the mound, but they did not respond. Apparently, no one else was allowed to investigate the specific area of the mound where we believe a Second Sphinx could be unearthed. No doubt they had a reason for this!
Why the denial?
Why would those two Egyptologists be so concerned about the possibility of discovering something that had been lost for centuries? Is it conceivable they don’t want to expose what’s behind that mound? It is illogical to oppose any type of probe or even a simple aerial image being taken, which may lead to the discovery of yet another great wonder of the world, attracting many thousands of more tourists to Egypt.
They don’t even admit to have inspected the mystery mound, and if they had, they would have been the first to admit it. Zahi Hawass appears to have an agenda, which is to maintain the conventional view of ancient Egyptian history (to not allow anything to disrupt the path of conventional history), regardless of how many new findings contradict what is now considered to be true.
Gerry Cannon has previously hinted at a timetable for constructing the three great pyramids, as well as the Sphinx, which is many thousands of years older than most of us assume. He also identified an undiscovered mound on the Giza plateau, where another sphinx is most likely hidden, based on ancient documents and data he presented.
The mysterious Egyptian tablet that is similar to an aircraft control panel
Some Egyptologists and theorists believe that this is a replica of a much earlier but far more advanced object used by Gods and Demi-Gods of Egypt.
The Mysterious Egyptian Tablet That Is somewhat resemble an aircraft control panel.
After just a few seconds of staring at this mysterious object, we get the unmistakable feeling that it was an OOPArt artefact, which is when something literally does not belong to the time it is dated.
The enigmatic table from Ancient Egypt is about 49 cm in diameter and 13 cm in height, weighing as much as 75 kg and was meticulously moulded in alabaster, a material that only exists in this region and was frequently used for decorating of various sites, including sarcophagi.
But this incredible artefact is absolutely unlike anything that was produced in this ancient time (nothing similar has been found to this day), as it features circular openings and basically undecipherable reliefs that specialists and scholars cannot interpret even after years of study.
These characteristics that we can observe, make the object resemble a control table of a modern aeroplane.
Some Egyptologists and theorists assume that this is a copy of a much older object, made of different, less weather-resistant, but considerably more advanced materials used by Gods and Demigods – perhaps a reproduction of the extraterrestrial technology observed in the past by the ancients.
This artefact was acquired by the Dutch museum in 1828, which is very interesting information about it. However, it is unknown which temple, tomb, or even where it was discovered.
As with many ancient Egyptian items, its provenance (from where it was recovered) is frequently forgotten, but its authenticity can still be confirmed. At the moment, the artefact is in the Leiden Museum of Antiquities.
Its authenticity was validated by specialists in the area after many investigations and assessments.
The strange contraption was discovered over 4,500 years ago and instantly connected with Egypt’s fifth dynasty of pharaohs.
The artifact comes from ancient Egypt, the purpose of which has not yet been determined. On this artifact, an image was applied that somewhat resembled a map or some kind of schematic board.
Only a small portion of its possible history can be deduced from the hieroglyphics found on its surface.
This tablet, according to one interpretation (there are others, all quite different), was used for the libation of deceased members of the highest Egyptian hierarchy in order for them to successfully enter the underworld.
Regardless of what the object is, its resemblance to modern equipment continues to perplex even the most sceptics and experts who have been unable to come up with a solid explanation for the find.
