Category Archives: AFRICA

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Possibly 10,000-Year-old rock Art Discovered in Egyptian Cave

Possibly 10,000-Year-old rock Art Discovered in Egyptian Cave

CAIRO, EGYPT—Egymonuments Reports that rock art has been discovered in a cave at Wadi Al-Zulma in North Sinai. Aymen Ashmawi of the Ministry of Antiquities said the images resemble a raised relief style and are thus different from those found in South Sinai.

Many of the newly found engravings depict animals, including camels, deer, mules, mountain goats, and donkeys. Remains of circular stone buildings have been found in the area of the cave. 

The cave is located high on a hillside, overlooking the valley and it is made of limestone. It is quite difficult to access. The height of the cave is 60 feet (20 m) and 45 feet deep (15 m). In the cavern, the team of experts was shocked to find a large number of rock carvings that are of a type not seen before.

The ancient cave was found in a mountainous area in Northern Sinai.

Ayman Ashmawy, a senior official with the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities told Egypt Independent that ‘this cave is the first of its kind to be found in the area’.

Sinai has a great many rock carvings and an important collection of them was found at al-Zaranji cave, earlier this year, in the south of the peninsula. 

Here a great many images were found that predated the Pharaohs and that possible date to 10,000 years ago. They were stylistically similar to other examples of cave art in the southern valleys of Sinai.

The rock carvings are of a type not seen before in the region.

Ayman Ashmawy told Egypt Independent that the newly explored ‘cave features an utterly unique assortment of carvings unlike those from the South Sinai valleys’. There are a great many more engravings than in the al-Zaranji cave.

The Director of Sinai Antiquities and head of the mission, Dr. Hisham Hussein told Egypt Today that ‘most of the scenes were carved along the walls of the inner cave’.

The carved images found in Northern Sinai are different from those found elsewhere in the Peninsula. They are more akin to bas-relief and the figures tend to be projected out of the surface of the cave walls.

The rock art found elsewhere in the area, such as those at al-Zaranji were made by chipping away the rocky surface of the caverns and apply pigments to color the engravings. 

Most of the carvings projected out of the surface of the cave walls.

Dr. Hisham told Ahram. online that the rock art depicts ‘animals, including camels, deer, mules, mountain goats and donkeys’. Some of the animals depicted have long ago disappeared from the area and this may help researchers to date the rock engravings.

Images of animals have also been uncovered in other caves in Sinai and other sites all around the world.

A great deal of animal waste and the remains of fires were found in the cave. This suggests that the local people still used the caves to shelter with their animals during the winter. It appears that the site had been used by people for millennia.

The carvings included animals such as camels, deer, mules, mountain goats and donkeys.

Ahram Online reports that ‘the remains of circular stone buildings were discovered’ and were unearthed near the location of the rock carvings. It was found some 140 feet (200 m) south of the site.

It is believed that these are the remains of an ancient settlement. It is not known if the settlement is contemporary with the rock art or if the people who lived there are responsible for the images deep in the limestone cave.

Dr. Hisham and his team will now record and catalogue the rock images. It is possible that more may be found elsewhere in the limestone cavern.

They will attempt to date the images based on their style and identify if they can be linked to any known historical society. It is too early to establish if the mysterious images were made by people from a previously unknown culture.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Researchers Find Ancient 3,600-Year-Old Mummy Near Luxor, Egypt

Researchers Find Ancient 3,600-Year-Old Mummy Near Luxor, Egypt

LUXOR, EGYPT—BBC reports that a wooden coffin containing a mummy, a small coffin made of mud, and funerary equipment dating to the 17th Dynasty (ca. 1635–1550 B.C.) were found in a mudbrick chapel in the Dra Abul Naga necropolis, which is located on Luxor’s West Bank.

The project chief, José Galán, clarified that during excavation activities in the area in front of Djehuty’s open courtyard these artifacts were uncovered.

The sarcophagus was mounted horizontally on the concrete. It measures 1.75 by 0.33m, and was carved in a woodcut from a single sycamore tree trunk, then coated with a whitewash and painted in red.

Inside the coffin was found the mummy of a 15- or 16-year-old girl resting on her right side. The mummy is in a bad conservation condition.

The mummy is wearing two earrings in one of her ears, both with a spiral shape and coated with a thin metal leaf, maybe copper.

It also had two rings, one made of bone and the other with a blue glass bead set on a metal base and tied with string. Four necklaces tied together with a faience clip are around the chest.

One necklace is 70cm long and made rounded faience beads, alternating dark and light blue.

The second one is 62cm long and made of green faience and glass beads.

The most beautiful is the third necklace which measures 61cm and is made of 74 pieces, combining beads of amethyst, carnelian, amber, blue glass, and quartz. It includes two scarabs, one depicting the falcon god Horus, and five faience amulets.

The fourth necklace is made of several strings of faience beads tied together at both ends by a ring combining all the strings.

At the opposite side of the mud-brick chapel, a small coffin made of mud was also found. It is still closed and tied together with string.

Inside there was a wooden ushabti wrapped in four linen bandages. The ushabti figurine and one of the linen bandages are labelled in hieratic text identifying its owner, “The Osiris, Djehuty,” who lived under the 17th dynasty (c.1600 BCE).

In the same area, but inside a funerary shaft, a pair of leather sandals was found together with a pair of leather balls tied together with string, also dating to the 17th dynasty.

“The sandals are in a good state of preservation, despite being 3,600 years old,” Galán noted. He added that they are dyed in a vivid red colour, and engraved with various motifs showing god Bes, goddess Taweret, a pair of cats, an ibex and a rosette.

From their decoration and size, he said, the sandals probably belonged to a woman, and also the balls, which were used by a woman for sport or as part of a dancing choreography, according to daily life depictions in Beni Hassan tombs of the 12th dynasty. 

AFRICA, SUDAN, WORLD

Archaeologists Diving Under a 2,300-Year-Old Pyramid Find Ancient Treasure

Archaeologists Diving Under a 2,300-Year-Old Pyramid Find Ancient Treasure

Objects, ‘ gold leaf ‘ were uncovered by a team of archeologists ‘ diving’ the sweltering deserts of northern Sudan once Nubia, in a 2,300- years-old submerged tomb belonging to a pharaoh named Nastasen who ruled the Kush kingdom from 335 BC to 315 BC.

A major difference between the pyramids of northern Sudan and the most prominent pyramids in Egypt is that the pharaohs were buried beneath them, rather than within them. 

This is why Georges Reisner, an egyptologist in Harvard, visited Nouri for the first time visited Nuri over a century ago and discovered burial chambers beneath Taharqa’s massive pyramid, the largest of 20 pyramids marking the burials of Kushite royal family.

Nuri pyramids.

Sometimes called the “black pharaohs,” this dynasty conquered Egypt in the 8th Century BC and ruled for almost a century. Reisner not only reported that he had found their water filled tombs, but he also noted the presence of a narrow, ancient processional staircase cut into the bedrock running deep below Nastasen’s pyramid at Nuri.

In 2018, the team located the 65-step stairway and began excavating, but when they got to around 40 stairs down they hit a water table – enters underwater archaeologist Pearce Paul Creasman – associate professor in the dendrochronology laboratory at the University of Arizona, who led the team into the subaquatic ancient tomb for the first time in at least 100 years.

In a National Geographic article Creasman said “normal scuba tanks would have been too cumbersome” and this is why he decided to pump oxygen through 150-foot-long (45.72 meters) hoses from a gasoline-fed pump on the surface.

With Fakhri Hassan Abdallah, an inspector with Sudan’s  National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, manning the air pump, Creasman entered the ancient abyss.

There are three chambers, with these beautiful arched ceilings, about the size of a small bus, you go in one chamber into the next, it’s pitch black, you know you’re in a tomb if your flashlights aren’t on. And it starts revealing the secrets that are held within.

And in this instance, those secrets Creasman risked his life to touch came in the form of fragments of ancient gold.

According to Creasman, when he was making his way through the dark silt they… “Were still sitting there – small glass-type statues” which had once been leafed in gold.

A shabti found in the submerged chamber of a Kushite pyramid.

And while the water destroyed the glass underneath, “the little gold flake was still there”. Under normal circumstances all traces of gold leaf would have been stolen by grave robbers , but the rising water level made this particular tomb inaccessible, said underwater archaeologist Kristin Romey in National Geographic .

‘Kush gold leaf’ sounds like the name of a tea, or a brand of really strong hashish, both products associated with the Kush empire; however, while Creasman’s team might be slightly let down at not having found a collection of solid gold statues , the fragments of gold leaf are in themselves priceless in heritage terms.

The land of the Kush became one of the main gold-producing areas of the ancient world and its alchemists and craftspeople forged intricate and beautiful jewelry and they adorned their temples and statues with gold leaf.

In 2007, The Guardian published an article announcing that archaeologists discovered “An ancient site where gold flakes were hand-ground from rare ores.”

Gold leaf found in the tomb.

Located at Hosh el-Geruf, 225 miles (362 km) north of Khartoum in Sudan, the archaeologists first unearthed grinding stones made of a granite-like rock called gneiss, used to crush the ore and recover flakes of gold. Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, told The Guardian, “This work is extremely important because it can give us our first look at the economic organization of this very important but little-known African state – the Kush empire.”

Funded in part by a grant from the National Geographic Society, for more information and updates on archaeology at Nuri, visit the official expedition website at  Nuri pyramids.

AFRICA, WORLD

Buried in the sand for a millennium: Africas roman ghost city

Buried in the sand for a millennium: Africas roman ghost city

While the whole city often does not vanish, the Roman colony of Thamugadi was established in the North African province of Mumidia by Emperor Traian about 100 A.D., the city, also known as Timgad or Tamugas.

Home to Veterans of the Third Augustan Legion, Thamugadi flourished for hundreds of years, becoming prosperous and thus an attractive target for raiders. After a Vandal invasion in 430, repeated attacks weakened the city, which never fully recovered and was abandoned during the 700s.

The desert sands swept in and buried Thamugadi. One thousand years would pass before the city received a visit from a team of explorers led by a maverick Scotsman in the 1700s.

Originally founded by Emperor Trajan in 100 AD and built as a retirement colony for soldiers living nearby, within a few generations of its birth, the outpost had expanded to over 10,000 residents of both Roman, African, as well as Berber descent.

Most of them would likely never even have seen Rome before, but Timgad invested heavily in high culture and Roman identity, despite being thousands of kilometers from the Italian city itself.

Timgad photographed by Brian Brake for LIFE magazine, 1965
Timgad photographed by Brian Brake for LIFE magazine, 1965

The extension of Roman citizenship to non-Romans was a carefully planned strategy of the Empire – it knew it worked better by bringing people in than by keeping them out.

In return for their loyalty, local elites were given a stake in the great and powerful Empire, benefitted from its protection and legal system, not to mention, its modern urban amenities such as Roman bath houses, theatres and a fancy public library…

Timgad photographed by Brian Brake for LIFE magazine, 1965

Timgad, also known as Thamugadi in old Berber, is home to a very rare example of a surviving public library from the Roman world.

Built-in the 2nd century, the library would have housed manuscripts relating to religion, military history, and good governance.

An artist’s interpretation of the Timgad library

These would have been rolled up and stored in wooden scroll cases, placed in shelves separated by ornate columns. The shelves can still be seen standing in the midst of the town ruins, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a monument to culture.

Mosaic found in Timgad

The remains of as many as 14 baths have survived and a mosaic portraying Roman flip-flops was found at the entrance of a house in Timgad dating back to the 1st or 2nd century, with the inscription “BENE LAVA” which translates to ‘wash well’.

This mosaic, along with a collection of more than 200 others found in Timgad, is held inside a museum at the entrance of the site.

Timgad photographed by Brian Brake for LIFE magazine, 1965

Other surviving landmarks include a 12 m high triumphal arch made of sandstone, a 3,500-seat theater is in good condition and a basilica where a large, hexagonal, 3-step immersion baptismal font richly decorated with mosaics was uncovered in the 1930s.

You can imagine the excitement of Scottish explorer James Bruce when he reached the city ruins in 1765, the first European to visit the site in centuries. Still largely buried then, he called it “a small town, but full of elegant buildings.” Clearing away the sand with his bare hands, Bruce and his fellow travellers uncovered several sculptures of Emperor Antoninus Pius, Hadrian’s successor.

Unable to take photographs in 1765, and without the means to take the sculptures with them, they reburied them in the sand and continued on Bruce’s original quest to find the source of the Blue Nile.

Upon his return to Great Britain, his claims of what he’d found were met with skepticism. Offended by the suspicion with which his story was received, James Bruce retired soon after and there would be no further investigation of the lost city for another hundred years.

A Roman lavatory, flanked by sculptures of dolphins, photographed by Brian Brake for LIFE magazine, 1965

Step forward Sir Robert Playfair, British consul-general in Algeria, who, inspired by James Bruce’s travel journal which detailed his findings in Timgad, went in search of the site. In his book, Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis, Playfair describes in detail what he found in the desolate and austere surroundings of the treeless desert plain.

“The whole of this district is of the deepest interest to the student of pre-historic archaeology … we left Timegad not without considerable regret that we could not afford to spend a longer time there. We would fain have made some excavations as there is no more promising a field for antiquarian research.”

Just a few years later, French colonists took control of the site in 1881, and began a large-scale excavation, which continued until Algeria gained independence from France in 1959.

“These hills are covered with countless numbers of the most interesting megalithic remains,” wrote Playfair in 1877.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Gold Mine of Discoveries Unearthed in Egypt’s Saqqara Necropolis

Treasure Trove of Discoveries Unearthed in Egypt’s Saqqara Necropolis

Situated some 30 km (19 miles) south of modern Cairo and the house of the older and the most early documented pyramid is Saqqara’s enormous historic site, the Unas, the well-known Step Pyramid of Djoser, the Serapeum, and the tomb of the spiritual Apis bulls, varying from the early Old Kingdom to the Graeco-Roman period.

In December 2018, The BBC reported archaeologists at Saqqara had actually found an “exceptionally-well preserved” burial chamber, the Wahti Burial place, consisting of holy birds and mummified animals, and now, the Tourist and Antiquities Minister in Egypt, Khaled El-Enany, revealed on Saturday through Instagram a brand-new discovery at the Spiritual Animal Necropolis in Saqqara near the highly-decorated burial place of “Wahti and the cachette” of spiritual birds and animals, reports Egypt Today.

The Minister of Tourist and Antiquities published pictures of himself with excavation employees in Saqqara on his main Instagram account revealing his group checking out a “burial well” situated beside the Wahti Burial place.

Another one of the ancient Egyptian sarcophagi unearthed at the Saqqara archaeological site, being inspected by an archaeologist.

The archaeologists discovered a passage that caused a chamber real estate 5 closed limestone sarcophagi and 4 wood caskets, all with human mummies within, from the Late Pharaonic Period.

In among the specific niches a big human-shaped wood sarcophagus included engravings in intense yellow ink and around it was a big collection of statues and pottery consisting of “365 Ushabti statues” crafted in faience and some including hieroglyphs A little wood obelisk measuring 40 cm (16 inches) in height was likewise found, and when this artifact is translated with the ushabtis themselves, they together use insight into ancient Egyptian cosmology.

The ushabti, shabti, or shawabti was a funerary figurine utilized within the death routines of ancient Egyptian faith, and they were positioned in burial places amongst the spiritual serious items meant to serve the deceased in the afterlife.

Shot of the many ushabti figurines found at the Saqqara archaeological site.

The routine application of ushabtis came from the Old Kingdom of Egypt ( c. 2600 to 2100 BC) and frequently they were portrayed with a hoe over their shoulders bring baskets on their backs.

Archaeologists believe these signs insinuate a belief that the statuettes would amazingly come to life and farm for the departed, and according to Richard Taylor’s 2000 paper’ Shabti, Ushabti, Shawabti, Death and the Afterlife’, hieroglyphs normally appeared on the legs asserting “their readiness to answer the gods’ summons to work.”

What is unique about the recently found collection of ushabti is that there are 365, one for each day of the year.

A short article on Ancient Egypt Online discusses that while the lunar calendar was utilized to determine dates for spiritual celebrations and routines, daily life was structured around the solar calendar of 365 days annually.

Each year consisted of 3, four-month seasons, which were called after considerable occasions associated with their agrarian way of life.

Obelisks, or pyramidions, were frequently set up outdoors as landmarks or monoliths representing the power and consistency of the Sun god Ra. Nevertheless, throughout the spiritual reformation of Akhenaten, the sign was translated as a scared ray of the Sun god Aten (sundisk) representing the god’s presence within the stone body of the structure.

Archaeologists and Khaled El-Enany inspect the ancient Egyptian obelisk and another figurine unearthed at the Saqqara archaeological site.

Obelisks were normally set up to honor occasions or people, honoring the gods for the associated successes and according to Ancient Encyclopedia, the ancient Egyptians began producing obelisks eventually in the Early Dynastic Duration (c. 3150-2613 BC) prior to the building and construction of the Action Pyramid of Djoser ( c. 2670 BC).

It is believed that the earliest obelisks worked as a sort of training for operating in stone on huge jobs, which was an essential action towards pyramid structure.

However, in the context that the brand-new 40 cm (16 inches) high design was found, in the middle of 365 ushabti, it represents the Sun, and its associated god, the magnificent Ra.

The secretary and therapist of the Sun god Ra were Thoth, who according to Ancient Egypt Online was “the One who Made Calculations Concerning the Heavens, the Stars and the Earth” and “the Reckoner of Time and of Seasons” – the “inventor of the 365-day calendar,” which changed the unreliable 360-day calendar.

Together, the 365 ushabti and the obelisk represent the days of the solar year and the Sun of this world, and it is gorgeous to see them surrounding the casket of somebody who is now under the light of another Sun, in another location and time.

AFRICA, SOUTH AFRICA, WORLD

Synchrotron X-ray sheds light on some of the world’s oldest dinosaur eggs

Synchrotron X-ray sheds light on some of the world’s oldest dinosaur eggs

In the most minor details, an international team of scientists led by the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa was able to re-construct the skulls of some of the world’s oldest documented 3D dinosaur embryos by using powerful and non-destructive ESRF synchrotron technology.

The skulls evolve as the crocodiles, ducks, turtles, and Lizards today. They are in the same order The results are published in scientific reports

In an article in Scientific Reports, the University of Witwatersrand releases 3D reconstructions of the nearly 2 cm long skulls of some of the oldest dinosaur embryos in the world.

Dinosaur egg concept Dinosaur 'Easter eggs' reveal their secrets in 3D thanks to X-rays and high-powered computers.
Dinosaur egg concept Dinosaur
‘Easter eggs’ reveal their secrets in 3D thanks to X-rays and high-powered computers.

Embryos, discovered in 1976, related to the legendary South African dinosaur Massospondylus carinatus (five-meter long herbivores nestled in the Free state region 200 million years ago in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park (Free State Region, South Africa).

The scientific usefulness of the embryos was previously limited by their extremely fragile nature and tiny size. In 2015, scientists Kimi Chapelle and Jonah Choiniere, from the University of Witwatersrand, brought them to the European Synchrotron (ESRF) in Grenoble, France for scanning.

At the ESRF, an 844 meter-ring of electrons travelling at the speed of light emits high-powered X-ray beams that can be used to non-destructively scan matter, including fossils.

The embryos were scanned at an unprecedented level of detail — at the resolution of an individual bone cell. With these data in hand, and after nearly 3 years of data processing at Wits’ laboratory, the team was able to reconstruct a 3D model of the baby dinosaur skull.

“No lab CT scanner in the world can generate these kinds of data,” said Vincent Fernandez, one of the co-authors and scientists at the Natural History Museum in London (UK).

“Only with a huge facility like the ESRF can we unlock the hidden potential of our most exciting fossils. This research is a great example of a global collaboration between Europe and the South African National Research Foundation,” he adds.

Up until now, it was believed that the embryos in those eggs had died just before hatching. However, during the study, lead author Chapelle noticed similarities with the developing embryos of living dinosaur relatives (crocodiles, chickens, turtles, and lizards).

By comparing which bones of the skull were present at different stages of their embryonic development, Chapelle and co-authors can now show that the Massospondylus embryos were actually much younger than previously thought and were only at 60% through their incubation period.

The team also found that each embryo had two types of teeth preserved in its developing jaws. One set was made up of very simple triangular teeth that would have been resorbed or shed before hatching, just like geckos and crocodiles today.

The second set was very similar to those of adults and would be the ones that the embryos hatched with. “I was really surprised to find that these embryos not only had teeth but had two types of teeth. The teeth are so tiny; they range from 0.4 to 0.7mm wide. That’s smaller than the tip of a toothpick!” explains Chapelle.

The conclusion of this research is that dinosaurs developed in the egg just like their reptilian relatives, whose embryonic developmental pattern hasn’t changed in 200 million years.

“It’s incredible that in more than 250 million years of reptile evolution, the way the skull develops in the egg remains more or less the same. Goes to show — you don’t mess with a good thing!,” concludes Jonah Choiniere, professor at the University of Witwatersrand and also co-author of the study.

The team hopes to apply their method to other dinosaur embryos to estimate their level of development.

They will be looking at the rest of the skeleton of the Massospondylus embryos to see if it also shares similarities in development with today’s dinosaur relatives.

The arms and legs of the Massospondylus embryos have already been used to show that hatchlings likely walked on two legs.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

3000-Year-Old Pharaoh Ramses II Statue Found In Cairo Slum, And It’s “One Of The Most Important Discoveries Ever”

3000-Year-Old Pharaoh Ramses II Statue Found In Cairo Slum, And It’s “One Of The Most Important Discoveries Ever”

The massive 26 ft (8 meters) statue was found in the groundwater of a Cairo slum by archaeologists from Egypt and Germany. It is likely to represent revered Pharaoh Ramses II, who controlled Egypt more than three thousand years ago, researchers say.

The find was made near the remnants of the temple of Ramses II, in the old city of Héliopolis in the eastern part of modern Cairo, one of the most significant ever by the Minister for Antiquities.

The minister of antiquities, Khaled al-Anani, told Reuters on the site for an unveiling of the statue, they called me to announce a big discovery of a colossus made from quartzite, most likely from Ramses II.

Ramses the Great was the most powerful and celebrated ruler of ancient Egypt.  Known by his successors as the ‘Great Ancestor’, he led several military expeditions and expanded the Egyptian Empire to stretch from Syria in the east to Nubia in the south.  

He was the third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt and ruled from 1279 to 1213 BCE. 

‘We found the bust of the statue and the lower part of the head and now we removed the head and we found the crown and the right ear and a fragment of the right eye,’ Anani said.

Archaeologists, officials, local residents, and members of the news media looked on as a massive forklift pulled the statue’s head out of the water. The joint Egyptian-German expedition, which included the University of Leipzig, also found the upper part of a life-sized limestone statue of Pharaoh Seti II, Ramses II’s grandson, which is 80 centimeters long.

The statue believed to depict the legendary Pharaoh Ramses II, measure 8 meters long and was submerged in groundwater
A partial statue of Pharaoh Seti II, Ramses II’s grandson, and pieces of an obelisk were also recovered from the site
Ramses II believed that the world was created in Heliopolis, now known as Matariya, the slum where this statue was found
These monumental findings were unearthed by a team of German and Egyptian archaeologists, and are currently being restored

The sun temple in Heliopolis was founded by Ramses II, which increases the likelihood the statue is of him, archaeologists say. It was one of the largest temples in Egypt, almost double the size of Luxor’s Karnak, but was destroyed in Greco-Roman times. 

Many of its obelisks were moved to Alexandria or to Europe and stones from the site were looted and used for building as Cairo developed. Experts will now attempt to extract the remaining pieces of both statues before restoring them.

If they are successful and the colossus is proven to depict Ramses II, it will be moved to the entrance of the Grand Egyptian Museum, set to open in 2018. 

The discovery was made in the working-class area of Matariya, among unfinished buildings and mud roads.

Dietrich Raue, head of the expedition’s German team, told Reuters that ancient Egyptians believed Heliopolis was the place where the sun god lives, meaning it was off-limits for any royal residences.

‘The sun god created the world in Heliopolis, in Matariya. That’s what I always tell the people here when they say is there anything important. According to the pharaonic belief, the world was created in Matariya,’ Raue said.

Matariya is believed to be the site of the Ancient Egyptian sun temples, which were built to worship Ra, the god of the sun
The sun temples were purportedly double the size of Luxor’s Karnak but were destroyed during Greco-Roman times

‘That means everything had to be built here. Statues, temples, obelisks, everything. But … the king never lived in Matariya, because it was the sun god living here.’

The find could be a boon for Egypt’s tourism industry, which has suffered many setbacks since the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011 but remains a vital source of foreign currency. 

The number of tourists visiting Egypt slumped to 9.8 million in 2011 from more than 14.7 million in 2010.

A bomb attack that brought down a Russian plane carrying 224 people from a Red Sea resort in October 2015 further hit arrivals, which dropped to 1.2 million in the first quarter of 2016 from 2.2 million a year earlier.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Ancient Egyptian Artifacts Unearthed at Temple of Ramesses II

Ancient Egyptian Artifacts Unearthed at Temple of Ramesses II

A team of researchers led by Sameh Iskander of New York University uncovered foundation deposits, ten large storerooms, and niches cut into the walls of the southwest corner of the Temple of Ramesses II in Abydos.

Mostafa Waziri of the Supreme Council of Antiquities said that the foundation deposits, which include plaques inscribed with Ramesses II’s throne name, copper tool models, pottery, grindstones, and food offerings, were buried in 1279 B.C. 

The mission of the New York University-ISAW at the Temple of Ramses II in Abydos, led by Sameh Iskander, discovered the temple’s foundation deposits during excavation work carried out at the temple’s southwest corner. 

Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the deposits were buried in 1279 BC at the time of the construction ceremony.

They include food offerings, plaques inscribed with Ramses II’s throne name painted in blue or green, small copper construction tool models, pottery vessels decorated with hieratic inscriptions, and oval-shaped quartzite grindstones.

The mission also uncovered 10 large mud-brick storerooms attached to the temple palace, originally roofed with vaulted brick ceilings.

They were used as granaries, storage of other temple provisions, offerings, and other small equipment.

Twelve sacrificial votive bulls’ heads and bones dated to the Ptolemaic period were found in niches cut into the walls of the storerooms. In addition, a complete skeleton of a bull was found carefully buried under the floor of the temple palace.

Iskander believes the foundation deposits bearing the throne name of Ramses II buried under his first temple built in Egypt confirm the temple was indeed constructed during his reign, not his father’s.

“This discovery has changed the physical appearance of the Abydos landscape and sheds considerable light on our understanding of the temple and its economy during the 13th century BC, Iskander said.

He explained that the insertion of numerous votive sacrificial bulls into the walls of the temple dated to the Ptolemaic period reveals that the temple was regarded then as a sacred place.

“This is testimony to the vivid memory of Ramses II in the Egyptian mind 1,000 years after his reign,” he pointed out.