Archaeologists Discover ‘Massive’ Ancient Building in Egypt

An ‘incredibly important’ ancient structure which they claim is believed to be a well-known city in ancient Egypt’s history, it is stated by the country’s Antiquities Ministry announced.

The city of Memphis was founded circa 2925 B.C. by Menes, a king who is said to have united the prehistoric kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt. The city was originally called the White Walls, a term that may have come from the king’s palace of whitewashed brick.

The newly found ruins are located about an hour south of Cairo, near an open-air museum in the town of Mit Rahina, the ministry says.

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Archaeologists also discovered a connected structure, containing a Roman bath and an ornately carved basin, which was likely used in religious ceremonies, according to The Associated Press.

Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the area was most likely part of a residential community in Memphis, the AP reports.

Memphis and its necropolis became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979.

The grounds contain the remnants of sun temples, palaces, pyramids, residential neighborhoods, and thousands of rock-cut tombs.

Last week, archaeologists found a sandstone sphinx when they were excavating a temple near the city of Aswan, in southern Egypt.

The statue was found close to a site where two reliefs of King Ptolemy V were recovered two months prior, according to the American University in Cairo.

Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology, said the sphinx and slabs trace back to the Ptolemaic Period. They “show us that the exterior area of the temple was an active ritual and cult place” and that it “played an important role in the spiritual, political and economic life of the people.”

New archaeological discoveries in Egypt could drive tourism at a time when the industry has seen a decline.

Tourism Minister Rania Al Mashat announced a partnership between the ministry and Zahi Hawass, the former Antiquities minister and archaeologist known as “Egypt’s Indiana Jones,” as part of a campaign to promote tourism in the country.

Ancient Christian settlement discovered in Egypt’s Bahariya Oasis

The Egyptian antiquities ministry announced Saturday that a French-Norwegian excavation team uncovered new Christian ruins in Egypt’s Western Desert, exposing monastic life in the area in the fifth century AD.

During its third excavation campaign at the Tal Ganoub Qasr al-Agouz site in the Bahariya Oasis, the team discovered “several buildings made of basalt, some carved into the bedrock, and others made of mud bricks,” according to the ministry said in a statement.

The complex is comprised of “six sectors containing the ruins of three churches and monks’ cells”, whose “walls bear graffiti and symbols with Coptic connotations”, said Osama Talaat, head of Islamic, Coptic and Jewish Antiquities at the ministry.

Mission head Victor Ghica said, “19 structures and a church carved into the bedrock” were discovered last year.

The church walls were decorated with “religious inscriptions” and biblical passages in Greek, revealing “the nature of monastic life in the region”, Ghica said, according to the statement.

It clearly showed that monks were present there since the fifth century AD, he said, adding that the discovery helped understand “the development of buildings and the formation of the first monastic communities” in this region of Egypt.

The remote site, located in the desert southwest of the capital Cairo, was occupied from the fourth to eighth centuries, with a likely peak of activity around the fifth and sixth centuries, according to the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology (IFAO), in charge of the mission.

Previous excavations undertook in 2009 and 2013 shed light on subjects including “the production and preservation of wine as well as the husbandry of animals” in a monastic context, according to the IFAO.

Cairo has announced several major new archaeological discoveries in recent months with the hopes of spurring tourism, a sector that has suffered multiple blows, from a 2011 uprising to the coronavirus pandemic.

In February, it said a high-production brewery believed to be more than 5,000 years old had been uncovered at a funerary site in the country’s south.

Also last month, an Egyptian-Dominican archaeological mission working near Alexandria said it had discovered mummies from around 2,000 years ago bearing golden-tongued amulets.

In January, Egypt unveiled ancient treasures found at the Saqqara archaeological site south of Cairo, including sarcophagi over 3,000 years old, in a discovery that “rewrites history”, according to famed Egyptologist Zahi Hawass.

Ancient Egyptian manual reveals new details about mummification

According to a statement released by the University of Copenhagen, Sofie Schiødt and her colleagues have found evidence of an ancient Egyptian embalming process in the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg, a 3,500-year-old medical text dated to 1450 B.C

Embalming was considered a sacred art in ancient Egypt, and knowledge of the technique was limited to a select few. Egyptologists conclude that most secrets of the art were handed on orally from one embalmer to the next, but written evidence is scarce; until recently, only two texts on mummification had been identified.

Egyptologists were therefore surprised to find a short manual on embalming in a medical text that is primarily concerned with herbal medicine and swellings of the skin. The manual has recently been edited by University of Copenhagen Egyptologist Sofie Schiødt:

– Many descriptions of embalming techniques that we find in this papyrus have been left out of the two later manuals, and the descriptions are extremely detailed.

The text reads like a memory aid, so the intended readers must have been specialists who needed to be reminded of these details, such as unguent recipes and uses of various types of bandages.

Some of the simpler processes, e.g. the drying of the body with natron, have been omitted from the text, Sofie Schiødt explains. She adds:

– One of the exciting new pieces of information the text provides us with concerns the procedure for embalming the dead person’s face. We get a list of ingredients for a remedy consisting largely of plant-based aromatic substances and binders that are cooked into a liquid, with which the embalmers coat a piece of red linen.

The red linen is then applied to the dead person’s face in order to encase it in a protective cocoon of fragrant and anti-bacterial matter. This process was repeated at four-day intervals.

Although this procedure has not been identified before, Egyptologists have previously examined several mummies from the same period as this manual whose faces were covered in cloth and resin. According to Sofie Schiødt, this would fit well with the red linen procedure described in this manuscript.

Four was the key number

The importance of the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg manual in reconstructing the embalming process lies in its specification of the process is divided into intervals of four, with the embalmers actively working on the mummy every four days.

– A ritual procession of the mummy marked these days, celebrating the progress of restoring the deceased’s corporeal integrity, amounting to 17 processions over the course of the embalming period. In between the four-day intervals, the body was covered with cloth and overlaid with straw infused with aromatics to keep away insects and scavengers, Sofie Schiødt says.

The Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg

The manuscript, which Sofie Schiødt has been working on for her PhD thesis, is the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg – so-called because one half of the papyrus belongs to the Louvre Museum in Paris and the other half is part of the University of Copenhagen’s Papyrus Carlsberg Collection.

The two parts of the papyrus originally belonged to two private collectors, and several sections of it are still missing.

Based on the palaeography, that is, the sign forms, the six-metre long papyrus is dated to approximately 1450 BC, which means that it predates the only two other examples of embalming texts by more than a thousand years.

The bulk of the papyrus, which is the second-longest medical papyrus surviving from ancient Egypt, deals with herbal medicine and skin illnesses.

Specifically, it contains the earliest-known herbal treatise, which provides descriptions of the appearance, habitat, uses, and religious significance of a divine plant and its seed as well as a lengthy treatise on swellings of the skin, which are seen as illnesses sent forth by the lunar god Khonsu.

Graves of nearly 600 cats and dogs in ancient Egypt may be the world’s oldest pet cemetery

A well-preserved burial ground in the researchers consider to be at the very origin of human burial customs has been found in Egypt the skeleton remains of over 600 cats, dogs, monkeys were found carefully laid in individual graves in Berenike, a remote seaport on the western coast of the Red Sea.

Some of the animals were still wearing collars and other adornments, and others showed evidence of illnesses indicating they had been cared for by humans.

But the lack of mummification or sacrifice at the 2,000-year-old site suggests these were companion animals, not used in rituals or venerated as gods.

Berenike was founded in 275 BC by Pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who named it after his mother, Berenice I of Egypt. It was a bustling Roman port, and excavations have uncovered ceramics, spices, fabrics and other goods from as far away as India, as well as luxury items from across the empire.

Berenike was also a way station for ‘war elephants’ from Africa that would be sent out to fight in various battles. Archaeozoologist Marta Osypinska and her archaeologist husband, Piotr, originally discovered the cemetery site in 2011 while excavating a Roman trash dump on the edge of town.

In 2017, they unearthed the remains of about 100 animals, mostly cats, and began to form a picture of what the area was used for. Other experts still believed they may have simply been discarded trash.

It wasn’t uncommon to bury pets in ancient Egypt but usually, they’d be interred with their owners, not placed in a dedicated space.

‘At first, some very experienced archaeologists discouraged me from this research,’ Osypinska told Science. They insisted there was little to learn about Berenike culture from studying pets.

‘I hope the results of our studies prove that it’s worth it,’ she told the magazine.

According to her research, published in the journal World Archaeology, the ‘pet cemetery’ at Berenice functioned for about a hundred years, from the mid-first century to the mid-second century. In all, the team has found 585 animals to date, some of which are not native to Africa.

The vast majority — more than 90 per cent — were cats, though there were also dogs, baboons, and two species of macaques native to the Indian subcontinent.

Of the dogs, most were light-coloured Spitz types, though there were also toy dogs and larger canines more like mastiffs. Many of the cats wore metal collars or necklaces threaded with ostrich-shell beads. Osypinska told Science many of the animals were covered with textiles or pottery, ‘which formed a kind of sarcophagus.’

The animals were not haphazardly discarded, but carefully laid in individual pits. One feline was placed atop the wing of a large bird, the magazine reported.

Consulting with a veterinarian, Osypinska’s team was able to determine several of the animals had illnesses that would have killed them without human caregivers.

The remains of a dog that suffered from bone cancer were found in a mat of palm leaves covered with an amphora, according to Archaeology News Network.

Its belly still contained remains of fish and goat meat, its final meal. Other canines were missing most of their teeth, had gum disease or showed signs of joint degeneration.

‘We have individuals who have very limited mobility,’ Osypinska said. ‘Such animals had to be fed to survive, sometimes with special foods in the case of the almost-toothless animals.’

The kind of devotion required to nurse an old pet reveals the people of Berenice had strong emotional ties with domesticated animals, according to the report.

Archaeologists have uncovered mass animal graves in Egypt before, but almost always the creatures were either sacrificed or venerated, not treated as pets. Dozens of mummified cats were found in 2018 on the edge of the King Userkaf pyramid complex at the ancient necropolis of Saqqara, south of Cairo.

Several years earlier a labyrinth of sacred tunnels was uncovered in the same region, packed with the mummified remains of up to eight million dogs, some of which was just hours old when they were sacrificed.

Other canines were treated as living representatives of the dog-headed god Anubis, living out their lives in the nearby temple before being preserved and laid to rest in the network of tunnels. The people of Berenike treated these animals as loving companions, Osypinska insists, ‘They weren’t doing it for the gods or for any utilitarian benefit.’

CT Scans Suggest Egyptian Pharaoh Was Brutally Executed on the Battlefield

Seqenenre Taa II, the Egyptian pharaoh, may have died on the battlefield, surrounded by attackers carrying daggers, swords, and spears. According to a recent computed tomography (CT) scan of the pharaoh’s damaged mummy, which revealed new facial wounds that ancient embalmers tried to disguise.

A broad cut in the pharaoh’s forehead, wounds across his eyes and cheeks, and a knife wound at the base of the skull that may have penetrated the brain stem were all visible. The attackers, it seems, surrounded the defeated ruler on every side.

“This suggests that Seqenenre was really on the front line with his soldiers, risking his life to liberate Egypt,” study lead author Sahar Saleem, a professor of radiology at Cairo University, said in a statement.

A war over hippos

Seqenenre Taa II (also spelled Seqenenre Tao II) was the ruler of southern Egypt between about 1558 B.C. and 1553 B.C., during the occupation of Egypt by the Hyksos, a people who probably came from the Levant.

The Hyksos controlled northern Egypt and required tribute from the southern part of the kingdom.

According to fragmentary papyrus accounts, Seqenenre Taa II revolted against the occupiers after receiving a complaint from the Hyksos king that the noise of hippos in a sacred pool in Thebes was disturbing his sleep.

The king lived in the capital city of Avaris, 400 miles (644 kilometres) away. On this trumped-up charge, the Hyksos king demanded the sacred pool be destroyed — a grave insult to Seqenenre Taa II. 

This insult may have been the prelude to war. Text on a carved rock slab found in Thebes recounts that Seqenenre Taa II’s son and immediate successor, Kamose, died in battle against the Hyksos. 

No one knew what had happened to the pharaoh, even after his mummy was discovered in 1886. Archaeologists noticed wounds on the skull and speculated that he’d been killed in battle or perhaps murdered in a palace coup. The 19th-century archaeologists who found the mummy reported a foul smell when they unwrapped it, leading them to suspect that the mummy had been hastily embalmed on the battlefield. 

The new study uses X-rays from multiple angles to build a 3D image of the pharaoh’s mummy. The pharaoh’s remains are in poor condition, with bones disarticulated and the head detached from the rest of the body. 

Violent death 

Nevertheless, the wounds on the skull tell the story of brutal death. The pharaoh had a 2.75-inch-long (7  centimeters) cut across his forehead, which would have been delivered from an axe or sword stroke from above. This wound alone could have been fatal. Another potentially fatal slice above the pharaoh’s right eye was 1.25 inches (3.2 cm) long and possibly made by an axe. More cuts on the nose, right eye and right cheek came from the right and from above and may have been delivered with an axe handle or blunt staff, the researchers said. 

Meanwhile, someone in front of the king swung a sword or an axe at the pharaoh’s left cheek, leaving another deep slice. From the left, a weapon — probably a spear — penetrated the base of his skull, leaving a 1.4-inch-long (3.5 cm) wound.  

Early archaeologists had previously reported many of these wounds, but Saleem and her colleague, Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, discovered a new set of skull fractures covered by embalming material. Concentrated on the right side of the skull, the damage seems to have been caused by a dagger and a heavy, blunt object, perhaps an axe handle. 

The mummy’s hands were flexed and clenched, but there were no defensive injuries on his forearms, leading the researchers to suggest that perhaps Seqenenre Taa II’s hands were bound when he died. He may have been captured on the battlefield and executed by multiple attackers, Saleem said in the statement. 

Although researchers have discovered pharaoh mummies with violent wounds before, there had been no evidence of pharaoh battlefield deaths until now, Saleem told Live Science. For example, Ramesses III had his throat cut in a palace coup, she said. Historical accounts tell of Ramesses II and Thutmose III taking part in the battle, but there is no evidence of injuries on their mummies. The mummy of an unidentified nobleman had an arrow embedded in its chest, Saleem said, which may have occurred in battle. 

The fact that embalmers tried to patch up Seqenenre Taa II’s skull wounds suggests that he wasn’t hastily embalmed, the researchers wrote in their new study, in the journal Frontiers in Medicine.

The pharaoh’s desiccated brain was also stuck to the left side of his skull, suggesting that someone laid him on his side after his death, either at the place where he fell or while his body was being transported for embalming. 

Seqenenre Taa II may have lost his life in battle, but his successors eventually won the war. After Kamose died, Seqenenre Taa II’s consort, Ahhotep I, likely acted as regent, continuing the rebellion against the Hyskos. When Seqenenre Taa II and Ahhotep I’s son Ahmose I came of age, he inherited the throne and finally pushed out the foreign occupiers. Ahmose I would unify Egypt and launch the New Kingdom, the period of ancient Egypt’s peak power between the 16th and 11th centuries B.C. 

Ancient beer factory unearthed by archaeologists in Egypt

At one of the most famous excavation sites of ancient Egypt, a top antique official said Saturday, American and Egyptian archaeologists have discovered what may be the oldest known beer factory.

The factory was discovered in Abydos, an ancient burial ground situated in the desert west of the Nile River, about 450 kilometers (280 miles) south of Cairo, Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said.

He said the factory apparently dates back to the region of King Narmer, who is widely known for his unification of ancient Egypt at the beginning of the First Dynastic Period (3150 B.C.- 2613 B.C.).

Archaeologists found eight huge units – each is 20 meters (about 65 feet) long and 2.5 meters (about 8 feet) wide. Each unit includes some 40 pottery basins in two rows, which had been used to heat up a mixture of grains and water to produce beer, Waziri said.

The joint mission is co-chaired by Matthew Adams of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Deborah Vischak, assistant professor of ancient Egyptian art history and archaeology at Princeton University.

Adams said the factory was apparently built in this area to provide royal rituals with beer, given that archaeologists found evidence showing the use of beer in sacrificial rites of ancient Egyptians.

British archaeologists were the first to mention the existence of that factory in the early 1900s, but they couldn’t determine its location, the antiquities ministry said.

With its vast cemeteries and temples from the earliest times of ancient Egypt, Abydos was known for monuments honoring Osiris, ancient Egypt’s god of the underworld and the deity responsible for judging souls in the afterlife.

The necropolis had been used in every period of early Egyptian history, from the prehistoric age to Roman times.

Egypt has announced dozens of ancient discoveries in the past couple of years, including a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus that could “rewrite history” and mummies with golden tongues, in the hope of attracting more tourists.

The tourism industry has been reeling from the political turmoil following the 2011 popular uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak. The sector was also dealt a further blow last year by the coronavirus pandemic.

An amazing discovery in Egypt – The bones of a 3600-year-old giant palm

A team of archaeologists has found that one of the palaces in the ancient city of Avaris, in Egypt, has hundreds of human sacrifices hidden beneath the earth. Archaeologists in the past have excavated the skeletons of 16 human hands that were found in four pits.

Two of the pits, located in front of what is believed to be a throne room, hold one hand each. Two other pits, constructed at a slightly later time in outer space of the palace, contain the 14 remaining hands.

They are all right hands; there are no lefts.

“Most of the hands are quite large and some of them are very large,” Manfred Bietak, project and field director of the excavations, told LiveScience.

The finds, made in the Nile Delta northeast of Cairo, date back about 3,600 years to a time when the Hyksos, a people believed to be originally from northern Canaan, controlled part of Egypt and made their capital at Avaris a location known today as Tell el-Daba. At the time the hands were buried, the palace was being used by one of the Hyksos rulers, King Khayan. 

The hands appear to be the first physical evidence of a practice attested to in ancient Egyptian writing and art, in which a soldier would present the cut-off right hand of an enemy in exchange for gold, Bietak explains in the most recent edition of the periodical Egyptian Archaeology.

“Our evidence is the earliest evidence and the only physical evidence at all,” Bietak said. “Each pit represents a ceremony.”

Cutting off the right hand, specifically, not only would have made counting victims easier, it would have served the symbolic purpose of taking away an enemy’s strength.

“You deprive him of his power eternally,” Bietak explained. It’s not known whose hands they were; they could have been Egyptians or people the Hyksos were fighting in the Levant.  “Gold of valor”

Cutting off the right hand of an enemy was a practice undertaken by both the Hyksos and the Egyptians. 

One account is written on the tomb wall of Ahmose, son of Ibana, an Egyptian fighting in a campaign against the Hyksos. Written about 80 years later than the time the 16 hands were buried, the inscription reads in part: 

“Then I fought hand to hand. I brought away a hand. It was reported to the royal herald.” For his efforts, the writer was given “the gold of valor” (translation by James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume II, 1905). Later, in a campaign against the Nubians, to the south, Ahmose took three hands and was given “gold in double measure,” the inscription suggests.

Scientists are not certain who started this gruesome tradition. No records of the practice have been found in the Hyksos’ likely homeland of northern Canaan, Bietak said, so could have been an Egyptian tradition they picked up, or vice versa, or it could have originated from somewhere else. 

Bietak pointed out that, while this find is the earliest evidence of this practice, the grisly treatment of prisoners in ancient Egypt was nothing new.

The Narmer Palette, an object dating to the time of the unification of ancient Egypt about 5,000 years ago, shows decapitated prisoners and a pharaoh about to smash the head of a kneeling man. 

The archaeological expedition at Tell el-Daba is a joint project of the Austrian Archaeological Institute’s Cairo branch and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.