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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

‘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.

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.

Skeletal remains of half-cat / half-human now on display in Cairo museum

The remains of what seems to be a half-human / half-cat have been taken from the secret chamber of the great pyramid, recently uncovered, and are now exhibited in the National Museum in Cairo.

Researchers from all around the world have come to study the unusual skeleton in Egypt; many do not believe it can be genuine.

“It’s probably one of their inventions to scare away the thieves that the ancient Egyptians have been achieved as taxidermists.” Dr. Jason Hendeley from Oxford University told us.

Some of the scientists agree with Dr, Hendley while others are less skeptical.

“I find it quite perplexing that the spinal column of the creature is actually attached to the skull.”  Dr.Winston Gorjone explained. “If this was the creation of some ancient taxidermist, the attachment of the skull to the spinal column would have been obvious.  

There would be wire holding the skull to the spinal column. In this case, there is not.  

The bone is fused together naturally which would indicate that this skeleton may indeed be the remains of some long-forgotten species of animal.”

“What we must not forget is that ancient Egyptian lore is filled with half-human/half-animal beings.” Dr. Gorjone said. “The question that now lies before us is whether or not they were imaginary or if they really existed.

The National Reporter – What can you tell us about the mysterious floating orb that was found in the hidden chamber?

“I am not at liberty to discuss it.” Dr. Gorjone said. “For now the golden sphere is considered a state secret by the Egyptian government and we are not allowed to discuss it with anyone.”

The National Reporter – How soon do you think the secret of the floating sphere will be uncovered and when it is, will this information be released to the public?

“Right now the sphere is still inside the great pyramid. From what I have been told it can not be moved. 

Technicians have tried using hydraulic pistons to force it free from its present position, but the force field it is generating is too powerful.  What it is and how it has managed to stay afloat for thousands of years is still a mystery.”

Archaeologist Discover Paintings of Goddess in 3,000-year-old mummy’s coffin

In the coffin of an Egyptian mummy, paintings were found after she was taken out for the first time in over a hundred years.

In the campaign to preserve Ta-Kr-Hb – pronounced “takerheb” – a priestess or princess from Thèbes, a Scottish conservative made this discovery.

Despite having been robbed by serious robbers throughout history, the mummy, almost 3000 years old, was in a fragile state.

The research was done before her remains are exhibited at Perth’s new City Hall Museum, Scotland to ensure that her condition didn’t further deteriorate.   The conservatives were shocked that when Ta-Kr-Hb was removed, painted figures from the Egyptian goddess were found on the inner and outer bases of the trough.

Both figures are representations of the Egyptian goddess Amentet or Imentet, known as the ‘She of the West’ or sometimes ‘Lady of the West’.

‘It was a great surprise to see these paintings appear,’ Dr. Mark Hall, collections officer at Perth Museum and Art Gallery, told the PA news agency. 

‘We had never had a reason to lift the whole thing so high that we could see the underneath of the trough and had never lifted the mummy out before and didn’t expect to see anything there.

‘So to get painting on both surfaces is a real bonus and gives us something extra special to share with visitors.’ 

Further research will be carried out on the paintings to find out more about the history of the mummy, believed to date from somewhere between 760 and 525 BC. The painting on the interior base of the coffin trough was previously hidden by Ta-Kr-Hb and is the best preserved of the two.

It shows Amentet in profile, looking right and wearing her typical red dress. Her arms are slightly outstretched and she is standing on a platform, indicating the depiction is of a holy statue or processional figure.

Usually, the platform is supported by a pole or column and one of these can be seen on the underside of the coffin trough. The mummy was donated to Perth Museum by the Alloa Society of Natural Science and Archaeology in 1936. 

It was presented to the society by Mr. William Bailey, who bought it from the curator of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In 2013, Ta-Kr-Hb was transferred temporarily for a ‘check-up’ at Manchester Royal Children’s Hospital, which included a CT scan and X-rays of her coffin.

Radiographic examinations revealed that her skeleton had suffered extensive damage to the chest and pelvis, sometime after the body had been mummified, according to SCBP Perth.

While the skull remains intact, radiography revealed that as part of the mummification process the brain mass was removed through the sinuses. 

But the full removal of Ta-Kr-Hb’s remains this year allow today’s researchers to closely observe the paintings beneath.  Perth Museum and Art Gallery are now hoping to save ‘Ta-Kr-Hb’ – as written in hieroglyphics on the lid of her coffin – for future generations.  

‘The key thing we wanted to achieve was to stabilize the body so it didn’t deteriorate any more so it has been rewrapped and then we wanted to stabilize the trough and upper part of the coffin which we’ve done,’ said Dr. Hall.  

‘Doing this means everybody gets to find out a lot more about her.

‘One of the key things is just physically doing the work so we have a better idea of the episodes Ta-Kr-Hb went through in terms of grave robbers and later collectors in the Victorian times so we can explore these matters more fully and we can share that with the public.’

Conservators Helena Jaeschke and Richard Jaeschke have been working closely with Culture Perth and Kinross on the project, which started work in late January.  Culture Perth and Kinross are campaigning to raise money for the conservation of Ta-Kr-Hb as she prepares to go on display at the Perth City Hall Museum, which is set to open in 2022.  

The Tarkhan Dress Confirmed to Be the World’s Oldest Dress

This tattered V-neck linen shirt, currently on display in the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, is the world’s oldest woven garment.

A recent radiocarbon testing conducted by the University of Oxford has established with 95% accuracy that the dress was made between 3482-3102 BC.

While garments of similar age have survived to the present day, but those were simply wrapped or draped around the body.

The Tarkhan dress, on the other hand, is a tailored piece with long sleeves, V-neck and narrow pleats, that looks surprisingly modern.

The Tarkhan dress was excavated by Egyptologist Flinders Petrie in 1913 from a First Dynasty tomb at Tarkhan, an Egyptian cemetery located 50 km south of Cairo.

Petrie had found a quantity of linen cloth under the sand alongside other artifacts. Instead of discarding away the linen as worthless, as most archaeologists at that time did, Petrie decided to preserve everything he found as evidence that would someday help throw light on the daily life of the ancient Egyptians.

The bundle of filthy rags Petrie recovered was stored away and forgotten for sixty-five years. It was not until 1977 when conservation experts at the Petrie Museum were sorting through the bundle did they stumble across the garment.

As textile conservator Sheila Landi carefully removed the caked mud from the dress, she was excited to see creases in the sleeves at the elbow and under the arms indicating that the dress had been worn in life.

The garment was also found inside-out, as it would be if one were to pull it out over the head.

The Tarkhan dress is made from three pieces of sturdy hand-woven linen with a natural pale grey stripe, which complements the neatly knife-pleated sleeves and bodice.

The lower part of the dress is missing so it’s difficult to say how the long the dress originally was or whether it was for a man or a woman, but its dimensions indicates that it fitted a young teenager or a slim woman.

At the time of its rediscovery in the late seventies, radiocarbon dating was not carried out as it would have required the destruction of a large piece of the dress fabric.

Instead of dating the fabric itself, the associated artifacts from the Tarkhan site was dated. Results indicated that the dress belonged to the First Dynasty which began in 3100 BC, making it the world’s earliest example of a woven garment.

Advancement in radiocarbon dating has now allowed researchers to date the textile directly by taking a tiny 2.24mg sample of the dress.

The new results not only confirm the dress’s antiquity but also suggest that it may be older than previously thought, pre-dating the First Dynasty.

The Lost City Of Heracleion Discovered Deep Underwater After 1,200 Years

For centuries, the ‘ lost city of Atlantis has eluded explorers and is almost certainly the stuff of myth. Staggeringly, though, an ancient city that is Atlantis in all but name has emerged from under the sea near Alexandria — and now the lost world of Heracleion is giving up its treasures.

Like in the classical tale, Heracleion was once a wealthy, prosperous place, around 1500 years before it was swallowed up by the sea. It was grand enough to be mentioned by the Greek writer Herodotus, the 5th-century BC historian.

He told the fabulous story of Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world — she of the face that launched a thousand ships — travelling to Heracleion, then a port of ‘great wealth’, with her glamorous Trojan lover, Paris.

But no physical evidence of such a grand settlement appeared until 2001 when a group led by French marine archaeologist Franck Goddio stumbled upon some relics that led them to one of the greatest finds of the 21st century.

Goddio was in search of Napoleon’s warships from the 1798 Battle of the Nile, when he was defeated by Nelson in these very waters, but came upon this much more significant discovery. Goddio’s team has since been joined by the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology and the Department of Antiquities of Egypt to produce a wealth of dazzling finds.

The archaeologists first faced the mammoth task of reassembling massive stone fragments on the seabed before they could haul them to the surface. Twelve years on, their fabulous finds have been exposed to public view for the first time after more than a millennium spent beneath the silt and water of Aboukir Bay, 20 miles north-east of Alexandria.

Among the discoveries are colossal statues of the Egyptian goddess Isis, the god Hapi, and an unidentified Egyptian pharaoh — all preserved in immaculate condition by their muddy burial shroud. Along with these 16ft statues, there are hundreds of smaller statues of Egyptian gods — among them the figures that guarded the temple where Cleopatra was inaugurated as Queen of the Nile.

It seems the Amun-Gereb temple at Heracleion was the Egyptian equivalent of Westminster Abbey, where our own Queen was crowned 60 years ago. Dozens of sarcophagi have been found, containing the bodies of mummified animals sacrificed to Amun-Gereb, the supreme god of the Egyptians. Many amulets, or religious charms, have been unearthed, too, showing gods such as Isis, Osiris and Horus.

These were made not just for the Egyptians but for visiting traders, who incorporated them into their own religions and also, one imagines, kept them as trinkets to remind them of their far-flung journeys. The importance of Heracleion has been further proved by the discovery of 64 ships — the largest number of ancient vessels ever found in one place — and a mind-boggling 700 anchors.

Other finds illustrate how crucial Heracleion was to the economy of the ancient world. Gold coins and lead, bronze and stone weights from Athens (used to measure the value of goods and to calculate the tax owed) show that Heracleion was a lucrative Mediterranean trading post.

In the ancient world, the Mediterranean Sea was their equivalent of a superfast motorway. All their greatest cities, including Constantinople, Rome and Athens, were either on the coast or on rivers with easy access to it.

And now Heracleion can be added to their number as Egypt’s most important port during the time of the later pharaohs. It was, if you like, a major motorway junction — the spot where the Nile, Egypt’s lifeline, met the Med. Archaeologists have determined that as well as having a naturally navigable channel next to its ancient harbour, a further artificial channel appears to have been dug to expedite trade.

The Heracleion finds will add tremendous depth to our understanding of the ancient world — not least because, among the discoveries, there are perfectly preserved steles (inscribed pillars) decorated with hieroglyphics. Translated, they will reveal much about the religious and political life in this corner of ancient Egypt.

It was a similar inscription on the Rosetta Stone — discovered in the Nile Delta town of Rosetta in 1799 by a French soldier, and now in the British Museum — that cracked the code of hieroglyphics in the first place.

And like the Rosetta Stone, those steles found beneath the waters of Aboukir Bay are inscribed in Greek and Egyptian, too. Who knows how many more archaeological gems will be uncovered at Heracleion?

The very name of the city is taken from that most famous of Greek heroes, Heracles — aka Hercules — whose 12 labours, from killing the  Hydra to capturing Cerberus, the multi-headed hellhound that guarded the gates of the Underworld, captivated the ancient world.

Heraklion, Crete’s capital and largest city, is also named after Heracles, as was Herculaneum, the ancient Roman town that was buried under ash when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.

It appears that Heracleion faded in importance in the later classical period, eclipsed by its neighbouring city of Alexandria, which became the capital of Egypt in 312BC.

Still, Heracleion lingered on, later under Roman control, until it slipped into its watery grave some time in the 6th or 7th century AD. What a thrilling discovery we have on our hands now that the sea has, 1,500 years later, giving up one of its greatest secrets.