About a week backHeritage Keypublished a story about the discovery of a massive, one ton, statue of Taharqa that was found deep in Sudan. Taharqa was a pharaoh of the 25th dynasty of Egypt and came to power ca. 690 BC. The pharaohs of this dynasty were from Nubia a territory located in modern day Sudan and southern Egypt. When Taharqa came to power, he controlled an empire stretching fromSudan to theLevant. The Nubian pharaohs tried to incorporate Egyptian culture into their own. They built pyramids inSudan even though pyramid building in Egypt hadnt been practiced in nearly 800 years.…
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CRE XI’s Religion Day – if you’ve missed day 1 of the Egyptology conference, read up here – started off with Susanne Tpfer from Leipzig. In this very very interesting session, we all heard about how some papyri describing embalming rituals can have direct connections to religion myths as the body and the afterlife were treated with the best care. Many publications have been published on Papyrus Boulaq 3 in Cairo, from 1871 to 2009. The position of body parts, the instructions on the application of anointments and other products onto the body of the deceased, how the bandages should…
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The media preview for Fakes and Forgeries: Yesterday and Today was held today. It will be opening at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto Canada, this Saturday. It’s a much smaller exhibition than the King Tut and Dead Sea Scrolls shows that have hit Toronto recently, and will potentially be dwarved by the very large China show that may or may not include the Terracotta Warriors this June. But Fakes and Forgeries offers some strong lessons about the world of fakes and the experts who try to out them. How the ancient section of the exhibit works is that there…
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The 21st century has seen incredible advances in our knowledge and use of forensic sciences – to investigate crimes and to find out about people from ancient times. How can we apply this information to the people of ancient Egypt? Find out – and test your own skills in a hands-on practical session – at ‘Forensic Aspects of Ancient Egypt‘ presented by Joyce Filer. The study day – being repeated due to popular demand – will take place on Saturday the 20th of February and will add to your knowledge about the difference between male and female mummies (not as…
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The exhibition “The Lost World of Old Europe,” which opened in Nov. 2009 in New York, has raised some very interesting questions about prehistoric societies and how they changed. David Anthony, guest curator of the exhibition and a leading anthropologist specializing in prehistoric Europe, Eurasia, and North America, raised a particularly powerful issue – why did the collapse of a highly sophisticated, matriarchal culture in what is now Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova, lead to a shift of power to men? Women, after all, are naturally capable of running households, and should surely be running countries too. Think of our powerful,…
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Today was the first day of the CRE XI conference, but last night we had a lecture by Prof. Demarée of Leiden University. Demarée, who studied Egyptology in Leiden, Copenhagen and Oxford and has a PhD on “Ancestor Worship in Ancient Egypt”, spoke about a group of papyri fragments scattered in different museums that, together with some ostraca and graffiti, provide researchers more information on the workers’ community at Deir Al-Medina, especially from the Ramesside Period and the second half of the New Kingdom. “Now, thanks to a largely unpublished dossier of texts, we are gradually beginning to understand what happened…
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With the recent developments in the excavation of Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum, and the discovery of more terracotta warriors, not to mention the ground-breaking discoveries of the tomb of Cao Cao, and the 100,000-year-old fossil, it’s an exciting time for archaeologists in China. The past decade has certainly been a good one for Chinese archaeology. So good in fact, that one might say it’s been a golden age. To Zhao Zhijun, a Chinese archaeologist working in Beijing, this is no overstatement. “We know the best archaeological methods, our research is open now, we have plenty of funding, and we have…
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Another exciting CRE conference is about to begin today, as I write this, this time and for the first time ever in Leiden, The Netherlands. Current Research in Egyptology (CRE) has always happened in The UK but, last time, at Liverpool, no one from UK universities wanted it, so our beloved colleagues from Leiden applied and won! CRE is the best way to show your work, explain your research, collect contacts from all over the world and get access to books that don’t exist in your country either by buying them at sale prices or by browsing the nicest libraries…
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A dying ancient culture, strange visitors from a far away land and a changing climate that helped bring them together. Whether you believe Dr. Patricia Sutherlands research or not, you have to acknowledge one thing she tells an incredible story! Its a tale of how two dynamic, but ultimately doomed, cultures co-existed together the Greenland Norse and the Dorset of the Canadian Arctic. Dr. Sutherland is a curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa Canada. She has been conducting Arctic archaeology research for more than 30 years. The Norse and the Dorset The Norse people hardly need an…
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After having been held in the UK for the past 10 years, the Current Reseach in Egyptology conference moves to the continent for the first time in 2010. CREXIwill take place January 5th to 8th at the Leiden University in The Netherlands. Originally set up by students at the University of Oxford in 2000, the main aim of the conference is still to provide graduate and post-graduate students the opportunity to present their research. The conference covers the entire span of the Palaeolithic to the Graeco-Roman and Coptic Periods in Egypt and the Sudan, which leads to a broad range…