Description Zahi Hawass takes you inside the new tombs at Saqqara, the Valley of the Kings, and the temple of Taposiris Magna. See the tombs of Nefret-swt and Qar, and come along on the search for KV64 and the tomb of Cleopatra and Mark Antony! Related Heritage Experts Zahi Hawass Credits Images by Sandro Vannini & Niccolò Piazza Transcription If someone ask me a question now and say: «What is the most recent discovery that you made?» I can say: «I’m inside a tomb located west of the step pyramid, the oldest pyramid in Egypt». This tomb is under the…
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Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo Dr Salima Ikram – one of the world’s leading authorities on Egyptian religion – recently chatted to Heritage Key on the subject of the cult of animal worship in ancient Egypt. In another exclusive new video interview, she dons her white coat and takes us to the lab, for a fascinating insight into the practice of animal mummification. Animals were deeply sacred in ancient Egypt, particularly from the 26th dynasty – around 700 BC – until the end of Egyptian civilization and the advent of Christianity by 400 AD. They were…
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The cemetery at Saqqara is one of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt. Over six kilometres long, it boasts thousands of underground burial sites, as well as the six-step Djoser pyramid – Egypt’s oldest pyramid. The ruins at Saqqara have long attracted the interest of explorers, grave-robbers and local people. Travellers first reported evidence of antiquities at Saqqara in the 16th century. The Djoser Pyramid and the smaller pyramids around it were hard to miss – but the size of the necropolis only became apparent with the advent of excavations in the 19th century. It was not until Napoleon…
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Alexandre Piankoff was a world-renowned anthropologist and Egyptologist, who made significant progress in the field of translating religious texts. Born in 1897 in St Petersburg, Russia, Piankoff first got a taste for history when visiting the majestic State Hermitage Museum in his home city. Enthralled by the Egyptology section in particular, Piankoff studied Foreign Languages and Egyptian Philology at university, before his academic life was cut short by the First World War. Thereafter Piankoff became a fervent academic, studying at Berlin, then the Sarbonne in 1924, then the University of Paris where he obtained a Phd. The Second World War…
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Recent archaeological work at the site of Tell Tayinat in southeast Turkey, near the Syrian border, indicates that the ancient city was the centre of a Dark Age kingdom, ruled by people from the Aegean area. In an in-depth interview Professor Timothy Harrison, of the University of Toronto, told Heritage Key about this startling theory and the evidence that supports it. Around 1200 BC life changed suddenly throughout the Mediterranean world. The Mycenaean civilization in Greece and Crete, the Egyptian New Kingdom and the Hittite Empire, all collapsed at roughly the same time. It’s not until 900 BC that archaeologists…
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The Edwin Smith Papyrus was this year touted as “the birth of analytical thinking in Medicine and Otolaryngology,” in the medical journal The Laryngoscope. Along with a collection of other fascinating papyri, the script gives an incredible insight into the knowledge, skills, and procedures of ancient Egyptian medicine, and offers some tips on how to treat trauma issues, such as a man with a massive gouge in his head. Much of what we know about Egyptian medicine comes from roughly a dozen medical scrolls that have survived. The oldest one is the Kahun Scroll, dating to 1820 BC, which focuses in Gynaecology. The two…
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Finished in 2560 BC, the Great Pyramid of Giza took 20 years to build. 3,000 years on, it doesn’t look like major Egyptian construction projects have hurried up any. It was recently announced that the opening date for the Grand Egyptian Museum – the massive centerpiece attraction of the epic new vision for the Giza plateau, two and a half kilometres from the pyramids – has been pushed back to 2013, after the latest in a long-running series of delays for the building. The project was officially commenced in 1992, which means that even if the GEM does open on…
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Key Dates 1186 BC The papyrus dates from the XX Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, which lasted from 1186-1069 BC. It was discovered in the early 19th century. Key People It was probably created by a painter from Deir El-Medina village. When French scholar (and translator of the Rosetta Stone) Jean-François Champollion viewed the papyrus in Torino in 1824, he described it in his notes as: “an image of monstrous obscenity that gave me a really strange impression about Egyptian wisdom and composure.” Key People: Jean-François Champollion The Turin Erotic Papyrus is a famous (or rather, infamous) 12th/11th century BC Egyptian…
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Think you know all there is to know about these goliaths of the ancient world? Heritage Key picks out ten key facts about pyramids. 1. There are actually 118 pyramids in Egypt. Sure, you might have heard of Khufu‘s, or Khafre’s – or even Djoser’s incredible Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first known pyramid ever built. But what about the ones which don’t grab the headlines: Amenemhat III‘s Black Pyramid of Dashur looks more like Ayer’s Rock than an Egyptian tomb, and Sahure’s fine mausoleum in Abusir once stood 47m high. 2. The 118th pyramid was unearthed by Egypt’s most…
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Question – who can completely fill up a cavernous 1,500 seat domed hall on a Saturday night in Toronto? Answer – Dr. Zahi Hawass “I don’t get to introduce rock stars,” said Art Gallery of Ontario CEO Matthew Teitelbaum. Well tonight he did. Forget the critical New Yorker article, the mixed reviews of the new Tut exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, or the fact that local Toronto media largely stayed away from this lecture. The world’s most well-known Egyptologist completely filled Convocation Hall, with people who had all paid a small admission fee (no more than $18) to…