A school in Edinburgh, Scotland, has developed an innovative alternative to the rigmarole of loading kids onto a bus for a visit to the museum bringing the museum to the kids. Developed with 10,000 from the Big Lottery Fund, the Living Links Museum at South Queensferrys Echline Primary School will represent the only in-school museum of its kind in Scotland, and feature displays relating to the Vikings and the ancient Egyptians and Africans. The museum will be housed in an old library. Exhibits will come from an extensive collection built up by the school over the past few years, via…
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It seems that Michael Jackson wasnt the only person to put himself through extensive cosmetic surgery in order to make himself look like a bust of an ancient Egyptian. Nileen Namita, a 49-year-old artist from Brighton, has undergone no less than 51 cosmetic operations, spending over 200,000 pounds in the process, in order to sculpt herself into the living image of Queen Nefertiti. Namita says, in her interview with the Daily Mail: Throughout my childhood and teen years I had constant vivid dreams of this ancient queen. They were visions of incredible intensity – I could see where she lived,…
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Those of you who just can’t get enough of the Ancient Egyptians and their obsessive-compulsive burial rituals are in for a treat at the Brooklyn Museum when it opens its exhbition, Body Parts: Ancient Egyptian Fragments and Amulets, this November. The Museum announced:”Body Parts features thirty-five objects that represent individual body parts in ancient Egyptian art from the Brooklyn Museums collection, many of which will be displayed for the first time. While traditional exhibitions of ancient art focus on reconstructing damaged works, this exhibition uses fragmentary objects to illuminate the very realistic depiction of individual body parts in canonical Egyptian…
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An alien necklace in King Tut‘s tomb? Too right, and it’s no myth or quackery. A pectoral found during Howard Carter‘s 1922 expedition to the boy-king’s funerary masterpiece is thought to contain the remnants of a meteor impact in the desert, thousands of years before the first stones were laid in Saqqara. The amazing story began 77 years after Carter’s discovery, when Italian geologist noticed something odd about a yellow-green scarab in the pectoral’s centre. Subsequent tests proved the lump of glass was older than any Egyptian civilization – a lot older, in fact. After much research, experts traced the…
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Lost for moves? Tired of busting out the same old body popping/moonwalk/drunk-uncle-at-a-wedding? You could take your dancing lines from Jacko, Wade Robson or even Michael Flatley (if you don’t mind being alone for the rest of your life). But how about Tutankhamun? The boy-king may be making waves in stateside museums right now, but he’s been influencing the best underground dancers on both sides of the Atlantic for over twenty years with the ‘Tut’ – and I don’t mean Steve Martin’s Saturday Night Live performance. Amateurs be warned: it may take a bit more practice than karaoke night down the…
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Dr Zahi Hawass and a huge team of experts have just finished laser scanning the Great Sphinx, and now the Pyramids of Giza are being surveyed using the latest laser technology. Dr Hawass, who reports on the project in his blog, has employed the services of the National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences at the Mubarak Institute for the project, which saw Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara subjected to the same techniques in June by a Japanese group. The team hope to get the most accurate representation of the wonders to date, as Egypt attempts to model the…
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In his August 7th, 2009, interview with Heritage Key, Zahi Hawass revealed that the Supreme Council of Antiquities was gathering evidence regarding the illegal appropriation of the bust of Nefertiti by the Altes Museum in Berlin. I will reveal [the evidence] in October when I write the letter to the Berlin Museum for the return of the piece, because it left Egypt illegally, Dr. Hawass stated. In a new article published in Al-Ahram Weekly (Queen of Egypts heart), Dr. Hawass reveals that his wish is for the bust to be placed in the Museum of National Heritage at Giza in…
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From the shimmering death mask of King Tut to the swinging penile replacements of 50 Cent, Gold and silver have been as staple pursuits of humanity as food, drugs and celebrity gossip. But while the dripping opulence of the ancient world may not seem a million miles away from the crass overindulgence of our own ‘enlightened’ age, you might be surprised to find that the two metals have almost exactly the same value now as they did then. According to economist Jeff Clark, that is. When faced with the notion gold was a dead investment, Clark looked at historical valuations…
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Tourism is a massive industry in Egypt, thanks to the countrys venerable past it accounts for 11% of GDP, and creates jobs for around 12% of the total national workforce. Chief among Egypts antiquarian attractions are the tombs of the pharaohs, the vast network of lavishly decorative burial chambers for its ancient rulers spread across the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, such as KV62 the final resting place of Tutankhamun. So why, then, is the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities calling for them to be closed? The Council have been faced with an almighty catch-22. The tombs are extremely…
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Today, Zahi Hawass and Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities are celebrating the completion of five major projects in the city of Luxor, which have totalled of 127 million Egyptian Pounds (13.9 million). They include work to restore and develop the famous ancient sites of Luxor Temple and Deir el-BahriTemple of Queen Hatshepsut, as well as the more recent attractions of Abul Hagag El-Loxori Mosque and Howard Carter‘s rest house. The 1286-built Abul Hagag Mosque had been in need of restoration, as its walls and foundations were beginning to crack and take water under the strains of time. Now, after 14…