On the banks of the Nile, some 200km north-east from Khartoum is the ancient city of Meroe – the southern capital of the Kushite empire, which spanned across Sudan and part of Ethiopia. Nearby are a group of villages called Bajrawia which is where today’s Flickr photograph was taken byVit Hassan, who captured this stunning sandstorm engulfing the area. The city of Meroe is flanked by over 200 Nubian pyramids, many of which lie in ruins as is evident in Vit Hassan’s fantastic capture of the site. Although once a flourishing city of great importance in its time, much about…
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Egypt’s oldest church will finally reopen its doors this December, after Antiquities chief Zahi Hawass announced that a project to save it from harmful air is coming to an end. The 3rd century AD Hanging Church has been decaying sharply over the past few hundred years, with much of its ornate imagery and wooden iconography in danger of disappearing forever. The plan first involved installing security and fire alarms, and redecorating much of the famous building’s exterior. An Italian team has since been drafted in to relieve the church from the pressures of hot air with precise cooling equipment. The…
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First they perfected chocolate, then the penknife. Now the Swiss are seeking to unlock the mysteries of mummification. According to a recent article in The Journal of Turkish Weekly (“Swiss Research Unlocks Mummy Secrets”), A leading Swiss anatomy expert has managed to mummify a body part using the same salt drying process the ancient Egyptians employed. Frank Rhli, head of the Zurich University Institute of Anatomy, is attempting to mummify a human leg. Having participated in the CT scan analysis of Tutankhamun and the tzi iceman, Rhli is no stranger to mummies. So far the Swiss team has met with…
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Browsing through Flickr sometimes feels like a treasure hunt. I’ll never be disappointed – great photographs get uploaded to it daily – but once in a while you find that really Astonishing Photograph, especially since more and organisations started making their archives available to the public through the Commons and private Flickr streams. Today was one of those ‘Wow!’ days, as I discovered the Flickr stream of the Egypt Exploration Society – as the EEShas been working in Egypt since 1882 – filled with marvelous photographs from ‘ancient times’. My 5 favourites from the ‘the early days of Egyptology’: Ahnas…
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Anyone looking for a holiday that gets much closer to the cultural core of a historic destination than the average tourist experience would do well to check out the Global Explorer Series a partnership between Fairmont Hotels & Resorts and the National Geographic Society. Theyre inviting intrepid travellers to do better than peer at their attractions of choice from behind a cordon while leafing though a guidebook, but better still engage with them in top destinations from Kenya to Cairo, Monaco and St Andrews up-close and in context together with a leading expert. The latest package offered is the Wonder…
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Recently the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities has shared it’s worries about the future of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings with the world. Now they share more details on the planned solutions: ventilation systems, special lighting and… well, we expected a replica of KV62, but we’re getting an entire new Valley of the Kings on the cliff side of the real one. Daily thousands of tourists visit the tombs of King Tut, Seti I, Ramses, Horemeb (recently re-opened) and Queen Nefertari. All well, were it not that the quantity of humidity and fungus generated through breath and…
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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…