Saqqara, located 40km south of Cairo, was a vast, 6km-long necropolis for the ancient capital of Memphis during the 1st and 2nd dynasties. It is most famously recognised for its step pyramid, built for the 3rd Dynasty pharaoh Djoser (2635 – 2610 BC) – but houses thousands of ancient burial sites, with many more submerged beneath the unerring depths of the desert. It stands as not only a memoriam to the time in which it was developed, but also as a yardstick against which all future Egyptian funerary ceremony would be placed. The City of the Dead Saqqara was originally…
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Signs O’ The Times Egyptian hieroglyphs – streams of sometimes heavily stylised pictograms and letters, carved into stone or drawn onto papyrus parchment – are instantly recognisable relics of one of the world’s oldest and most famous ancient civilizations. But what on earth do they mean? And what of their place in the development of the Egyptian language, written and spoken, as a whole? Origins and Development Examples of written Egyptian date back more than 3,400 years, making it one of the earliest known languages in human history. The oldest bands of script discovered to date comprise a primitive system…
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I have been browsing of our ever-growing Flickr group focused on Ancient World sites, artefacts and adventurers exploring, and have been thinking about what the ancient world is all about (power tips for browsing Flickr here). It seems unnecessary to drop a definition on what the ancient world is–but we can certainly describe it. My top ten ways for describing Ancient World sites and artefacts: 10. The Ancient World is Old First of all the Ancient World is really old–from a long time ago. It is much, much older than any one now alive could possibly remember. Even generations older…
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The pyramids of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs have long stood proud as some of the world’s greatest architectural achievements. The heralded leaders to whom they were devoted are known throughout the world, yet the stories of the men who built them have remained hidden until recent times. Who were these people, how did they construct these massive mausoleums – and why did they devote their lives to such a breathtaking task? Modern archaeology and ancient testament may hold the key to these questions. Who Were They? Age-old storytelling, myth and the mysticism of the structures themselves, has led many in…
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Few events in the history of archaeology have stirred so much interest or had such an impact as the discovery of the tomb of the boy king, Tutankhamun in 1922. For the first time since serious exploration of the Valley of the Kings began in the early 1800s an intact tomb had been found. The finding unearthed the mummified remains of a king of Egypt interred many thousands of years ago, and revealed to the world the true wonder and artistry of the ancient Egyptians. The treasures uncovered at King Tut’s tomb stunned the world, and even today we stare…
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The burial chamber is the only room of Tutankhamun’s tomb which was decorated. The early and unexpected death of the young king left little time for preparation and, from the modest size and arrangement it is clear that this is a hastily converted commoner’s tomb not intended for a royal burial. Despite the sparsity of mural paintings in King Tut’s tomb, they are an essential part of the funerary process, and should not be overlooked. Funerary Rituals For a Pharaoh, and indeed for Egyptians in general, life was a preparation for death, the Afterlife and immortality. The ceremonies of burial…
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As we have been developing the Heritage Key online areas, we have tried to find a good working definition of the “Ancient World.” On some levels this is easy to do. We can draw a crude line at the Middle Ages and say everything before that is Ancient. So we then might conclude that anything made by man before 565AD, the death of the roman emperor Justinian, could be called Ancient. Some things are more Ancient than others. In the 6th Century AD the Eastern Roman Empire was based out of Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) and the Emperor Justinian ordered…
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The whole world agrees to the fact that ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day‘, yet there’s little consensus on how long it exactly took our ancient romans to construct their home town, let alone when they exactly got their shovels out.A date is easy,all historic sources do agree on April 21st, but which year? 753BCis an often used year, and a recent discovery of fortification walls on the north slope of the Palatinus – Palatine Hill, one of the Seven Hills of Rome – dated to the middle of the 8th century BC confirms this.Anyway, enough with the boring facts.…
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Challenging the University of Virginia’s Ancient Rome in 3D, the UCLA’s Digital Karnak is a three-dimensional virtual-reality model that runs in real time and allows users to navigate 2,000 years of history at the ancient Egyptian religious site Karnak, one of the largest temple complexes ever constructed. Today, the Karnak site — where generations of pharaohs constructed temples, obelisks, sphinxes and other sacred structures beginning in the 20th century B.C. — is a popular tourist destination near modern-day Luxor. Developed by UCLA’s Experiential Technologies Center, the Digital Karnak model and a host of additional digital resources are now available for…
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We make a lot of use out of Flickr. It is one of the best community sites and photo sharing servces online. You can make it work even better with a little effort. We use Flickr to do a couple of main things: post and share photos find photos to link to them First thing is to use Firefox (huh? download it here.) to browse Flickr and get the Greasemonkey add-on. Greasemonkey (GM) allows you to add GM scripts that will automate tasks and rework your view of web pages. Yeah, it is cool enuough really. In fact there are…