Akhenaten’s feminine figure explained…again
Akhenaten may have suffered from two genetic disorders that affect body shape, according to a recent theory offered by Irwin Braverman, a professor of dermatology and an expert on visual diagnosis at the Yale University School of Medicine,
The pharaoh, who ruled from 1353 to 1336 B.C., is shown in paintings and statues as having prominent breasts and buttocks—indications, Braverman says, of a hormone disorder. An overproduction of the enzyme aromatase, which is instrumental in the body’s production of the hormone estrogen, is the likely culprit. In males, the disorder results in the development of feminine traits by puberty. Depictions that show Akhenaton’s prepubescent daughters with breasts support the genetic hormone-disorder theory.
Another genetic disease, craniosynostosis, which can result in the joints in the skull fusing too early, could have caused the pharaoh’s elongated head and neck.
Braverman hopes that DNA analysis of mummies of the pharaoh’s descendants may one day confirm his theory.
Lecture: From Babylon to Amarna
The 14th century BC was a period of vibrant cultural relations throughout the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean. Babylonian, which was the international language of the age, was also the language of the Amarna letters of Pharaoh Akhenaten. These letters have been the most famous witness of this dynamic time since their discovery in the late 1880s. Important new discoveries in Middle Eastern archaeology now allow us to bring this fascinating international age into sharper focus.
Tickets: £40 (concessions £20).
Host: The Egypt Exploration Society
Date: Saturday, February 7, 2009
Time: 9:00am - 5:00pm
Location: Birkbeck College, University of London
Street: Malet Street
City/Town: London, United Kingdom
Contact InfoPhone: 02076316627
Email: contact@ees.ac.uk
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The new Nebamun Gallery at the British Museum
Richard Parkinson is a curator in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, at the British Museum. Later this month he’ll be opening a major new permanent gallery, one that will display the famous wall paintings from the tomb-chapel of Nebamun in a splendid new environment. Conserving and researching the paintings, and deciding on their display, has been the work of more than a decade
The project really started in 1999 and has dominated my job ever since: watching the seven-year work by museum conservators, then worrying over the design of the gallery, the label texts, the accompanying publications, and even a computer reconstruction of the tomb-chapel. I’m particularly pleased about the nature of the sponsorship of the gallery: the original tomb-chapel commemorated the dead, and our donor is commemorating his own father – it’s named the Michael Cohen Gallery. That feels very right, very Egyptian.
What the design tries to do is restore the tomb-chapel into an Egyptian landscape, so visitors will feel that this is where they are. The floor, cases and flagstone ceiling are French limestone, chosen to match the colour of the Theban hills; the walls are sky blue, as if under an Egyptian sun.
We’re also restoring, as much as possible, the original setting for the paintings. They were removed from the chapel’s walls in the 1820s and have since been displayed as separate fragments as if they were individual European works of art. Now they are joined back together, and can be seen as they were meant to be seen, as a whole. At the centre of the long stretch of painted scenes, as in the original tomb-chapel, there is a funerary niche, with offerings of real fruit and bread from 1350BC – complete with the baker’s fingerprints.
The gallery is larger and more open than the original space. There will be six million visitors a year in this room; it would have been impossible to exactly recreate the tiny chapel. But the light and sense that this is a colourful, lively space are true to the original intent – this place was not at all about death: it was somewhere people went to celebrate – where Nebamun’s son would have visited regularly, until time took its course and Nebamun was forgotten.
Nebamun paintings: Quotes by Egyptologist Richard Parkinson
“These are the greatest paintings we have from ancient Egypt. There is nothing to touch them in any museum in the world. Yet they were created for an official too lowly to have been known by the pharaoh. It is quite extraordinary.”
The “Michelangelo of the Nile” who created these great tomb panels was almost certainly working on another project in the neighbourhood of Nebamun’s tomb at the time. This building or burial complex would have been constructed, and decorated, on a far grander style for a far more important figure. Nebamun merely slipped the artist and his team some extra cash and they stole off to paint his own panels. In short, the secret of his tomb and its great painting lies with one word: backhanders. “Life then was not that different from today,” says Parkinson.
“I think Nebamun had all his paintings done for his tomb-chapel walls in three months. Yet the draughtsmanship was quite wonderful. The thing is that although the artist and his team may have done them in a few weeks, I have now spent a quarter of my life studying their handiwork.”
“The straw crates in which geese are sold at market - you see these on just about every street corner in Cairo. And the women’s jet-black hair and skin colour are just the same as we see in Egypt today.”
Nevertheless, the paintings repay detailed inspection. On several of them, you can see where d’Athanasi’s grave robbers had started to crowbar a panel from a wall only to find it cracking, ready to split. They would then move on to splinter open the panel at a new spot. “Only 20 per cent of the panels survived these attacks,” adds Parkinson. “Only sections that would appeal to British audiences were taken: the ones with naked dancing girls and scenes from gardens. Perfect for our taste, in short.”
Excerpted from an article by Robin McKie for guardian.co.uk
Egypt announces measures to bolster tourism
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Egypt will exempt hotels from paying contributions to the country’s tourism promotion authority and will cut fees paid by charter flights to help its tourism industry cope with the global financial crisis.
The ministry of tourism would also change its broadcast advertisement campaigns to focus on promoting Egypt as an affordable holiday destination.
The ministry of aviation has agreed to reduce landing and take-off fees, as well as ground handling fees for charter flights, and waive them entirely for charter flights that make 11 trips to designated destinations in the span of three months.
Tourism represents 6.6 percent of Egypt’s gross domestic product and is the Arab country’s main hard currency earner. It has started to feel the pinch of the global financial crisis, with hotel bookings down 30 percent in January 2009 compared to the same month in 2008.
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Luxor development plan: use the past to build its future
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Out with the new and in with the old: this is Luxor in a nutshell. With plans to turn the city into one of the world’s largest open air museum, the Egyptian government has busily set about demolishing eyesores such as the New Winter Palace and obstructions such as the hardscrabble village of Gourna. Meanwhile, they are preserving everything that is fine and ancient– all so that tourists can commingle with a carefully curated version of Luxor’s past.
In July 2004 Samir Farag was appointed governor of Luxor by President Hosni Mubarak with a mission to renovate Luxor’s antique sites and redevelop the city as a world-class tourist destination. The task entailed removing all the signs of human habitation that had, over the years, built up on and around the city’s historic sites.
Farag’s first task was to modernize the city’s infrastructure: electricity, sewage, water, phone lines and roads. He is opening up the Avenue of the Sphinxes, a three-kilometer pathway, once lined with thousands of Sphinxes, that links the Karnak and Luxor temples, which was used each year as a processional route during the festival of Opet to celebrate the seasonal flooding of the Nile. Go there now and you see a vast open area that permits, for the first time in hundreds of years, a view of the Nile and the temple of Hatshepsut high up on the Theban Hills.
There are now highways linking Luxor to the Red Sea resorts of Hurghada and Marsa Alam, so that people on holiday there can make day trips to the city. Six thousand tourists make that journey every day now, all of them bringing money to spend in Luxor. The city has an airport terminal that can now accommodate up to seven million passengers a year; a new railway station and souk; a hospital; a cultural center providing work and training for the city’s 30,000-strong Nubian community; a women’s center; a large wireless internet zone; a library and a heritage center. An Imax cinema is also on the way.
Overall the governor says the city has spent 1.2 billion Egyptian pounds on infrastructure since he’s arrived – changes that have already had an impact on the city’s economy as a whole.
But still the opposition persists: earlier this year a demonstration of 3,000 people outside Karnak almost turned into a riot. A court case protesting the Gourna evictions is pending – marking the last hope of Old Gourna’s few remaining few residents.
But that only means it’s time for the next stage of the plan, Farag believes. Just around the corner is a development sure to create new livelihoods for the inhabitants of places like Gourna. The governor says he’s building new resorts capable of holding tens of thousand of people outside the city; that Luxor will soon have the biggest youth hostel in the Middle East; that a forest of jatropha trees, whose seeds contain up to 40 per cent oil, is being grown to provide the city with engine oil; that treated wastewater is being used to irrigate 22,000 acres of farmland; that investment zones are being opened to bring in new businesses. Farag thinks the city can double the annual number of tourists it currently hosts. In the end, he says, people will appreciate what he’s done.
Excerpted from an article by Simon Mars for The National
What killed Dr Granville’s mummy?
Well…a mummy can’t be killed, but now that we’ve got your attention this is the title of a thrilling article about Augusto Bozzi, an adventurous Italian born, traveling troupe player and medicine doctor who escaped Napoleon’s threat to press him into his army, went from one country to another contracting all kinds of diseases, learned English in the West Indies, married an Englishwoman and ended setting up practice in London, swapping the name Bozzi for Granville, the name of his English grandmother.
In 1821, at the height of mummy mania in Britain, Dr. Granville conducted one of the first autopsies on the mummy of a Theban lady. Among his findings:
The woman was between 50 and 55. She had borne children. The cause of death was body was ovarian dropsy - the earliest documented case of ovarian cancer.
The body was not mummified according to Herodotus eyewitness account in which the internal organs were removed through an incision in the abdomen and preserved separately. This mummy had no abdominal incision and most of the organs were intact and in place.
The body must have been kept in a bath of warm liquid wax and bitumen as a mummification method.
WHEN Egyptologist John Taylor joined the British Museum in the late 1980s, he found storerooms piled high with boxes. During the second world war, the museum’s collections had been moved out for safety. Although returned soon afterwards, some had not been touched since. Exploring one such storeroom, Taylor came across a large wooden chest. Inside were two trays, each divided into compartments, and each compartment contained a piece of an Egyptian mummy. Taylor had rediscovered what was left of Augustus Granville’s once-famous mummy.
Since 1990, a team of investigators has re-examined the remains using modern scientific methods. Their findings will be published next year. So how much had Granville got right?
One thing he couldn’t know was the identity of his mummy, because Egyptologists hadn’t yet deciphered the language of the ancient Egyptians. From the inscriptions on her coffin, we now know she was Irtyersenu, a “lady of the house”. Granville couldn’t know when she had lived, either: the style of the coffin and radiocarbon dating place her in the early 6th century BC.
In Granville’s day, pathology was in its infancy, but he was right about the ovarian tumour. Pathologist Eddie Tapp examined sections of the uterus, ovaries and tubes and confirmed that Irtyersenu had a tumour, but it seems to have been benign. “Granville’s diagnosis was in the right area but the tumour wasn’t fatal,” says Taylor. So what did kill her?
Tapp found signs of inflammation in the lungs, perhaps caused by pneumonia. Further research found traces of the TB bacterium and suggested that she might have had malaria. “We can’t say what the ultimate cause of death was,” says Taylor. “All of these are contenders.”
When it came to the mummification, Granville had been right in part. “He was correct that what was done to this mummy doesn’t correspond to anything in Herodotus. And he was right that they used a cheap method - although the latest theory is that the liquid used was some sort of preservative that would preserve the organs in situ.”
As for the body in the warm wax bath - there he was way off, says Taylor. Rebecca Stacey, a chemist at the British Museum, analysed the waxy material from the chest and found neither bitumen nor beeswax. What then was the wax Granville found in such abundance that he could make candles from it? When a body decomposes, fats break down to form what’s known as adipocere, or “gravewax”. “It’s an unsettling thought,” says Taylor, “but we think his candles were made from adipocere.”
Excerpted from an article by Stephanie Pain for NewScientist
Ancient Egypt: Pioneers in medicine
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Egyptian medicine is one of the oldest in history. Herodotus identified this region as a fertile land that produces an abundance of drugs, some are remedies and other poisons, its doctors are the wisest of the world.
The art of healing that was practiced at that time made use of plants and plant compounds that have proved to be medicinal and help alleviate some ailments and diseases.
Certainly, we can not forget the weight that religion and magic had in this civilization. In fact, many diagnostics involve evil spirits and curses of the gods. However, archeological and historical studies have shown that the Egyptians had great medicinal knowledge obtained from objective experience. While the practice of medicine had a religious or divine meaning, it was, overall, true science.
The village doctors were called Sun-Nu, which means “the man for those who suffer or are sick”. At the time of the pharaohs, this group had a lot of freedom to investigate the effects of the plants that grew around the Nile.
Many historians relate this concern for medicine to the building of the pyramids. The construction of these monuments required about twenty thousand workers gathered together for a long time. The danger of epidemics was immensely high. Thus, the pharaoh’s officials included onions in the food supply to their workers. Today we know that onion juice is an effective antibacterial agent against infection, but the question is: how did they know it? Furthermore, the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen was found surrounded by a collar made of plants used to combat allergies, illnesses and diseases. It seems sensible to think that they were there for the pharaoh to have a healthy afterlife.
A known plant used for medical purposes was Cymbopogon Proximus, employed as a remedy against kidney stones and nephritic colic. This compound is currently sold as Proximoly and is an effective medicine for kidney ailments. Corchorus Oliterius was also widely used by Egyptian healers, from which glycosides are extracted and used against heart failure. And these are just two examples.
Egyptologists have rescued several papyrus with recipes and curative remedies, many of them are spells but medicinal plants are listed as ingredients, A famous document found by George Ebers from 1550 years BC is regarded as one of the earliest treatise on medicine. In its content there are plenty of diagrams on the anatomy and physiology of the heart and vessels. It is a work that demonstrates that ancient Egyptian doctors had knowledge of the movements of the heart, with a description of the 48 vessels which are distributed throughout the body, a dissertation of their function and a reference to almost seven thousand medicinal substances.
The Ebers papyrus is a compilation of various medical disciplines; internal medicine, ophthalmology, dermatology, orthopedics, disorders of the head (tongue, teeth, nose, ears). There are anatomical, pathological and physiological explanations for each disease and therapy, surgical descriptions of diseases such as anthrax, node tuberculosis, fistulae, hemorrhoids, tumors, hernias, varicose veins and hydroceles.
The Edwin Smith papyrus is of a surgical nature and includes descriptions of conditions reported with extraordinary precision and detail: wounds, fractures, dislocations, burns, abscesses, tumors that can occur from head to toe, description of surgical instruments, and so on. This document is regarded as a treatise on Emergency Surgery.
The techniques used for the embalming and mummification of the bodies showed what great connoisseurs of anatomy the ancient Egyptians were. Thus Egyptian culture presents a great paradox - despite having gone down in history as one of the most influenced by religious belief and magic, it was also one of the foremost societies to practice science as a method to improve the lives and health of the people.
Translated from diariosur.es
Egypt cancels official New Year celebrations
Egypt’s Ministry of Culture has called off official celebrations of the New Year in solidarity with Palestinians during Israel’s attack on the Gaza strip.
The minister’s office said Wednesday state-sponsored events, including a popular concert in the Opera House, were called off because of the massacre on Gaza.
The Information Ministry also called off its major event, a concert by famous Lebanese heartthrob singer, Assi Hilani.
Egyptian state television official Ossama al-Sheikh said on Tuesday that the launch of new channel “Nile Comedy,” set for January 1, would be delayed “out of solidarity with the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.”
Images of destruction and death in Gaza have caused outrage around the Arab world and other Arab countries have also called off their celebrations.
Since Israel unleashed its massive aerial attack on Hamas and the Gaza Strip on Saturday, at least 374 Palestinians, including 39 children, have been killed and 1,720 wounded, Gaza medics say. During the same period, four Israelis have been killed by rockets fired from Gaza.
Royal jewelry museum to open in Alexandria
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The city of Alexandria will host a museum displaying royal jewelry dating back to 1805, when Mohammad Ali’s era started. The museum will be open for tourists and visitors early 2009.
Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni said the museum’s restoration took three years and cost LE50 million. “It is the largest Egyptian museum in terms of space,” the Minister said, adding that it had been constructed on a total of 4,185 metres.
He added “The building itself is a masterpiece as it used to be the palace of Princess Fatima Al-Zahra.”
Egypt State Information Service
