Archive for May, 2011

A colossal statue of Amenhotep III (c. 1390-1352 BC), seated and wearing the Nemes headdress, a pleated shendjyt kilt and a royal beard was found in the passageway leading to the third pylon (gate) of the funerary temple at Kom el-Hettan on the west bank of Luxor, 200 meters behind the Colossi of Memnon,... »

Thomas Hemer wants to stop the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany from taking his grandfather’s Egyptian collection from the University of Leipzig Museum. Losing the collection “would destroy an institute that my grandfather cherished,” Hemer said in an interview at the museum in Leipzig. The 163 antiquities include a 4,000-year-old Nagada bowl, ancient clay... »

The Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX30) jumped 2.5 percent when it opened for the trading week on Sunday. The market managed to extend the eight-week-high on Monday, but this time foreign investors tended towards selling. On the other side of the world, the Market Vectors Egypt ETF closed a 0.2 percent lower on Friday. The pledge that... »

A German court has ruled that a collection of 150 ancient Egyptian objects once owned by a Jewish professor was sold forcibly and below fair value to the University of Leipzig back in 1936, when Germany was under Nazi rule. Georg Steindorff, then head of Leipzig’s Egyptology department, had possession of the objects since 1915... »

A modern-day Egyptian gladiator has reportedly announced plans to fight an African lion. Al-Sayed al-Eassawy claims to have the Ministry of Interior’s blessings to fight the animal in front of the Giza pyramids, all in an exceedingly misguided effort to revive the country’s tourism industry. From Egypt’s Daqahlyia Governorate, the stunt man purchased the... »

Minister of State for Antiquities (MSA) Zahi Hawass announced at the ministry in Zamalek that yesterday’s media reports that researchers from the University of Alabama in the United States had identified 17 lost pyramids and thousands of ancient Egyptian settlements via infrared images is not accurate. Hawass told Ahram Online that satellite infrared images are... »

Seventeen lost pyramids and more than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt. Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids. The work has been pioneered at the University of Alabama in Birmingham by US Egyptologist Dr Sarah Parcak. The team... »

Egyptological is a free publication which offers papers, articles, brief items, reviews, and reports all discussing the rich world of Ancient Egypt.  Authors Kate Phizackerley and Andrea Byrnes represent a variety of backgrounds and interests and produce some very diverse content. Egyptological is fully searchable with a complete archive of all items published on... »

I am happy to say that we completed another great mission with the help of the police and the military.  Today (May 22, 2011), we cleared about 22 monuments on the West Bank of Luxor that had been attacked by illegal building activity in the days following the revolution. Many people built houses or... »

Analysis of mummies from Nubia, a former kingdom that was located in present-day Sudan, reveals how age-old irrigation techniques may have boosted the plague of schistosomiasis (bilharzia), a water-borne parasitic disease that infects an estimated 200 million people today. About 25 percent of mummies in the study dated to about 1,500 years ago were found... »