Modern Egyptians living in the shadow of past greatness
“Can you believe our government can do nothing for us, and this thing that was built thousands of years ago is still helping me feed my family?”
Image by liber via Flickr
For citizens and foreigners alike, there is no escaping the truth that Egypt is inextricably linked in the public consciousness with pyramids, especially the Great Pyramids of Giza. Yet living in the shadow of past greatness is not always easy.
The pyramids are proof of Egypt’s endurance but these monuments to Egypt’s early ingenuity are also an ever-present symbol of faded glory. It is hard to escape comparisons between an Egypt that once led the world in almost everything and modern Egypt, where about 40 percent of the population lives on $2 a day.
The ubiquitous nature of antiquities has helped mold a collective consciousness, a national identity, that is uniquely Egyptian.
Egyptians, as a group, are extremely patient, though given the growing pressure of daily life, a bit less than they used to be. Their it-is-what-it-is attitude is often attributed to a strong religious faith and a conviction that all events are God’s will. Yet growing up and living amid so much history has something to do with that view, too; the abundant antiquities in everyday life are a constant reminder of one’s place in time.
These days, Egypt is rarely spoken of in a positive context. The education system is in crisis, and unemployment, traffic and pollution are all major problems. Top to bottom, the state seems to have seized up. When the historic Parliament building burned recently, firefighters bungled for hours before bringing the blaze under control. When a rock slide crushed a neighborhood, the authorities responded slowly, infuriating rather than rescuing. And at nearly every level, there is anxiety over who will rule when Mubarak is gone. The president, who is 80, refuses to clarify the issue of succession and seems out of touch with daily life in his country. His son Gamal Mubarak, who appears positioned to inherit the job, says that it is premature to discuss succession.
And there is ample evidence that Egypt itself can be expected to continue to endure. It may be down for the moment, but this country has survived the test of the time, a lot of time, where so many others have not.
Excerpted from an article by Michael Slackman for International Herald Tribune
Mystery of the screaming mummy
Some academics believe that Man E, as the screaming mummy is named, is the body of an Hittite prince summoned to Egypt by Tutankhamen’s widow Ankhesenamen, who did not bear heirs to the throne of Egypt. Others that he was an Egyptian governor who had died abroad and been returned to his homeland for burial. According to this report, the mummy belongs to Prince Pentewere, elder son of Ramses III, who, with his mother, Tiy, had evolved a plan to assassinate the pharaoh and ascend to the throne.
Image via Wikipedia
On a scorching hot day at the end of June 1886, Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, was unwrapping the mummies of the 40 kings and queens found a few years earlier in an astonishing hidden cache near the Valley of the Kings.
There, wrapped in a sheep or goatskin - a ritually unclean object for ancient Egyptians - lay the body of a young man, his face locked in an eternal blood-curdling scream. It was a spine-tingling sight, and one that posed even more troubling questions: here was a mummy, carefully preserved, yet caught in the moment of death in apparently excrutiating pain.
He had been buried in exalted company, yet been left without an inscription, ensuring he would be consigned to eternal damnation, as the ancient Egyptians believed identity was the key to entering the afterlife. Moreover, his hands and feet had been so tightly bound that marks still remained on the bones.
Who could he be, this screaming man, assigned the anonymous label ‘Man E’ in the absence of a proper name?
Today, nearly 130 years after his body was first uncovered, a team of scientists has brought the wonders of modern forensic techniques to bear on the enigma.
Using sophisticated-technology, including CT scanning, Xraysand facial reconstruction, to examine the mummy, they uncovered tantalising new clues that could reveal his identity, all under the watchful eye of Five’s TV crew, who are making a series of documentaries hoping to unravel some of Egypt’s great secrets.
Their findings suggest that Man E is indeed Prince Pentewere, elder son of Rameses III, who, with his mother, Tiy, had evolved a plan to assassinate the pharaoh and ascend to the throne.
Excerpted from an article by Kathryn Night for Mail Online
New boost to Great Pyramid internal ramp theory
A recent National Geographic video shows French architect Jean Pierre Houdin being presented with a diagram depicting low density spiral shapes inside the Great Pyramid, which may be a sign of internal ramps.
Early last year, Houdin proposed a theory that the Great Pyramid of Khufu was built from the inside out using internal ramps.
Previous theories have suggested that the Great Pyramid builders raised the man made structure’s millions of stone blocks using an external ramp, either single or spiral.
The ramps remain inside the pyramid, detectable by sensors, Houdin says.
No testing has been done yet. In the meantime, the Great Pyramid of Khufu remains the most massive puzzle in the history of civilization.
Evidence of malaria found in Egyptian mummies
Two Egyptian mummies have provided clear evidence for the earliest known cases of malaria, according to a study presented this week in Naples at an international conference on ancient DNA.
Pathologist Andreas Nerlich and colleagues at the Academic Teaching Hospital München-Bogenhausen in Munich, Germany, studied 91 bone tissue samples from ancient Egyptian mummies and skeletons dating from 3500 to 500 B.C. Using special techniques from molecular biology, such as DNA amplification and gene sequencing, the researchers identified ancient DNA for the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum in tissues from two mummies.
Malaria is transmitted to humans through a bite from an infected female Anopheles mosquito.
Great Pyramid was on the verge of collapse during construction
Bob Brier, also known as Doctor Mummy, along with an architect and a team of software specialists, has determined that huge support beams inside the Great Pyramid at Giza cracked as final construction was under way 4,500 years ago.
The team used 3-D modeling software that measures stresses in buildings, cars and airliners and found that the pyramid cracked up when three things happened: One wall of King Khufu’s burial chamber settled, stone rafters in a room above the chamber slipped, and the height of the pyramid reached 392 feet.
The team found that the pyramid’s architect, Hemienu, cut a tunnel into a sealed space above the burial chamber to assess the damage and filled the cracks with plaster that would indicate if the cracks were widening. The ancient fix-it job worked, the beams held and the pyramid was complete.
Brier will present his findings at the Microsoft Innovation Management Forum in Redmond, Wash., on Tuesday.
Exhibition: BYZANTIUM 330-1453 at the Royal Academy of Arts
From 25 October 2008 – 22 March 2009, the Royal Academy of Arts will host a ground-breaking exhibition devoted to Byzantium. Highlighting the splendours of the Byzantine Empire, the exhibition will comprise around 300 objects including icons, detached wall paintings, micro-mosaics, ivories, enamels plus gold and silver metalwork. Some of the works have never been displayed in public before. Byzantium 330–1453 will include great works from the San Marco Treasury in Venice and rare items from collections across Europe, the USA, Russia, Ukraine and Egypt.
The exhibition begins with the foundation of Constantinople in 330 AD by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great and concludes with the capture of the city by the Ottoman forces of Mehmed II in 1453. This will be the first major exhibition on Byzantine Art in the United Kingdom for 50 years.
This epic exhibition has been made possible through a collaboration between the Royal Academy of Arts and the Benaki Museum, Athens.
A traveler’s thoughts on Egypt Sinai Desert
I had come to Egypt to visit St Catherine’s on the Sinai peninsula, which has kept its sacred traditions unbroken since the early 6th century, when the great builder Justinian constructed it from huge hunks of granite around a chapel marking the spot where Moses had seen the burning bush.
Here, in preparation for the magnificent Byzantium exhibition, which opens at the Royal Academy next week, I passed two days like a lizard in a rocky desert fissure. I gazed at the earliest surviving icon image of Christ’s face, pored over manuscripts in the world’s oldest Christian library, and attended dawn service in the Greek Orthodox basilica.
As the first grey light of morning leaked into the arid Sinai Valley, it spread its shimmer of divine glory across gilded mosaics.
It’s far more rewarding to treat a cultural tour like a pilgrimage, to focus on one period, or even one single artwork. If you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there, as someone once put it.
Excerpted from an article by
New theory provides alternate route “Out Of Africa” for early humans
While it is widely accepted that modern humans originated in sub-Saharan Africa 150-200 thousand years ago, their route of dispersal across the hyper-arid Sahara remains controversial. The widely held belief is that the Nile valley was the most likely route out of sub-Saharan Africa for early modern humans 120,000 year ago.
In a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by the University of Bristol shows that wetter conditions reached a lot further north than previously thought during the last interglacial period (130-170 thousand years ago), providing wet corridors through Libya for early human migrations. These corridors rivalled the Nile Valley as potential routes for early modern human migrations to the Mediterranean shores.
Isotopic composition measurements of snail shells taken from two sites in the fossil river channels have a distinctly volcanic signature different from the other rocks surrounding the sites. Water flowing from the volcanic mountains of the Saharan watershed is the only possible source of this signature, according to the researchers.
The similarities between Middle Stone Age artefacts in places like Chad and the Sudan, with those of Libya, strongly support this theory of early human migration.
Rosetta Stone(s)?
According to Bassam El Shammaa, Egyptologist and tour guide, the famous Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, the focus of a controversy regarding rightful ownership, is not the only one of its kind. There are even better preserved and more ancient inscriptions of the same text written on the Rosetta Stone, whose discovery in 1799 was crucial in the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs by Thomas Young and Jean Francois Champollion.
The Rosetta Stone contains a proclamation by the pharaoh exempting the priests and temples from taxation. El Shammaa claims this decree was traditionally proclaimed every time a new pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty ascended to the throne of Egypt. The researcher mentions two similar stelae discovered in Kom El Hesn in the Western Delta and currently exhibited in the Greco-Roman section of the Egyptian Museum. They are known as the Canopy Stones because they were found at an archaeological site near Canopy, the extinct estuary of the Nile located 100 km from Rashid. These “Canopy Stones” display the same royal text as that of its famous counterpart.
Says Bassam El Shammaa:
“The Canopy Stones are even older as they date back to King Ptolemy III, whereas the Rosetta Stone marked the ascension of King Ptolemy V to the throne of Egypt.”
“When the Canopy Stones were discovered in Kom El Hesn, we found out that the hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek texts were the same as the ones carved on the Rosetta Stone, but with the only difference that the Canopy Stones were intact.”
“Comparing the versions, we also detected a spelling mistake in the last line of the Greek text, a fact that could probably prove that the texts on the Rosetta Stone were inscribed by Egyptians.”
The Egyptologist questions why the Egyptian Museum authorities display a replica of the British Museum Rosetta Stone when they could showcase these two better preserved originals.
The inscriptions in the Rosetta and the Canopy stones command that “this decree be carved on stones and displayed at all the temples beside the sovereign’s eternal figure.” Bassam El Shammaa insists that a search be carried out to find similar stones that probably still remain buried in the Inner Sanctum chamber beneath the temples at Edfu, Dendara and Philae, among other Egyptian Ptolemaic temples.
Ancient Egypt and present Ethiopia: a comparison
Traveling southward along the White and Blue Niles a revealing phenomenon unfolds.
One virtually steps back in time to witness a continuation of living culture that has survived until this day. Layers of foreign interference dissolve, until Pre-dynastic Egyptian methods of agriculture, pottery, trappings of religious ceremony and even social fabric, are found to still be in some form of relative practice.
Immediately apparent are the various wooden farming tools still used in industry today, which are identical to those of Pre-dynastic Egyptians. Egyptian furnishings and accoutrements such as the traditional African headrest and the long toothed hair comb also draw immediate comparisons with their Sub-Saharan counterparts. Even the two omnipresent hand held symbols of Pharaoh’s authority, the hook and flail, transmute as the flywhisk, and the staff – both of which continue to carry time-honored significance into our lifetime as symbols of African authority.
Because Ethiopia’s rugged highland terrain and well-ordered society rendered foreign intrusions difficult, it in particular retains a link to the age when Pharaohs of Egypt sent expeditions there via the Red Sea, the Nile and overland, in search of ebony, ivory, giraffes, leopard hides, captive human labourers, frankincense, myrrh and gold.
Comparative similarities between these two ancient lands are striking.
Ethiopians venerated symbols, such as the sun disc – quite similar to those of ancient Egypt. They also performed sacred music with strikingly similar instruments, such as the Y-shaped sistra-cymbal and the lyre. These continue to be as ever-present in the religious ceremonies of modern Ethiopia as they were during those of ancient Egypt, as is the profuse burning of frankincense and myrrh.
The well known funeral march of the Ancient Egyptians is also still played out in Ethiopia, including precisely the same entourage of dedicated mourners called criers, whose duty it is to follow the deceased’s body, wailing in a demonstrative procession of sorrow.
In ancient Egypt, beer was widely consumed as a vital sustenance – in fact it was even served daily to workers of the Great Pyramid. A traditional Ethiopia brew, called tala might very well then have been a precursor to the Egyptian version.
There is also a remarkable similarity in form between the rectangular African board game, known in Kiswahili as bao, and the correspondingly proportioned, refined Egyptian version called senet.
Even the traditional manner in which women often transport goods upon their heads throughout Africa is frequently found in Ancient Egyptian works of art. The list of other notable similarities goes on to include weapons, basketry, jewelry, and ceremonial masks.
Excerpted from an article by Bruce Strachan for Daily Nation
Amarna lecture given at University of Dallas
“So have you made your lists and checked them twice? I hear King Tut’s coming to town,” joked Dr. James Hoffmeier, professor of Near Eastern Studies at Trinity International University, who addressed an audience of about 50 in the Art History Building on Sept. 25.
Since 1999, Hoffmeier and his team have been working on excavations at a fortress-outpost from the Armana period in the northern Sinai region of present day Tell el-Borg. He noted that around 1300 BC, this location was outside the boundaries of Egypt.
Hoffmeier explained that most scholars have thought that, during the reign of Akhenaten, the empire began to collapse, with the pharaoh’s armies pulling back to within the borders. Shards of wine pots found in the area might alter that view, however. Each shard Hoffmeier presented bore the cartouche-hieroglyphic name-of the pharaoh under whom the wine was bottled. With these, Hoffmeier has been able to trace an unbroken line of cartouches of seven consecutive Egyptian rulers, including those of Akhenaten and Tutankhamen, evidence that the fortress was occupied continuously throughout the period, which challenges the idea that Egypt became isolationist during Akhenaten’s reign.
The dig site’s web page is www.tellelborg.org.
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By N2H
