Gods we could hold in our hands
For the ancient Egyptians, metals had a range of implicit associations: the use of gold was equated with red but also with parts of the body. Gold and silver were flesh and bone, sun and moon; certain deities, like Hathor, were associated with night and therefore cast in silver. Coloration could also be achieved with inlays of glass or semiprecious stones like lapis and turquoise.
“Gifts for the Gods: Images From Egyptian Temples” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art focuses on ancient Egyptian metal sculpture, featuring some 70 god images superbly cast in copper, bronze, gold, and silver. It includes loans from the Louvre, the British Museum and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. These are not the monumental stone sculptures everyone is familiar with, but more intimate, small and exquisitely crafted images for ritual use.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={0485AAC4-D004-447C-834B-54E42638B47D}
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/arts/design/03temp.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin
Large Ancient Settlement Unearthed in Puerto Rico
The main topic of this blog is Egyptology, that is, the archaeology of Egypt. But I feel I need to bring up an issue of an archaeological nature that is happening in my homeland, Puerto Rico. It has to do with a major discovery of pre-Columbian artifacts during an excavation as part of a project to build a dam near the city of Ponce in the southern part of the island. This find is regarded as the most important of its kind in the Caribbean, and the managing of this archaeological site already reeks of colonialism and reminds me of how it used to be during the early days of Egyptology.
Puerto Rico is not a sovereign state. It has been a U.S. territory since 1898. Construction projects that may have a significant impact on the environment are approved and managed by United States authorities. In this case, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has contracted a U.S private archaeology company to survey the site. Amid the controversy, Puerto Rican archaeologists, organizations and concerned individuals are demanding local government authorities to take action. Puerto Rico has an Institute of Culture and a State Historic Preservation Office. So far, the response has been timid, as artifacts are being removed from the site without any record submitted to these or any other government agencies and taken to the United States.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/10/071029-puerto-rico.html
Travelers preferences revealed
TripAdvisor has just surveyed more than 2,500 travelers globally, finding the top trends were concerns about germs, the growth of green tourism, and opposition to cell phone use on planes.
It also found emerging hotspots for vacations in 2008 were Jerba in Tunisia, Makadi Bay in Egypt and Phangnga in Thailand.
Airplanes were deemed the most germy, according to 28 percent of those polled, with public transportation next, followed by restaurants, hotels, and airports. Nearly half — or 45 percent — of travelers said their worst experience at a hotel was a dirty bathroom or dirty sheets but 17 percent said they encountered vermin.
Travelers are going greener, with 26 percent planning to be more environmentally conscious in their travel decisions in the coming year, with plans ranging from biking to hiking. And they clearly don’t want cell phones disturbing their peace, with 78 percent of travelers believing that mobile phones should not be allowed on flights.
http://africa.reuters.com/country/EG/news/usnN25232213.html
Canal Linking Ancient Egypt Quarry to Nile Found
Experts have discovered a canal at an Aswan rock quarry that they believe was used to help float some of ancient Egypt’s largest stone monuments to the Nile River.
It has long been suspected that ancient workers moved the massive artifacts directly to their final destinations over waterways.
Ancient artwork shows Egyptians using boats or barges to move large monuments like obelisks and statues, and canals have also been discovered at the Giza pyramids and the Luxor Temple. But the newfound canal, which has since been filled in, is the first proof discovered at the granite quarries in Aswan. Almost all obelisks, including those at the Luxor and Karnak Temples, were originally hewn in the Aswan area.
Larger obelisks can weigh more than 50 tons.
Experts said the canal likely filled in with water during the one of the Nile’s annual floods. Workers would have dragged the large stone monuments onto rafts at a point below the floodwater level, allowing the artifacts to float when the water level rose.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/10/071024-ancient-egypt.html
Photo from webshots.com
Death, Curse and Flowers
Scientists claim to have finally solved the 3,000 year old mystery behind the sudden death of Egypt’s golden boy. Until now, historians assumed that Tutankhamen was a rather fragile child. Recent analysis of the chariots and weapons found in the tombs of the Pharaoh indicate that they were not merely ceremonial, but showed signs of wear and tear.
Last year, a CT scan revealed he died at age 19 as a result of infection from a broken leg just above his knee, which possibly led to lethal blood poisoning. This fracture was most probably due to a fall from a fast moving chariot while hunting game in the desert.
A final piece of evidence has come from a garland of flowers placed around the neck of the mummy. Botanists found it included cornflowers and mayweed that were fresh at the time the decoration was made. Since the flowers could have been collected only between the middle of March and the end of April, and as the complex process of mummification lasted 70 days, it meant Tutankhamun probably died in December or January, a timing perfectly coinciding with the middle of the winter hunting season.
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=292917
Only a handful of experts have ever seen true likeness of King Tutankhamun. To coincide with the opening of the exhibition of the treasures of King Tutankhamun in London, Egyptian archaeologists are putting his mummified body on display. Zahi Hawass said archaeologists would remove the mummy from its original golden sarcophagus, which lies in a stone sarcophagus and place it in a climate-controlled plexiglass case in the antechamber of the tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=292998
Nearly 85 years after Lord George Herbert Carnarvon made history with the discovery of the 3000-year-old tomb of King Tutankhamun in Egypt’s Valley of Kings at Luxor, his great-grandson is retracing the footsteps of his illustrious ancestor. Now, his heir, the current Lord Carnarvon, has become the first member of his family to step inside the tomb.
Five months after entering King Tutankhamun’s tomb, Lord Herbert Carnarvon died of blood poisoning from a mosquito bite infected with the bacterial infection erysipelas. But rumors quickly spread that he became a victim of the mummy’s curse for disturbing the 19- year-old King’s resting place, and the family has lived under the shadow of the curse ever since.
Lord George Carnarvon is philosophical about the effect of the curse on his family.
“So much has been said about the curse that I don’t know what to believe. There was talk at the time of inscriptions above the doorway warning that those who entered would be struck down, but that has since been proven to be nonsense. On balance I don’t believe it was a curse that killed my great-grandfather. But now, having been inside the tomb he discovered, I just better hope that I’m right,” he said.
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=292890
Exhibit: "Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt"
The Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, in collaboration with the British Museum presents “Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt … Treasures From the British Museum”.
The exhibition holds 140 objects, which includes 14 mummies and sarcophagi, and is the largest exhibit of its kind to be shown by the British Museum outside of Britain. It spotlights the tale of the Egyptian ritual of preparing and sending the dead to the “afterlife,” entirely with furnishings made specially for each coffin, such as astonishing golden jewelry and a wooden boat to ship the dead into the underworld.
“Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt … Treasures From the British Museum” will be displayed until April 15, and includes discounted student prices of $12 on the weekdays, and $14 on the weekends.
An Environmental Make-Over for an Ancient Egyptian Industry
Since pharaonic times, mud bricks have been Egypt’s primary building material, and brick making has changed very little over the last few centuries. The industry still uses a crude methodology: barrels filled with mazot, a heavy oil left over after more valuable fuel products have been extracted from crude oil, are placed on top of blazing hot kilns with a pipe extending down into a stack of bricks. The mazot drips out of the pipe, and is then lit, cooking the bricks.
Factories that burn mazot are among the worst polluters in Cairo, a city of 18 million residents where the average Cairene ingests more than 20 times the acceptable level of air pollution, akin to smoking 20 cigarettes a day.
There are, however, signs of hope. An enterprising group of Canadian businessmen and Egyptian mud brick factory owners is switching from the heavy oil to natural gas, dramatically reducing pollution and the carbon emissions of the factories, at a profit. The efficiencies allowed owners to recover the cost of switching to gas within a year and continue with an annual saving of about 20,000 dollars. Furthermore, the gas process creates a much higher quality brick than the mazot fired brick.
Air quality in the surrounding environment has also improved substantially. Each brick factory conversion is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 37 percent — or 2,000 tonnes — per year. Having 50 factories running on gas is the equivalent saving of getting 300,000 cars off the road in Cairo — a city of three million cars.
What started as a development project has now evolved into a privately funded business venture run by Idea Egypt with Canadian investment. Currently 311 factories are slated to make the conversion, which will reduce carbon emissions to the equivalent of taking almost 1.9 million cars off roads in the Egyptian capital.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39730
Will she walk like an Egyptian?
Now that former Miss India Celina Jaitly has been designated as “Brand Ambassador” by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism, what will this white European looking non-Egyptian beauty queen do in the promotional campaign to portray her as the official new “Face of Egypt”?
Anything in Egypt possible with a little bit of money
The right connections and a generous budget can get you viewing opportunities beyond what most tourist packages offer. These include access to archaeological digs, dinner at the Temple of Luxor and private openings of tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
For prime views of the Sphinx, Egyptologist Ramez Salama brings people inside the Valley Temple of Khephren at Giza. Egyptologist Rami Girgis recommends visiting the Temple of Medinet Habu, built by Ramses III. “It’s fascinating, and in very good condition. The carvings inside are unique and very deep, unlike the other temples. They show battles and victories that were led by Ramses III,” he says.
Other gem sites tucked right next to the main attractions and worth exploring are the Village of the Workmen of the Valley of Kings at Deir el Medina and the noblemen tombs high on the cliffs at Aswan.
Right in the center of Old Cairo is the “Hanging Church,” built over the ancient Roman Fortress of Babylon. Just next door is the Coptic Church of St. Sergius. Coptic Christianity is the oldest surviving religion in Egypt, and services are conducted in ancient Coptic Egyptian. Since both churches are still active worship facilities, you can hear the priests chanting the 5,000-year-old language when you visit.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21322894/?displaymode=1006
Egyptomania - Egypt in the popular western culture
To the western imagination, ancient Egypt is often seen as an out of this world civilization. For centuries, the notion that religion, science, arts, agriculture and architecture developed in Africa long before Europe, has conjured up ideas of alien travelers from outer space or even a highly advanced civilization from this planet landing in Egypt during prehistory to reveal the secrets of the Pyramids and the Sphinx to backward African people. To the Greeks of the Hellenistic era, Egypt was already an old culture whose origins were unknown and imbued in legend.
After the Arab conquest, Middle Age Europe lost contact with Egypt, its only source of information being the biblical accounts. In the Bible, Egypt is depicted as a land of idolaters and enslavers, with the Pharaoh portrayed as a tyrannical oppressor of the Jews.
By the time of the Renaissance, the desire for knowledge, hindered by lack of facts, created a wave of speculation that pictured Ancient Egyptian civilization as a source of western mysticism and occult wisdom, which could be somehow interpreted by the readings of the Tarot. Attempts were made to decipher and interpret Egyptian hieroglyphs as hidden sacred messages taken from the Bible. A perception that Egyptian monuments could somehow embody the coded secrets of long forgotten ancient knowledge increased during the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th Century with the Freemasons.
When Napoleon set up to conquer Egypt in 1797, a sudden burst of popular interest in all things Egyptian spread across Europe, and the term Egyptomania was coined. The Age of Romanticism embraced the distant, both in space and time. Egypt became the perfect scenario for artistic imagery, a remote vast desert land scarcely populated by exotic people amidst monumental ruins half covered in the sand of times at the banks of a mystical river whose unexplored source was deep in the heart of a primitive continent. Egypt suddenly had an aesthetic impact on literature, art, music and architecture.
The Art Deco movement of the early 20th Century relies on many decorative elements derived from ancient Egyptian architecture. It was precisely at this time that two iconic Egyptian figures emerged. Nefertiti became an ideal of feminine beauty after her painted limestone bust was unearthed at Amarna in 1912. This amazing discovery was followed ten years later by an even greater discovery, the unspoiled tomb of Tutankhamen, filled with spectacular treasures of gold and jewelry.
The event was hyped by the media with the infamous “Curse of the Mummy”, which has been effectively exploited by Hollywood, from “The Mummy” starring Boris Karloff to today’s “special effects” versions, all featuring them as fearful reanimated monsters playing on the American fascination for the living dead and on their anxieties about revenge by those they have dominated. The movie Stargate and recent versions of The Mummy continue to influence people’s fanciful perception of ancient Egypt as an alien powerful force that needs to be tamed by western technological superiority.
Egypt has been branded to American and western culture in advertising, cartoons, products and games. Today, the fascination for Egypt and all things Egyptian still exists. The Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas is a contemporary example of the enduring impact of Egyptian imagery. So is the pyramid of glass and steel in front of the Louvre. And many different exhibitions in museums all over the world demonstrate people’s continued interest in ancient Egypt.
http://www.all-about-egypt.com/egyptomania.html
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By N2H
