Oldest UK museum to shut its doors
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The Ashmolean Museum will be shut to the public from 23 December to November 2009 for a £61m revamp. Once refurbished, the museum will have 39 new galleries, a new education centre and Oxford’s first rooftop cafe.
Construction work began in 2006 and is funded with support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Linbury Trust. It has had a minimal impact on visitor access to the collections on display, but in 2009, builders will need to undertake the major work of constructing a new front entrance. Only the shop will remain open for business.
The new building was designed by award-winning architect Rick Mather.
The Ashmolean was founded by Oxford University in 1683. The museum features collections covering a wide range of cultures from early Egyptian to Italian Renaissance and 20th Century European art.
Development plan along Lake Nasser unfair to Egyptian Nubians
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Nubians, now numbering about 3 million of Egypt’s 73 million people, have been leaving their stretch of the Nile valley for more than a century — some because of poverty, some because of efforts to tame the river’s annual floods. The first dam near Aswan was built in 1902; subsequent ones obliterated settlements further and further south until all of Egyptian Nubia was under water.
In 1964, their shoreline was inundated when the Aswan High Dam created Lake Nasser, the world’s largest reservoir. Now the Egyptian government plans to settle northern Egyptians along Lake Nasser without reserving space for Nubians. More recently, newspapers reported plans for agricultural and tourist developments on about 300,000 acres. Some of the space would be designated for foreign investors, the rest would be for domestic developers — with nothing for Nubians. Activists in the ethnic minority say no fair: They want terrain set aside for new villages so their brethren can live again on the Nile, returning from a northern Egypt diaspora and arid settlements established 44 years ago for displaced families.
Nubians once ruled Egypt in pharaonic times, their armies having ousted Libyan invaders. They speak their own, non-Arabic language and sing their songs to drum beats. The Nile was their economic lifeblood and fountain of memory, identity and lore.
Excerpted from an article by Daniel Williams for bloomberg.com
Seven Russian tourists dead in Egypt coach crash
Seven Russian tourists were killed when their coach overturned on a highway near the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Dahab, according to a new death toll on Tuesday.
Eighteen other people were injured in Monday’s crash, including three Egyptians, a medical source said. Five of the injured remain in critical condition.
The accident came less than two weeks after a public bus plunged into a canal south of Cairo, killing 64 Egyptians in the worst road accident in the country in decades.
In October, six Belgian tourists died and 26 were hurt in the south of Egypt when their coach crashed.
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France to loan 100-150 million euros to Egypt
The French Development Agency is to give Egypt between 100 and 150 million euros for development, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon announced on Monday.
The grant will support Egyptian small businesses, help battle industrial pollution and “improve living conditions for the population,” he said.
Since 2006, France has jumped from fourth to first place among foreign investors in Egypt.
5th Dynasty tombs found in Saqqara, Egypt
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Two ancient Egyptian tombs dating back 4,300 years discovered at Saqqara indicate that the sprawling necropolis south of Cairo is even larger than previously thought, according to Egypt’s top archaeologist Zahi Hawass. The rock-cut tombs were built for high officials — a man named Iya-Maat, described as the overseer of the quarries used in the construction of the Unas pyramid nearby and another for a woman named Thinh, with the title of “Chief of the Singers”, in charge of procuring entertainers for the pharaoh.
Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said excavations will continue and further finds should shed light on the 5th and 6th dynasties of the Old Kingdom, which ruled over 4,000 years ago.
Excavations have been going on at Saqqara for about 150 years, focused on just one side of the two nearby pyramids — the Step Pyramid of King Djoser and that of Unas, the last king of the 5th Dynasty. The area where the two tombs were found, to the southwest, has been largely untouched.
Despite years of excavation, uncovering a vast necropolis of pyramids, tombs and funerary complexes mostly from the Old Kingdom, but including sites as recent as the Roman era, new finds are constantly being made. In November, Hawass announced the discovery of a new pyramid at Saqqara, the 118th in Egypt, and the 12th to be found just in Saqqara.
Peter Lacovara: an interview
Peter Lacovara is senior curator of Egypt, Nubia and the Near East at the Carlos Museum in Atlanta, where “Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs” is being exhibited until May 25.
“We don’t really know much about how Egyptians lived, I mean far less than about how they died.”
Q: Is Atlanta too modern for the antiquities scholar?
A: Actually, more of our support for the Egyptian collection comes from New York these days than from Atlanta itself.
Q: Why aren’t you getting the Atlanta support?
A: I don’t know. You would think they would be more public minded, but I have found it very difficult to —- despite the popularity of the Egyptian collection —- I’ve found it very hard to build one here in Atlanta.
Q: You’re saying people just don’t get the importance of it?
A: Here, people seem to put the cart before the horse. They’re into building big, splashy museums and additions and not realizing that it’s the collections that are the important thing. It’s what’s inside that counts, not the outside.
Q: A few years ago, scholars including you concluded that a mummy acquired by the Carlos Museum was likely that of the great King Ramses I. Later the museum returned the mummy to Egypt. Did giving back Ramses I help to secure the current Tut exhibit?
A: No. When we gave back the mummy, we gave it back no strings attached. We weren’t going to ask for anything in return. But we’ve had a close relationship with the Egyptian antiquities service. We’ve had people from Egypt trained here, we’ve gone over and done collaborative projects. So it’s part of a close relationship with them.
Q: I hear you’ve got a thing against the Indiana Jones films.
A: That’s not what archaeology is like. It gives people a very false picture of people going over there and stealing things and bringing them back. [Real archaeology] doesn’t make a good movie because it’s a very tedious, slow process.
Q: Come on, didn’t you get a kick out of watching “The Mummy”?
A: I did. I did. Well, I like the Boris Karloff one [the 1932 film] much better, it was much closer to the truth.
Q: To what truth?
A: The Brendan Fraser thing, they made no attempt to make it make any kind of sense whatsoever. And you can hire an Egyptologist as a [movie] consultant very cheaply (laughs). So there’s no excuse.
Q: You’re going to spend the next 10 years helping to excavate the hometown of King Tut’s grandfather in Marqata, Egypt. What are you looking for?
A: I got approached by the Egyptian government because the site is under threat from urban expansion and agricultural expansion, and it’s never been properly surveyed or documented. Town planning is one of my specialties.
Excerpt from an interview by Rosalind Bentley for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Three Egypt related stories among National Geographic Top 10 archaeology news
The National Geographic News has outlined a list of its ten most viewed archaeology stories of 2008, including three from Egypt.
2. Great pyramid mystery may be solved by hidden room: A sealed space in Egypts Great Pyramid may help solve a centuries-old mystery: How did the ancient Egyptians move two million 2.5-ton blocks to build the ancient wonder?
5. Rare Egyptian Warrior tomb found: Feathered arrows lying near a well-preserved coffin suggest that the mummy inside, when alive, may have been a mercenary for an Egyptian king.
8. New pyramid found in Egypt: Long buried by deep sands, the newly discovered 4,300-year-old Queens tomb is a testament to a pharaohs reverence for his mother.
Modern bridge building like an Egyptian
Using a method likely perfected by the builders of the Egyptian pyramids, workers at the Belleair Causeway bridge just reached a milestone in construction.
For the second time in the U.S. bridge-building history, construction workers employed a technique called “incremental launching” to drag 7,200 tons of concrete deck into place. It works in the way archeologists believe the pyramids were built, by dragging huge construction components into place and aligning them.
The bridge workers used heavy-duty hydraulic jacks and Teflon pads, plus an ingredient found in every kitchen - dishwashing detergent. Giant slabs of bridge deck were dragged across a series of piers to form the east and west approaches of the Belleair Causeway bridge. By the time the last slab on the west approach was cured, connected to the others and dragged into place, the bridge deck weighed about 7,200 tons.
Think of 2,200 Hummer vehicles, without wheels, dragged across the ground at the rate of about a quarter inch every seven seconds.
Engineers say the dragging method is cheap, safe and simple.
Excerpted from an article bt Mark Douglas for msnbc
A tomb tour of Egypt in Canada
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Most people will never get to see the inside of an ancient Egyptian tomb, the president and CEO of the Canadian Museum of Civilization said yesterday.
That’s where the museum’s newest exhibit —Tombs of Eternity, which opens Friday — comes in. The exhibit — which includes about 200 rare and authentic artifacts unearthed by archaeologists in the early 20th century — includes three human mummies, mummified remains of animals, including a snake, mouse, crocodile, kitten and falcon, canopic jars and relics buried alongside the dead in Egyptian tombs.
The design of the exhibit itself mimics the layout of an actual Egyptian tomb, said Dr. Matthew Betts, the exhibit’s curator. The museum has also “listed the names of the Egyptian men and women” whose objects or bodies are included in the exhibit, Betts said. By reciting an offering prayer, visitors can help them live on.
Other parts of the exhibit includes a section on cosmetics and jewels that ancient Egyptians wore, as well as a section explaining the mummification process.
Tombs of Eternity, which is accompanied by the IMAX film Mummies: Secrets of the Pharaohs, runs through Aug. 16, 2009.
Mass Internet outages in Egypt after cables cut
Egypt suffered a massive Internet outage after cables in the Mediterranean were cut, the Communications Ministry said Friday.
Three Internet cables were cut off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily on Friday morning, the ministry said in a statement. The cause of the cut was not immediately known. Throughout Egypt, the Internet is almost completely down or working sporadically.
The ministry says it will take “several days” for cables to be repaired and is trying to switch Egypt’s Internet to an alternative route through Asia in the meantime.
