Yesterday night, a couple of thousand archaeologists and prominent figures flocked to the Cairo Opera House Grand Theatre where the fifth annual Archaeologists’ Day was held. The site became a temple for the day, embellished with an imposing façade, columns, and statues of ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and deities.

The event focused on paying homage to pioneering archaeologists, dead and alive, who have spent their lives exploring, enriching, documenting and preserving Egypt’s heritage. A number of specialists were honoured along with skilled workers who helped in excavation works.

During his speech at the event, Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the SCA, highlighted a number of projects that the SCA undertook during his tenure that started 2002. Among them, SCA excavation teams are spread all over Egypt digging for new secrets of Egyptian history.

A social club for archaeologists is under construction in Al-Fustat, Hawass announced, while plans for a hospital for members of the profession are being studied. SCA officials are also looking at ways to increase archaeologists’ salaries and retirement pensions.

Hawass also announced the establishment of a medical insurance plan for archaeologists. This insurance coverage, he continued, provided by Life Health Care, ensures excellent medical care for 32,000 SCA employees at well known medical centers and hospitals in Egypt.

During the ceremony, archaeologists, restorers and painters were honoured with a certificate and a golden collar. Posthumous honours were received by family representatives.

As for workers, they were honoured with an honorary certificate and a sum of money.

Excerpted from an article by Nevine El-Aref for Ahram Online

Egyptology is a relatively recent discipline, and was born in imperial times. Unfortunately it is still tainted by its own colonialist stereotypes or those similar to the macho archaeologist embodied by Indiana Jones. Popular books still go on relentlessly about uncovering finds, cracking secret codes – a language that implies that we are acquiring hidden treasures and bringing them from primitive darkness into modern scientific light. Real Egyptology, however, is no longer about acquiring objects, but about understanding their meaning in their original context, and about working within the Egyptian landscape. Long gone is the old colonial arrogance that once denied to ancient Egyptians any possibility of being our equals – and denied to modern Egyptians any interest in their own culture: Egyptology is now always a partnership with modern Egypt. More sophisticated theoretical perspectives are developing, drawing on work from other disciplines, and we are beginning to understand Egyptian culture more as a whole, and less as a sequence of facts and artefacts. Our European stereotypes are not the only way of viewing this past, no matter how familiar and natural they seem to us. Modern scholarship has a lot to learn from how modern Egyptians have engaged with their history: when the Egyptian director Shadi Abd al-Salam filmed the story of a 19th- century discovery of royal mummies, his film was titled The Mummy – but instead of being another crude yarn of monsters and curses, it sympathetically explores our complex relationship with this ancient heritage, and reminds us that ancient and modern Egypt are parts of the same country.

Richard Parkinson is a curator in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum. His main research interest is the poetry of the classical age of Egyptian literature

Excerpted from guardian.co.uk

When I speak of ancient Egypt, I am speaking about my first and greatest love, however this does not mean that I do not love anything else, as I appreciate the magnificence and beauty of Islamic art and the genius of the Muslim artists who were able to tame their tools to create a new type of art in accordance with the values of Islam. I think that if I specialized in Islamic antiquities I would speak about this from my heart in the same way that I speak about ancient Egyptian antiquities. In Egypt, there is a popular expression that goes “let the baker make the bread,” meaning that everybody should work according to their own specialization, and this should also apply to antiquities. Therefore whilst I love Islamic, Coptic and Jewish antiquities and monuments, my first love is ancient Egyptian antiquities and monuments.

Asharq Al-Awsat

Many of us are tired of mass media’s interest in using archaeological facts as a solid foundation on which to build hoaxes usually dealing with apocalyptical issues and hyping them to their prime time audiences.

Well, archaeologist Sarah Parcak is doing something about it. The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) professor conducted a “Mythbusters” seminar last fall where students could confront, explore, discuss and finally debunk the most pervading pseudo-archaeological topics such as Egyptian tomb curses, lost cities and continents, apocalyptic prophecies and the end of the world.

Parcak believes it is crucial to educate students and the public about what most academic archaeologists avoid – discussing untruths in the classroom.

She hopes to make the seminar a course available as a 200-level offering by spring 2011.

Source: UAB Magazine

Dr Kathleen Martinez, a young archaeologist from the Dominican Republic, has been excavating a site near Alexandria in the search for the tomb of Cleopatra. After being given permission to conduct a dig at the site for 2 months, Dr Martinez’s team have discovered two chambers which has won them the right to continue the dig into the next season.

Describing the tomb that was discovered at Taposiris Magna, Dr Martinez remains confident that she will uncover the tomb of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony.

Read the full article by Sean Williams at Heritage Key

Jane Akshar from Luxor News blog was there for the preparation and the opening ceremony (she helped with polishing some dusty furniture too), along with celebrities Dr. Zahi Hawass and the present Lord and Lady Carnarvon.

“We were given a sneak preview of the ghost of Howard Carter. With the aid of lights, screens, mirrors and glass an image of Carter appears and gives a talk about the discovery of the tomb with slides. It is really excellent, very cleverly done”, said Akshar.”

The newly renovated property displays the archaeologist’s office room, his desk, tools and the original surveying equipment he used.

Photographer Harry Burton’s camera is also on display, along with a collection of photographs of work in Tutankhamen’s tomb.

Luxor News

Egypt’s embassy in Paris is holding talks with Francés premier museum, the Louvre, over the retrieval of five wall paintings that were stolen from Tombs of the Nobles, located in the Theban Necropolis, near Luxor, in 1980, said Zahi Hawass the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA).

Under the law, museums should report any stolen antiquities before purchasing the items. Despite that, former director of Louvre’s Egyptian Antiquities Department, Christine Ziegler, purchased the stolen items, Hawass added.

The SCA sent a letter two years ago claiming the wall paintings, and Henri Loyrette, director of the Louvre Museum, for his part, promised to restore the items, the SCA chief added. Yet, Loyrette has not fulfilled his promise over 18 months now. The SCA decided to suspend an excavation sponsored by the Louvre at Saqqara until the five paintings are brought home, and Ziegler was denied to deliver a lecture in Egypt last week.

ANSAmed

The SCA described the fragments as paintings of the nobleman’s journey to the afterlife chipped from the walls of the tomb by thieves in the 1980s.

The Louvre has said the museum is open to returning the artifacts demanded by Egypt, though the decision has to be taken by a special committee. France’s Culture Ministry also said it is ready to return the pieces if the committee approves.

A spokeswoman for the antiquities council said there would be a meeting Friday with the Louvre to resolve the matter.

French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said he believes the artifacts should be returned and the pieces were acquired by the Louvre in “good faith” in 2000 and 2003, according to his office.

The French said there were five fragments, while the Egyptians report four. There was no way to immediately reconcile the discrepancy.

Entertainment Daily

Archaeologists are the most meticulous and versatile of explorers, covering vast distances in a few days or mere inches in a month. Their discoveries can vary from massive temples or burial sites to shards of pottery scattered across an endless desert plain. With enough patience, they might be able to construct a complete urn.

A good archaeologist has lots of patience. Although often backbreaking work on hands and knees with shovels and trowels, or lying on the ground for hours searching for tiny shards of pottery amidst pebbles, bits of bone and offal cast away millennia ago, it can provide a goldmine of information about a past world.

The measuring and recording of sites is one the most tedious jobs for an Egyptologist. Typical methods take an inordinate amount of time and meticulous record keeping, both on-site and in the office. Intensive surveys, for example, involve teams of archaeologists walking slowly side-by-side across a site marking each find with a small flag. Each one is then individually recorded and described in detail. The records are then sent off for later review and interpretation.

The on-site work is only part of the vast machine that records, analyses, and archives thousands of observations, measurements and locations. A massive web of record keeping work surrounds each field expedition and binds them together with the larger archaeological record. Without this detailed work, pieces of the puzzle could be misplaced or misinterpreted resulting in whole sites lost in the vastness of the desert.

A few archaeological expeditions have turned up finds that cannot be placed in the historical record because of unclear record keeping. On the other hand, searching through even the most meticulous of records can be a daunting project.

archaeology-news.org

Ancient Egypt comes to life again this summer when Cal State San Bernardino offers its popular art workshops to budding artists and archeologists from throughout the Inland Empire.

The Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum at the university hosts its annual summer Egyptian Art Workshop series for kids ages 10-13 July 27-30. The art museum is home to what is considered the largest collection of ancient Egyptian art west of the Mississippi River, some 500 pieces encompassing more than 4,000 years of Egyptian history.

The four-day workshop features both morning and afternoon sessions for all kinds of ancient fun, including a mock archeological dig. Kids will also use clay to make little Shabti figurines and canopic jars, which will be part of a student exhibition in early October.

And since it’s a “parent free” zone, kids get to experience the ancient past without their mummies.

Excerpted from an article by Michel Nolan for The Sun