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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 when he excavated the site located in the Giza plateau in a German mission. In accordance with Egyptian law at the time, he received 50 per cent of the discovered artefacts.

The court determined that The University of Leipzig must hand over the entire collection to the Jewish Claims Conference (JCC) as compensation for Holocaust victims and their descendants.

Leipzig University will appeal the court ruling. Meanwhile, the Egyptian Ministry of State Antiquities sent an official letter to the JCC demanding restitution of these objects.

The collection spans more than five millennia, since the pre-dynastic era to the Late Intermediate period. Among the most distinguished objects are the Ebers Papyrus and a small limestone head of Nefertiti.

Ahram Online

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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 617 pound animal (illegally) for approximately $4,200 and will fight it with a dagger and shield. This madness is supposed to happen on 25 June, 2011.

Change.org invites concerned people to sign the following petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-al-sayed-al-essawy-from-murdering-an-innocent-lion-2?utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition&utm_term=autopublish

At a scholarly conference in Atlanta archaeologists announced that the burials of 400 people – dating between 2,700 and 2,000 years ago – have been excavated on the Giza plateau in Egypt.

The discovery was made by researchers with AERA (Ancient Egypt Research Associates), a group led by Mark Lehner that conducts work at Giza.

Research shows that these individuals were malnourished and lacked grave goods. The pyramids at Giza were built about 4,500 years ago, so these people would have been buried long after it was constructed.

The burials were found beside a 200 meter long ancient wall called the “Wall of the Crow.” The wall was first constructed in the time of the pyramids and is located just south of the Sphinx.

The Egypt these people lived in was a very different place than the one that existed at the time Giza’s pyramids were built. Between 2,700 and 2,000 years ago the country was under the sway of a large number of foreign rulers.

Excerpted from an article by Owen Jarus for Unreported Heritage News

The unique architectural features of the tomb include a superstructure built from limestone blocks. Those blocks create the maze-like pathway leading to the tomb entrance carved into a cliff face.

The tomb’s walls include painted reliefs showing Rudj-ka, the owner of the tomb with his wife in front of table of offerings that holds gifts of bread, goose and cattle. They also show the priest doing daily life activities such as fishing and boating.

Source:  Live Science

The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) was always intended to be an architectural masterpiece, a fit home for the display of the most outstanding objects produced by Egypt’s 7,000 years old civilisation.

After eight years of work, the first two phases of the project — including a power plant, fire station, fully equipped conservation centre with 12 labs and four storage galleries — were inaugurated.

The conservation centre is the largest in the world, intended not only to restore Egyptian antiquities but to be a regional conservation centre. It will also incorporate a documentation unit charged with creating a computerised database of all artefacts.

Established in partnership with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and with Japanese technical assistance, the centre includes 12 laboratories for restoring, scanning and studying mummies as well as objects made from pottery, wood, textiles and glass. The 122 conservators are currently working on restoring 6,800 objects that will be part of the museum’s permanent display.

The Japanese government helped to fund the $600 million project. It provided a $300 million soft loan to be repaid over 30 years at an interest rate of 1.5 per cent. In addition, the Ministry of Culture will itself provide $150 million and an additional $27 million has already been donated by businessmen.

The Italian government financed the project’s year and a half feasibility study.

The museum will also house a conference centre with an auditorium for 1,000, catering to theatrical performances, concerts, conferences and business meetings. The main auditorium will be supplemented by seminar rooms, meeting halls, a multi-purpose hall suitable for a variety of events, along with an open plan gallery for accompanying exhibitions. A special section for children will be created in order to encourage young people to learn about their heritage.

A 7,000-square-metres commercial area with retail shops, cafeterias, restaurants, leisure and recreational activities is planned for the ground floor level, as well as a 250 seat cinema.

The museum complex will centre on the Dunal Eye, an area containing the main exhibition spaces. From this central hub a network of streets, piazzas and bridges will link the museum’s many sections. The design is by Shih-Fu Peng, of the Dublin firm Heneghan, winners of the international architectural competition held in 2003. According to Peng the museum, which will be partly ringed by a desert wall containing half a million semi-precious stone, will act as a link between modern Cairo and the ancient Pyramids.

The storage rooms will be equipped with movable units designed for secure storage and easy access, and the environment will be determined by the materials kept in individual rooms, whether they are organic or non-organic, or require low temperatures for their preservation.

The conservation centre has been constructed 10 metres below ground level.

Zahi Hawass described the museum’s thematic displays, beginning with the physical environment, the River Nile and the surrounding deserts and oases, moving through kingship and the state, religion as practised under the Pharaoh Akhenaten during the Amarna period, and displays focussing on the daily lives of the ancient Egyptians, their sports, games, music, arts, crafts and cultural and social practices.

The new museum will house objects drawn from prehistory and up to the early Roman period. The unique funerary objects of Tutankhamun, Hetepheres, mother of the Pharaoh Khufu, Yuya and Thuya, the grandfathers of Pharaoh Akhenaten, Senedjem, the principal artist of Pharaoh Ramses II, the royal mummies and the treasures of Tanis will all be on permanent display.

“Khufu’s solar boats, now on display at the Giza Plateau, and the red granite statue of Ramses II, removed four years ago from Ramses Square in downtown Cairo, will also be among the permanent display,” said Hawass.

To guarantee security and complete isolation of the complex from the surrounding neighbourhood an iron fence has been erected and is monitored by CCTV cameras. A buffer zone of trees has also been planted.

Excerpted from an article by Nevine El-Aref  for Al-Ahram Weekly

The Grand Egyptian Museum now has a power plant, a fire station and its own conservation center, and over the next two years it will become home to some 100,000 artifacts.

The main achievement so far is the construction of the new conservation center to restore damaged antiquities. Established with Japanese technical assistance, the center includes 12 laboratories for restoring, scanning and studying mummies as well as artifacts made from pottery, wood, textiles and glass. Already 122 conservators are restoring and preparing 6,800 artifacts that will one day be showcased in the Grand Egyptian Museum.

A documentation unit is also working to create a computerized database for all the artifacts.

Tens of thousands of artifacts are currently locked away unseen in the old museum due to lack of space to display them.

A partial opening for the 120-acre Grand Egyptian Museum complex, located at the foot of the Giza pyramids is set for the fall of 2012.

Google News

A crowd of 10000 fans is expected to pack the arena today in front of the Great Pyramids and Sphinx outside Giza as the Red Bull X-Fighters World Tour touches down in Egypt for the first time.

The event features the usual collection of the world’s best FMX athletes: Nate Adams (USA), Robbie Maddison (AUS), Eigo Sato (JPN), Levi Sherwood (NZL) and Andrè Villa (NOR).

Red Bull X-Fighters World Tour in Giza will also see a new competition format in the Semi-Final and Final, adopting the popular one-upmanship known as “horse” in the world of skateboarding. The lower-ranked rider goes first and pulls a trick, with his opponent then having ten seconds to “answer” with a trick of his own. This system continues until both riders have completed eight jumps in the Semi-Final and ten jumps in the Final. If a rider does not “answer” his opponent’s trick within ten seconds, the jump will not be counted in the rider’s run.

A live webcast will be provided Friday May 14, 21:00 local time/18:00 GMT via http://194.29.114.52/LiveStreamPlayer/liveStreamPlayer.php?url=http://redbullmediahouse.edgeboss.net/flash-live/redbullmediahouse/59813/800_redbullmediahouse_nogeo_100302.xml

Going Places

Dassault Systèmes (DS), a world leader in 3D software solutions and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), one of the world’s most important encyclopedic art museums, today announced that they will join forces in a strategic innovation partnership to bring the power of industrial and experiential 3D to the domain of archaeology.

One of the world’s largest Egyptology databases, the Giza Archives Project, will be the first to benefit from the power of interactive, immersive and multi-platform 3D experiences for both the scientific community and the general public.

The Project aims to “assemble and link” the world’s archaeological information on the Egyptian Pyramids at the Giza Plateau. In the last decade, it has digitized historic expedition photographs, excavation diaries and field notebooks, maps, plans and sketches from the ancient tombs and pyramids at Giza. The result is the largest database and Web site ever assembled relating to the Giza Plateau (www.mfa.org/giza).

This partnership will enable real-time virtual reconstruction of the Giza plateau based on actual archaeological data. The collaboration between technology and archaeology will result in new forms of scientific inquiry and communication.

3ds.com

A 24 year old man named Hassan Farooq Anter was apprehended by military commandos who dropped from a helicopter poised on top of the pyramid of Khafre, the second largest of the Giza pyramids, and wrestled him aboard the craft. The entire operation took about ten minutes, according to one of the many witnesses visiting the famous tourist site.

The Interior Ministry reported that Anter is a worker from Minyat al-Nasr al-Daqahliyah, and so far he has refused to explain why he climbed the pyramid, which is forbidden.

CNN

Sixty-seven families in the Warraq and Imbaba Airport area in North Giza have been evicted from their homes after the land was sold to investors to establish new housing projects.

The Ministry of Housing, Utilities, and Urban Development had initially reportedly promised to evict the families only when the alternative housing units were ready. The families will, however, have to find temporary housing on their own initiative until the new units are finished.

Each evicted family will receive a maximum of LE200 (LE50 for each room) in compensation until they are placed in alternative housing.

The residents displaced by the ministry were angered by the decision and contacted the Popular Committee for the Defense of the Land of Imbaba for support.

almasryalyoum.com