Jane Akshar mentions rumours of another tomb find near KV-8 (Merenptah) on her blog and I received an email from Lug Buergin last night pointing me to this story [Sensational Discovery in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings!, Luc Buergin, Legendary Times, March 11, 2008] (Jane has updated her blog post since I first looked to include this story)

Also Bernhard Grundl mentions it here on the Glyphdoctors forum here.

So if this new find is over by KV-8 then it is not the radar anomaly reported by Nicholas Reeves' Amarna Royal Tombs Project here (31 July 2006) as this appears to be in a different place.

Check out the maps on the Theban Mapping Project website for comparison.

And we have this confusing news item from the Egyptian State Information Service detailing a new SCA excavation team, headed by Zahi Hawass, that is going to find new tombs in the valley of the Kings.

Culture Minister Farouk Hosni named the first antiquities excavation team under Dr. Zahi Hawass Secretary General of the Antiquities Supreme Council to operate in Valley of the Kings in Luxor to unearth a number of tombs of kings and queens including Ramesses the [Eighth] and Thutmose the Second.

Dr. Hawass said the unearthing of those tombs would be regarded as the most important discovery since that of Tutankhamen tomb, especially as the excavation operations in the western bank was monopolized by foreign missions.

The Kings Valley included 63 royal tombs unearthed by foreign archaeological missions, Hawass added.

The first excavation team was formed, Egyptian State Information Service, Egypt, March 25, 2008.

So, they found a "doorway" or "stepped entrance" last November and kept it quiet (this is standard practice as official announcement is always through the SCA and they'd want to know exactly what they were dealing with first. This happened with KV63 when it was discovered.) And now they announce that they have formed an excavation team to find the missing tombs of two New Kingdom pharaohs. I expect there will be an official announcement soon of this new team discovering something.

Hundreds of residents of the ancient Egyptian city of Luxor clashed with riot police Friday during a protest against government attempts to move them to make room for an open-air museum free of modern buildings.

The demonstration turned violent when police prevented the protesters from entering Karnak Temple, one of the most famous sites from the Pharaonic era, according to witnesses.

Residents hurled stones at police, who responded by firing tear gas and arresting 13 people.

The government has offered compensation and temporary housing to many of the displaced residents, but some complain the money is insufficient or that they simply do not want to move...

Fight at the Museum: Egyptians Protest Government Attempt to Raze Homes, AP via FOX News, USA, March 28, 2008.

New evidence of a sick, deprived population working under harsh conditions contradicts earlier images of wealth and abundance from the art records of the ancient Egyptian city of Tell el-Amarna, a study has found.

Tell el-Amarna was briefly the capital of ancient Egypt during the reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who abandoned most of Egypt's old gods in favour of the Aten sun disk and brought in a new and more expressive style of art.

Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt between 1379 and 1362 BC, built and lived in Tell el-Amarna in central Egypt for 15 years. The city was largely abandoned shortly after his death and the ascendance of the famous boy king Tutankhamun to the throne.

Studies on the remains of ordinary ancient Egyptians in a cemetery in Tell el-Amarna showed that many of them suffered from anaemia, fractured bones, stunted growth and high juvenile mortality rates, according to professors Barry Kemp and Gerome Rose, who led the research...

Kemp, director of the Amarna Project which seeks in part to increase public knowledge of Tell el-Amarna and surrounding region, said little attention has been given to the cemeteries of ordinary ancient Egyptians...

Study shows life was tough for ancient Egyptians, Alaa Shahine, Reuters, South Africa, March 28, 2008.

cf. Ancient Egyptians, not so fortunate, Press TV, Iran, March 29, 2008.

Monster Moves: Rescuing Ramesses was shown on Tuesday night (March 4th 2008) on channel Five in the UK. I was a bit apprehensive at first but the show turned out far better than I expected.

The show told the story of the UNESCO rescue operation to save the Egyptian monuments from the rising flood waters caused by the building of the Aswan Dam and focuses specifically on the temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel but also visits Philae, Amada, and Kalabsha. The story of the rescue operation is told to accompanying colour archive footage which is very good. The narration is well paced and well explained and the old footage is very good. Interspersed with these scenes is a modern recreation of cutting and moving a giant replica stone head of Ramesses II from one of the four statues that adorns the front portico of Abu Simbel. I'm not entirely sure what the point of these segments was though. How its was done is well documented and it was only forty-years ago. It is not as if they were re-creating how Ramesses' builders built it over 3,000-years ago. Are we supposed to be surprised that sixties-man was capable of this? Don't get me wrong, moving it was a stunning achievement, just as is building the Channel Tunnel or the Milau Viaduct but in a film about the latter two you wouldn't expect the film makers to go to the trouble of building a miniature one just to show you how difficult it was.

The computer graphics along with the narration served to explain the problems encountered, and overcome, quite well with graphics of the disastrous consequences of drilling to the wrong depth when mounting lifting rods in the head, for example. I guess the modern re-creation was a requirement of the series format — this is actually series three, episode one — where other 'monster' moves are actually followed and documented whereas this episode is documenting a past move.

The move of Kalabsha was shown and was used by the UNESCO team as a 'test' to see how easy it was to take a temple apart block by block and then put it back together again afterwards. Kalabsha was chosen as it is built out of blocks rather than carved out of stone like Abu Simbel. The rock cut temple of Abu Simbel itself was cut up into over a thousand blocks using giant hand saws by teams of workmen for transportation and then re-housed inside an artificial mountain. Amada temple was lifted whole onto rails to be move 2.5 kilometres away at a rate of 30 metres per day - they only had 150m of track to play with so they had to move the track as well. And Philae's move was shown with the whole temple being surrounded by a cofferdam whilst the workmen dismantled it. One structure, though, was outside of the dam and already underwater — a Roman portico gateway built by Diocletian — and a team of British Royal Navy divers, led by Ed Thompson, actually dismantled it underwater!

A couple of minor quibbles though. The use of dramatic background music was unnecessary but seems to be endemic in new productions. And the repeated graphic of a truck driving across the screen — complete with engine and horn sounds — grated very quickly but is probably a trademark graphic of the series as a whole (I've only seen this episode so I cannot be sure).

This series also appears as Mega Moves on Discovery Channel & TLC, Impossible Moves on National Geographic US and Huge Moves on National Geographic International.

cf. Monster Moves: Rescuing Ramesses, Series 3, Episode 1, Windfall Films, UK, 2008.

All eyes were on the Valley of the Kings the morning of February 5, 2006, when our expedition first looked into the chamber now known as KV63, the first tomb found in Egypt's Valley of the Kings since that of Tutankhamun (KV62) in 1922.

Press speculation was rampant over what the tomb might hold. Would our expedition find the mummies of royal women from the late 18th Dynasty, such as Queen Nefertiti, thought by some to be Tut's mother? Or the six princesses she bore to the pharaoh Akhenaten, including Tut's queen, Ankhesenamun? The mummies of these women have either not been found or identified. Perhaps they were removed from Akhenaten's capital at Amarna when a later king, presumably Tut, returned to the traditional capital of Thebes on the Nile opposite the Valley of the Kings. Did Tut rebury them in the Valley?

After taking out several stones blocking the doorway from the tomb shaft into the chamber, we peered through the narrow opening. Inside, we could see many large ceramic jars and several wooden coffins, some with yellow-painted faces. The press speculation was incorrect on all counts. We found no mummies in any of the tomb's seven coffins and no inscriptions to tell us for whom these coffins were initially intended.

But while studying the coffins, I discovered--in the eyes of faces painted on three of them — an intriguing link to Nefertiti...

Nefertiti's Eyes, Earl L. Ertman, Archaeology Magazine, Archaeological Institute of America, New York, USA, Volume 61, Number 2, March / April 2008.

I the obelisk of Seti I and of his son Ramses II, was born and raised a devoted Egyptian in spite of my current address. At birth, I weighed more than 250 tons, and I measured more than 24 metres’ (78’) in length. It took an army of chanting men with chisels and heavy hammers to labour me out of the granite quarries near Elephantine. Workers swarmed over me for months, midwives on a mission, as the parent rock was cut away, and I was delivered, cut by cut, blow by blow. Great levers then lifted me to an embankment, where thousands pulled at straining ropes, dragging me, gently despite my great bulk, to the Nile. There, cradled in a special barge and the focus of a mobile ceremony, I journeyed down through history, from Thebes and Abydos to Memphis and Anu.

My noisy procession came ashore at Holy Anu, City of the Sun. Seti I, beloved of Ptah, conceived me as a monumental shaft of the sun’s pure light that would stand before the temple of Ra. Before Pharaoh’s wish was accomplished, however, fate intervened: Suddenly (as we Egyptians say), old Seti became Osiris, ruler no longer of the living, but the dead.

I lay heartbroken and half-born until Seti’s son, the long-lived Ramses II, took his place as Lord of the Two Lands, Upper and Lower Egypt — in 1279 BC, as I think you would say. Like a second father, Ramses set me towering over the sun-priests at Anu. In the hush that fell as I found my footing, everything finally made sense to me. At last I saw the world as it was intended to be — not that and near, but far below, stretching out in every direction with vistas of beauty and mystery. I marvelled at the tiny upturned faces of the followers of Ra. I recognized nearby my brother obelisks, some already a thousand years older than I, arrayed across the city like a scattering family of tourists. Across the Nile, I glimpsed the pyramids that alone made me feel small among the monuments of men...

I, Obelisk, Frank L. Holt, Saudi Aramco World, September / October 2007.

Spectacular prehistoric depictions of animal and human figures created up to 6,000 years ago on Western Saharan rocks have been vandalised by United Nations peacekeepers, The Times has learnt.

Archaeological sites boasting ancient paintings and engravings of giraffes, buffalo and elephants have been defaced within the past two years by personnel attached to the UN mission, known by its French acronym, MINURSO.

Graffiti, some of it more than a metre high and sprayed with paint meant for use for marking routes, now blights the rock art at Lajuad, an isolated site known as Devil Mountain, which is regarded by the local Sahrawi population as a mystical place of great cultural significance.

Many of the UN “graffiti artists” signed and dated their work, revealing their identities and where they are from. MINURSO personnel stationed in Western Sahara come from almost 30 countries. They are monitoring a ceasefire between the occupying Moroccan forces and the Polisario Front, which is seeking independence...

See Nick Brooks' blog post linked below for many more depressing pictures of the damage. Nick Brooks is the director of the Western Sahara Project.

Three reddish-brown giraffe images watch over Nick Brooks as he struggles, hunched over, to shovel sand from the rock shelter’s floor. Some 150 meters (500’) above a sweeping, flat and desolate Western Sahara landscape, the burly environmental scientist is hoping these cliffs of Bou Dheir will reveal just when those animals roamed the plains. Three thousand years ago? Four thousand? Five thousand?

Pinning down dates like these is essential to the study of human response to drastic alterations in climate. While many scientists believe climate change was responsible for the decline of such civilizations as the Mayan, a growing number, including Brooks, believes there’s also evidence that earlier global climate shifts actually spurred the beginnings of the world’s first civilizations.

For all of Earth’s history, the only constant about global climate has been its changes. For those climate-change episodes severe enough (and recent enough) to affect human survival, the response, in most cases, must have been to migrate and continue life in a new place, to adapt to new resources — or perish. But one climatic episode in particular, a massive change during the fourth and early third millennium BC, shifted global rainfall patterns in many subtropical and temperate northern-hemisphere regions and caused severe desertification. Only that change — not any of the earlier ones — was immediately followed by the new human social arrangement we call “civilisation.” Was that because the affected humans were larger groups that were forced to share limited resources, since they were boxed into refuges with no other place to go?

“If we define civilization as the emergence of large urban centres, labour specialization, bureaucracy, a high degree of social stratification with centralized authority, monumental architecture and writing — all these emerged as the result of increased competition for resources,” Brooks told me earlier...

Desertification and Civilization, Graham Chandler, Saudi Aramco World, November / December 2007.

Evidence of the brutal lives endured by some ancient Egyptians to build the monuments of the Pharaohs has been uncovered by archaeologists.

Skeletal remains from a lost city in the middle of Egypt suggest many ordinary people died in their teenage years and lived a punishing lifestyle.

Many suffered from spinal injuries, poor nutrition and stunted growth.

The remains were found at Amarna, a new capital built on the orders of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, 3,500 years ago...

"The bones reveal a darker side to life, a striking reversal of the image that Akhenaten promoted, of an escape to sunlight and nature" says Professor Barry Kemp who is leading the excavations...

Three videos attached to this article.

Grim secrets of Pharaoh's city, John Hayes-Fisher, BBC Timewatch, UK, January 25, 2008.

With increases in family and work commitments I can no longer update this blog as frequently as I used to. I will endeavour to post interesting bits of news as I find them but cannot be as comprehensive as before.

You can also keep up with all of the latest Egyptology news by keeping an eye on Andie Byrnes' blog.

Many thanks to those who asked how I was.

Mark.

An Egyptian mummy nearly 3,000 years old is to be examined using the latest in NHS imaging technology.

Nesperennub, a male body enclosed in a linen and plaster case within a 1.5m-long coffin, will have a whole-body computerised tomography (CT) scan at University College Hospital on Monday to see if it will yield any more of its secrets.

Experts from the British Museum asked for Nesperennub to be scanned at UCH as the hospital uses the latest CT technology that allows individual images to be created at a thickness of 0.6mm.

Two radiographers from the hospital will take about four hours over a series of detailed scans on behalf of experts from the museum's Department of Egyptology...

The mummy first visited the trust in 2004 to have a CT but subsequent improvements in technology mean more could potentially be discovered.

Scientists to use NHS scan on mummy, PA via The Guardian, UK, December 09, 2007.

cf. Egyptian mummy given NHS scan, PA via The Buxton Advertiser, UK, December 08, 2007.