Kathryn Bard had "the best Christmas ever" this past December when she discovered the well-preserved timbers and riggings of pharaonic seafaring ships inside two man-made caves on Egypt's Red Sea coast.   They are the first pieces ever recovered from Egyptian seagoing vessels, and along with hieroglyphic inscriptions found near one of the caves, they promise to shed light on an elaborate network of ancient Red Sea trade.

Bard, a CAS associate professor of archaeology, and her former student Chen Sian Lim (CAS'01) had been shoveling sand for scarcely an hour on their first day of excavation on a parched bluff rising from the shore at Wadi Gawasis when a fist-sized hole appeared in the hillside.   "I stuck my hand in, and that was the entrance to the first cave," Bard says.   "Things like that don't happen very often in archaeology..."

[More]   B.U. Bridge, Boston University, Massachusetts, USA, Vol. VIII, No. 23, 18 March 2005.

Thieves have taken £15,000 worth of ancient Egyptian figurines and a human skull from Bagshaw Museum, Wilton Park.

The figurines, known as Shabtis, are carved from stone and jade. They are small statuettes which were buried with the dead to work as servants in the afterlife.

The burglars smashed a double-glazed window and broke through shutters to reach the religious artefacts overnight last Friday.

[More]   Dewsbury Today, UK, 18 March 2005.

The production of replicas of Egyptian artifacts is a team work process that reveals the beauty of our heritage helps in the spreading of our heritage, archaeological awareness, and plays a role in tourist publicity.

The Ancient Egyptian Art Revival Centre (AEARC) affiliated to the Supreme Council for Antiquities is a project that derives its glamour from of wonder of the ancient Egyptian heritage...

[More], Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, March 17,2005.

The golden jewelry collection from Egypt's Dush Temple was displayed in Cairo's Egyptian Museum on Tuesday for the first time since its discovery by French archaeologists 16 years ago.

The collection, dating back to the Greco-Roman period, features a golden diadem fronted by an image of the god Serapis and a 493-gram (one pound) necklace in the form of a snake ornamented with golden coins from the second half of the second century AD...

[More]   Middle East Times, Cyprus, March 16, 2005.