The March / April 2006 issue of Archaeology Magazine is out now. It contains an article by Bob Brier entitled The Mystery of Unknown Man E.

Was a mummy found in less-than-royal wrappings a disgraced prince who plotted to murder his father, Ramesses III?

On a day at the end of June 1886, Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, was unwrapping the mummies of kings and queens found in a cache at Deir el-Bahri, near the Valley of the Kings. Inside a plain, undecorated coffin that offered no clues to the deceased's identity, Maspero found something that shocked him. There, wrapped in a sheepskin — a ritually unclean object for ancient Egyptians —was a young man, hands and feet bound, who seemed to be screaming. There was no incision on the left abdomen, through which the embalmers normally removed the internal organs; the man had not been afforded the traditional mummification. Maspero was convinced there had been foul play...

Daniel Fouquet, the physician who examined the mummy at the time, agreed that he had been poisoned and said, "the last convulsions of horrid agony can, after thousands of years, still be seen." A chemist named Mathey, who did some analyses on the mummy, felt that "the wretched man must have been deliberately asphyxiated —most likely by being buried alive..."

An abstract is online here The Mystery of Unknown Man E, Bob Brier, Archaeology Magazine, New York, USA, Volume 59 Number 2, March / April 2006.

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Archaeology magazine has a review of Antiquity & Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites.

In 1839, the scientist François Arago introduced Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre's new way of capturing images to an excited audience in Paris. Arago himself was enthusiastic about it: "To copy the millions of hieroglyphs that cover even the exterior of the great monuments of Thebes, Memphis, Karnak, and others would require decades of time and legions of draftsmen. By daguerreotype, one person would suffice to accomplish this immense work successfully." That dream was never achieved, but the recording of archaeological monuments began almost as soon as Daguerre's and other photographic techniques were devised. More than 100 such images, made between 1840 and 1880, appear in Antiquity & Photography. Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (2005: J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, $65.00 / Thames and Hudson, London, £36.00 hardcover).

The volume consists of four long essays — an overview, assessments of early practitioners Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey and William James Stillman, and an in-depth look at Athens. An additional two "portfolios" complement the essays, presenting many images with basic information rather than a detailed discussion. The first portfolio is a sample of works by early French photographers and Briton Francis Frith in Egypt. The second has images by various photographers in Rome and Pompeii, as well as a number produced by the French firm of Braun, Clément, and Cie at various sites...

Photograph as Artifact, Mark Rose, Archaeology Magazine, New York, USA, Volume 59, Number 1, January / February 2006.

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The only map provided on the web so far is on the BBC website and it is actually incorrect.

Aayko Eyma of the EEF Forum has forwarded me the following maps for comparison KV63 - where it is NOT and KV63 - where it IS.

cf. Pharaonic tomb find stuns Egypt, BBC News, UK, February 10, 2006.

Someone has been rather fleet of foot and posted a KV63 page on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: KV63

The discovery of this Egyptian tomb is so big you can't even put a price tag on it. Nothing like this has been found since King Tut's tomb was uncovered in 1922. Yet, the University of Memphis sponsored archaeology team who made the discovery is scraping by on a shoe string budget.

There are five mummies in the tomb that have remained untouched and unseen for over three thousand years. Now for the rest of time they will be linked to the University of Memphis. Dr. Mariam Ayad, with the University, says the archaeological team actually made the discovery by accident when they were clearing out some workman huts. "Underneath the floor of one of the huts they discovered the shaft," says Ayad. After removing centuries worth of sand they found an unknown tomb in an area archaeologists have been digging in for decades. "For eighty-four years people have assumed there are no more tombs there. So, the combination of the intact find and where it was found is incredible," says Ayad. Ayad says you can't put a price tag on the publicity the University of Memphis has made from this discovery. But, you can put one on what the archaeology team will need to stay and continue their work. "It's all privately funded donations that are administered by the University of Memphis," says Ayad. Donations are what allows the team to work in Egypt. The country has asked them to stay and catalog the artefacts, but that will take more money.

They have received some funds from an out of sate donor. If you would like to give money call the University of Memphis at 901 678-2555 for more information.

Memphis Archaeologists Make Priceless Find But Still Need Funds, WREG-TV, Tennessee, February 15, 2006.

cf. Video version U of M Tomb Money, WREG-TV, Tennessee, February 15, 2006.

It seems that Tutankhamen, the teenage king of ancient Egypt, sloped off to the afterlife with a good supply of fine white wine. It's a surprising discovery, considering there is no record of white wine in Egypt until the 3rd century AD, 1600 years after the young pharaoh died.

Rosa Lamuela-Raventós and her colleagues from the University of Barcelona, Spain, used liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to analyse the residue from six of the jars in Tutankhamen's tomb. All contained tartaric acid, a chemical characteristic of grapes, but only one contained syringic acid, found in the skin of red grapes. It's this skin that gives red wine its colour.

The absence of the chemical in the other five jars suggests the wine in them was white. Because it is unlikely Egyptian wine makers would have removed red grape skins to create white wines as modern wine makers do, white grapes probably did exist in Tutankhamen's time...

Tutankhamen liked his wine white, New Scientist, UK, Issue 2539, p. 22, February 16, 2006.

cf. White wine was Tutankhamen's afterlife tipple, Sapa-AFP via IOL, South Africa, February 16, 2006.

cf. King Tut's taste, Yahoo! News, USA, February 16, 2006.

Previous stories have all been of the ‘King Tut liked red wine’ variety.

On February 16th 1923, the burial chamber of King Tutankhamen’s recently unearthed tomb, the sixty-second in the valley, was unsealed in Egypt’ Valley of the Kings by Howard Carter.

The New York Times have the full text of their original 1923 article here: Tut-ankh-Amen's Inner Tomb is Opened Revealing Undreamed of Splendors, Still Untouched After 3,400 Years, New York Times, New York, USA, February 16, 1923.

[Mohammed Zakaria] Goneim assembled a crew "from the peasant class" and began to excavate just east of the Djoser pyramid. It was a dig that would come to define his life.

"To our delight, on the first day a massive wall of rubble-coursed masonry appeared," Goneim would write. The excavation crew quickly assembled a narrow-gauge railway, or decauville, to cart away sand and rock. Unearthed, the wall proved to be a buttressing device for a structure that had been built on a depression in the desert floor. Goneim soon concluded he was excavating a site "several times the size of Trafalgar Square in London."

Unlike the smooth-sided pyramids of later dynasties, Djoser's is built of smaller stone blocks that incline toward a central core of rubble. As Goneim's excavation progressed, the new site's structural similarity to Djoser led the archaeologist to believe he might have uncovered the "buried" pyramid of a hitherto-unknown pharaoh of the Third Dynasty...

This article is ten pages long!

Out of Egypt. From a long-buried pyramid to the Saint Louis Art Museum: The mysterious voyage of the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask, Riverfront Times, Missouri, February 15, 2006.

cf. Previous post: This mask belongs to Egypt.

Archaeologists and officials meeting in Cairo on Wednesday deplored the deterioration of the country's ancient sites, which they attributed both to government agencies and to private individuals.

The assault, they said, runs from illegal construction activities to farming.

Zahi Hawass, director general of the Supreme Council for Antiquities, said that there were 6,000 such cases in 2003 but gave no more recent figures.

The governor of Cairo, Abdel Azim Wazir, said "certain government agencies degrade archaeological sites...

For his part, Hawass said that as many of 90 percent of the caretakers of sites allow improper activities in exchange for bribes...

Deterioration of Egypt archaeological sites deplored, Middle East Times, Cyprus, February 16, 2006.

Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, is asking the St Louis Museum of Art to return an antiquity he says was looted from Saqqara.

The St Louis Art Museum is facing allegations that an ancient Egyptian mask in its collection was stolen from a warehouse in Saqqara, Egypt in the 1980s.

Dr Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), told The Art Newspaper that he believes the so-called Mask of Ka-nefer-nefer was removed from Egypt illegally and that the SCA is now taking steps to launch an official restitution request...

“This mask belongs to Egypt”, The Art Newspaper, UK, February 15, 2006.