For more than a century, people have wondered what kind of girl Pesed was.

"Was she old, young, good-looking — what was her life like and how did she die?" said Samuel Farmerie, curator of cultural artefacts at Westminster College in New Wilmington, where Pesed has resided since 1885.

One of a handful of people who have seen Pesed's just delivered and painstakingly built facial reconstruction, Farmerie now knows what the 2,300-year-old Egyptian mummy looked like in the last days of her life.

So will the rest of the world in about six weeks, when Pesed's facial reconstruction is unveiled at the small Lawrence County college...

Peeling back time, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Pennsylvania, USA, February 17, 2006.

cf. Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium.

My blog has just received an entry in ABZU.

ABZU, A Guide to information related to the study of the Ancient Near East on the Web, ETANA, February 24, 2006.

For those who do not know what ABZU is, here is a ‘definition’ from their website.

Abzu is a guide to the rapidly increasing, and widely distributed data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East via the Internet.

You can keep up with what's new in ABZU by subscribing to their news feed at Bloglines: What's New in Abzu or add the Bloglines RSS feed to your favourite news aggregator. PS. Don't forget to add my blog's RRS feed to your news aggregator as well. EgyptologyBlog RSS Feed

The Autumn 2005 issue of the bulletin of Egyptian Archaeology the Egyptian Exploration Society, number 27, is available now. A short summary of its contents follows.

• UNESCO and Qasr Ibrim
  During the 2005 excavation season at Qasr Ibrim, a delegation from UNESCO made a brief visit to the site as part of a wider assessment of Nubia and Egypt. The aim of the inspection was to identify key sites at which UNESCO might become involved in conservation, restoration, the development of site management programmes, and the training of those involved in these projects.Pamela Rose reports.
• Mut el-Kharab: Seth's city in Dakhleh Oasis
  Mut el-Kharab preserves the remains of the local cult centre of the god Seth and an Adjacent cemetery. Colin Hope summarizes the results of the excavations at this site in Dakhleh Oasis which have revealed activity from the early Old Kingdom to the Mamluk Period.
• Satellites and survey in Middle Egypt
  Since 2004 a British mission [from Cambridge University] has been using satellite remote sensing to survey an area on the west bank opposite Tell-el-Amarna. Sarah Parcak reports on the project’s work.
• Egypt’s earliest granaries: evidence from the Fayum
  The Fayum Project of the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands (RUG), worked in autumn 2004 in the region north of Lake Qarun, in the Fayum. Willeke Wendrich and René Cappers describe the results of the project’s work.
• ‘Origines 2005’, Toulouse
  In September 2005, The Second International Conference on the Origins of the Egyptian State took place in Toulouse. Joanne Rowland summaries the event.
• The ancient landscapes and waterscapes of Karnak
  In spring 2002 a programme of augering and cartographic studies to study past landscapes at Karnak was begun. Angus Graham and Judith Bunbury report on the first three seasons of work, which reveal a migrating Nile and temple development on newly found land.
• The Middle Kingdom temple of Amun at Karnak
  Since 2002 renewed excavations in the central area of the temple of Amun-Re at Karnak have uncovered well-organized, massive mud-brick foundations. Thanks to this discovery, Guillaume Charloux presents here a new proposed reconstruction of the religious complex in the Middle Kingdom.
• In search of Cleopatra’s temple
  Statue fragments found in Alexandria may be from one of the city’s largest temples. In 2004 Sally-Ann Ashton led a University of Cambridge / EES team trying to locate the temple site.
• New research in the Abu Bakr cemetery at Giza
  Between 1949 and 1976 Abdel-Moneim Abu Bakr excavated at Giza, on behalf of Cairo University, in the far north-west corner of the western mastaba-tombs. In March 2000 a joint expedition of Cairo University and Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, = directed by Tohfa Handoussa and Edward Brovarski, resumed work there for the purpose of recording and publishing the tombs.
• Ancient Egypt at the Manchester Museum
  The University of Manchester’s collection of Egyptian antiquities numbers more than 15,000 objects, and still counting. Christina Riggs takes readers behind the scenes and explains how the collection is being made accessible for public engagement as well as academic research.

Egyptian Archaeology, EES, London, UK, No. 27, Autumn 2005.

You can buy the EES' Egyptian Archaeology Magazine via Oxbow Books.

The Third Symposium on Coptic Studies that took place at the White Monastery of St Shenoude west of Sohag early this month cast light on the life and times of an extraordinary Upper Egyptian monk, says Jill Kamil.

Who would have thought that a symposium on Coptic studies would draw so much attention outside the narrow field of specialists in the discipline? The organisers of the international gathering on "Christianity and Monasticism in the Region of Sohag" certainly did not expect it, even though they did, in a sense, set the ball rolling.

Preparations for the convention had been ongoing for much longer than usual — mainly because the area has seen so little tourist activity for many years now — and more than the groundbreaking spadework was needed. Apart from accommodation, catering, transport and appropriate technology at the White Monastery, the chosen venue of the symposium, there was the question of security. Sohag's residents soon became aware that something unusual was going on and wanted to know what the activity was all about...

Desert fathers in the limelight, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 783, February 23 - March 01, 2006.

Developing the panoramic surroundings of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Fustat is on the government's priority list now that Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif has given the go ahead, says Nevine El-Aref.

Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif called the planned National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation "one of the country's mega projects" when he spoke to reporters last Saturday after touring the museum site together with the Cairo governor and the ministers of construction, tourism and environment. The tour to check on the museum's progress came at the invitation of the Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni.

Nazif went on to say that the museum would not only help preserve Egypt's cultural heritage but would also encourage tourism by focussing on Egypt's diverse civilisation from the pre-dynastic to the modern eras. This would satisfy the taste of all visitors, he said...

View to a museum, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 783, February 23 - March 01, 2006.

Egypt has asked the Saint Louis Art Museum to return a 3,000-year-old funerary mask of a mummy depicting a woman, which it said disappeared from the Egyptian Museum decades ago, antiquities officials said Thursday.

The Supreme Council of Antiquities said it formally requested the return of the piece, known as the mask of Ka Nefer Nefer, which the museum says dates back to the 19th Dynasty, 1307-1196 BC.

"The mask is in a very well preserved condition and it features the bust of a young lady called Ka Nefer Nefer ... It has a combination of glass inlaid eyes, a face covered with gold and a wig," Egypt's antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass, said...

Egypt asks Saint Louis Art Museum to return mummy mask, AP via Kansas City Star, Missouri, USA, February 23, 2006.

cf. Egypt seeks return of ancient mask, AP via Al Jazeera, Qatar, February 24, 2006.

cf. Egypt asks a U.S. museum to return a mummy mask disappeared 45 years ago, Pravda, Russia, February 24, 2006.

With bountiful gold mines, powerful kings and fabulous cities, ancient Nubia was a great black African civilization that sprouted and grew 5,000 years ago alongside Pharaonic Egypt, two empires that were sometimes friends and often enemies.

Few places in the world are more important to the preservation of Nubian history, still relatively little studied, than the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, 1155 E. 58th St. On Saturday, the museum will open only the second permanent museum gallery in the U.S. devoted to the Nubians; the other is at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

The opening marks the end of the final phase of the institute's 11-year remodelling project, which began in 1995 when the museum closed completely to allow construction of a major addition housing offices, workrooms, storage spaces and vital climate control equipment. Each of the museum's permanent galleries has been stripped and completely reconfigured...

Artefacts get a new home, Chicago Tribune, Illinois, USA, February 22, 2006.