In February, a headline-grabbing announcement came out of Egypt. Excavators had uncovered what appeared to be the first ancient tomb to be found in the Valley of the Kings since the discovery of King Tutankhamen's in 1922. Because all burials there were done by order of the pharaohs, the bodies stood a good chance of being royalty. But last week, Egyptian authorities changed their assessment and said the chamber was not a tomb. So what is it? Carter Lupton, Milwaukee Public Museum curator of ancient history, was one of the few researchers allowed to visit the new find. He talked to Journal Sentinel reporter Jackie Loohauis...

Ancient Egyptian chamber raises questions — and new interest, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin, USA, March 21, 2006.

The Bowen Branch of the Detroit Public Library held a workshop on Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Culture on Thursday as part of Black History Month. Joan Gartland, one of the librarians at the Bowen Branch, led the workshop and discussion.

In a brightly lit section of the library, residents from all across metropolitan Detroit were in attendance, including Wayne State alumni Medgar Clark-Alum.

Gartland discussed the approximate date of the recently found tomb in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor and the curses of tomb raiders...

Deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, The South End, Wayne State University, Michigan, USA, February 20, 2006.

Egyptologist Salima Ikram discusses ancient rock art discovered this field season in the forbidding Western Desert.

Best known for her work on ancient human and animal mummies with the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Salima Ikram is also co-director of the North Kharga Oasis Survey (NKOS), which is documenting for the first time the myriad forts the Romans built on the edge of Egypt's Western Desert, the empire's African frontier in the third and fourth centuries A.D. For the past five years, Ikram and her partner Corinna Rossi have catalogued the forts, their extensive system of aqueduct-fed fields, and the hundreds of tombs surrounding them. About 100 miles west of Luxor, these sites are isolated and have generally been safe from looters and careless adventure tourists, but two years ago one fort suffered terrible destruction when looters bulldozed its temple in search of gold. Ikram found the damage months later while taking potential NKOS funders on a tour of the forts. She was devastated. "It's terrible when you see your temples turned into piles of dirt," she said. "I was in tears."

On a more positive note, unexpected archaeological finds have turned up on travel routes between this fort, known as Ayn Amur, and one called Umm el-Dabadib, in the northern region of the Kharga Oasis: large sandstone rocks with beautifully etched petroglyphs. Most are found at two sites the archaeologists dubbed Split Rock and Snake Valley...

Rock the Oasis, Archaeology Magazine, New York, USA, March 13, 2006.

cf. In Egypt, Archaeologists Fly Kites to Detect Ancient Sites, National Geographic News, District of Columbia, USA, September 24, 2003.