The pharaohs of ancient Egypt owed their existence to prehistoric climate change in the eastern Sahara, according to an exhaustive study of archaeological data that bolsters this theory.

Starting at about 8500 B.C., researchers say, broad swaths of what are now Egypt, Chad, Libya, and Sudan experienced a "sudden onset of humid conditions."

For centuries the region supported savannahs full of wildlife, lush acacia forests, and areas so swampy they were uninhabitable.

During this time the prehistoric peoples of the eastern Sahara followed the rains to keep pace with the most hospitable ecosystems.

But around 5300 B.C. this climate-driven environmental abundance started to decline, and most humans began leaving the increasingly arid region.

"Around 5,500 to 6,000 years ago the Egyptian Sahara became so dry that nobody could survive there," said Stefan Kröpelin, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Cologne in Germany and study co-author...

Exodus From Drying Sahara Gave Rise to Pharaohs, Study Says, Sean Markey, National geographic News, District of Columbia, USA, July 20, 2006.

cf. Ancient humans 'followed rains', Helen Briggs, BBC News, UK, July 21, 2006.

[T]his month, as Greece stepped up its campaign against the illegal antiquities trade and announced it would demand the repatriation of hundreds of looted works, the statue again became the focus of scrutiny. Mr Aboutaam may have exercised due diligence when he bought the masterpiece but authorities in Athens believe that before it entered his showroom it was passed through a chain of traffickers on the underground market. "We're investigating this statue and whether it was stolen very closely," says Giorgos Gligoris, who heads Greece's art squad. "We believe that it was, that it's a typical case of antiquities theft. We're in the process of studying photographs. The Italians, we have learned, may be claiming it and so may we. Our information from informers is that it was found in the Ionian Sea and then passed on, through I don't know how many hands, before being sold."

From his sixth-floor office in the Orwellian building that is the Athens police headquarters, the detective oversees a web of informants in and outside Greece. Among his targets is the freeport in Geneva where the sellers of museum-quality pieces often store their stock and where specialists believe the illicit journey of plundered art into some of the world's greatest museums often begins.

"We have people in Geneva because it seems that containers always pass through the freeport," he says. "Smugglers like Switzerland, with its flexible laws and good location, but they can see we're closing in on them..."

It's art squad v tomb raiders as Greece reclaims its pillaged past, Helena Smith, The Guardian, UK, July 21, 2006.

That a victim of a Palestinian suicide bombing would seek legal redress from an American museum might seem baffling to the uninitiated. But for Daniel Miller, 27, it is simply a way of extracting justice from a government that he blames for his suffering.

Because Iran helped to train and support members of Hamas, the militant group that carried out the attack along a Jerusalem shopping promenade in 1997, Mr. Miller and four other Americans who survived the attack decided to seek damages from the Iranian government in American courts.

In 2001 they won a judgment against Iran in federal court in Chicago; in 2003 a United States District judge in Washington awarded them about $71 million in compensatory damages and $180 million in punitive damages, to be paid by the Iranian government, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyer.

To collect on the judgment, the plaintiffs seized upon an unusual strategy shortly afterward: laying claim to some 2,500-year-old cuneiform tablets that are on loan from Iran to the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. The survivors are demanding that the university sell the tablets, unearthed by American archaeologists at the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis in the 1930s, and compensate them with the proceeds.

Last week the Iranian government finally took notice, dispatching a Washington lawyer to District Court in Chicago to plead its case. In a hearing yesterday Iran was given until Aug. 21 [2006] to respond to the suit...

In a Lawsuit Aimed at Iran, Terror Victims Focus on Ancient Artefacts in a Chicago Museum, Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, New York, USA, July 18, 2006.

Iran, U.S. Allied in Protecting Artefacts

In a case that raises issues of victims’ rights and cultural heritage, Rhode Island lawyer David J. Strachman aims to seize and sell Iranian property — including thousands of 2,500-year-old clay artefacts known as the Persepolis tablets — and channel the profits to victims of the 1997 terrorist attack...

Iran, U.S. Allied in Protecting Artefacts, Peter Slevin, The Washington Post, District of Columbia, USA, July 18, 2006.

More than a hundred years ago, German archaeologists began to excavate the remarkable tel (mound) of Megiddo. Since then, artefacts galore from 26 layers of civilization built on top of one another have been discovered. However, the site still has many untapped secrets waiting for a trowel or shovel to unearth and expose them to the light of the new millennium.

Scores of students from Israel and abroad, including archaeology buffs of all ages, are hard at work hoping to discover the unknown as they participate in this season's dig on and around Tel Megiddo.

For 25 years a German team worked the site, mentioned in ancient Egyptian writings as Thutmose III — one of the mightiest kings of Egypt — waged war upon the city in 1478 BCE. The battle was described for posterity in hieroglyphic detail on the walls of his upper Egypt temple.

The Germans were followed by teams from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and financed by John D. Rockefeller Jr., some of their finds ending up in the US...

Dig this tel, Lydia Aisenberg, Jerusalem Post, Israel, July 13, 2006.

War, politics, religious movements and natural disasters — all key players in the formation of human history. Now, Kathleen Stewart Howe has just added one more chief element to the list, one that most people would never consider as being pivotal in history: photography. Howe, the Sarah Rempel & Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Museum of Art and professor of art history at Pomona College, has found that photography played a significant role in shaping archaeology, especially Egyptology, from its very beginnings.

In her March 30 [2006] lecture entitled, “Egypt Recovered: Early Photographic Surveys and the Development of Egyptology,” Howe exposed photography’s dramatic impact on Egyptology. Since its introduction to the public in 1839, photography has been used as a record-keeper for dozens of archaeological expeditions to Egypt. During her informative oration at the Getty Villa, Howe enlightened the audience about three of the most important photographers and their expeditions: Maxime Du Camp, Félix Teynard, and John Beasley Greene.

According to Howe, Du Camp was the first photographer who wanted to “collect impressions of the orient,” which he did through a series of general views and close-up views of hieroglyphic tablets of monuments that he took during his Egyptian expedition. He used daguerreotypes to preserve the images and to create the first photographic travel book.

A few years after Du Camp’s expedition, Teynard travelled to Egypt in hopes of being able to convey a sense of experience through his photographs by actually spending time around the ancient sites. He produced a photographic atlas of Egypt, which included the first photographs of vandalized and defaced monuments.

Greene travelled to Egypt in the 1850s, after Du Camp and Teynard, but he went there as an excavator. He travelled to Egypt and found more to excavate than he had ever imagined existed. He only took photographs in order to keep a record of the excavations in which he participated, such as that of the Sphinx. It was Greene who kept the first systematic documentation of any excavation in history.

Howe said that these photographers have left a legacy that enables people today to understand the origins of both photography and Egyptology...

Modern technology uncovers the glory of ancient Egypt, Megan Westervelt, Pepperdine University, California, USA, July 14, 2006, via EEF News.

Prehistoric humans roamed the world's largest desert for some 5,000 years, archaeologists have revealed.

The Eastern Sahara of Egypt, Sudan, Libya and Chad was home to nomadic people who followed rains that turned the desert into grassland.

When the landscape dried up about 7,000 years ago, there was a mass exodus to the Nile and other parts of Africa.

The close link between human settlement and climate has lessons for today, researchers report in Science...

Ancient humans 'followed rains', Helen Briggs, BBC News, UK, July 21, 2006.

The past three months have not been easy for ALKAN Holding Company (AHC) chairman Mohamed Nosseir, locked as he has been in a bitter feud not only with the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) but, equally, with archaeologists and intellectuals resentful of a LE2.5 billion project to build the Cairo Financial and Tourist Centre (CFTC), a 260,000-square metre business and tourism megacomplex overlooking the Citadel. An ambitious project for which land has been set aside at the foot of the Muqattam Hills, the complex — initially scheduled for completion in 2002 — includes eight office towers, entertainment and shopping facilities, a 600-room five-star hotel and — the highlight, a CFTC donation — a glass-domed trading floor modelled on those of London, Tokyo and New York for the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange (CASE), which agreed to be headquartered there when the project was launched in 1999 but has, since the delay, reportedly backed out; rumour has it that CASE will move, rather, to the Smart Village on the Cairo-Alexandria highway.

Launched early February, the project was halted by Cairo Governor Abdel-Azim Waziri in response to a SCA intervention stating that the project, undertaken without the permission of the SCA Permanent Committee for Islamic and Coptic Antiquities (which refused to grant it in 2001 and again in 2005) constituted an encroachment on an archaeological site, violating Antiquities Law 117 of 1983. Events took a new turn as the media cashed in on the debate, with two seminars held at the Press Syndicate and the Supreme Council of Culture, with numerous parties accusing ALKAN of blocking the view of the Citadel, posing a threat to Islamic monuments and using explosives, thereby undermining the Citadel foundations and damaging an Ancient Egyptian quarry. According to the SCA Islamic and Coptic Antiquities Department head Abdullah Kamel, the project threatens not only the eastern side of the Citadel but the Mohamed Ali Fortress and the neighbouring Jacob Shah Al-Mehmendar dome as well. He added that the Muqattam Hills are already fragile: "The vibration of bulldozers and heavy construction equipment are a daily threat. When the committee granted preliminary approval in May 2006," Kamel elaborates on the official dynamics of the procedure, "it was by proxy, as it were, among a handful of members awaiting the 70-member monthly meeting. At the meeting the verdict was to form another committee to study all possible damage and take legal action where necessary." However, Kamel added, the SCA found out that ALKAN had started the construction work before getting the final approval on the project. In fact by 5 June, the project had been officially rejected again and the SCA demanded that ALKAN provide the required technical reports and abide by stipulations that the building should not be higher than the Citadel's eastern wall in the area from Al-Mubalat to the Al-Remeila Towers and that the architectural style be in harmony with the surroundings...

Who's afraid of Saladin?, Nevine El-Aref, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 804, July 20 - 26, 2006.

In the year 1417 a ceremony was held to mark the opening of the Al-Moayyad Sheikh Mosque in Al-Muezz Street. This event, so splendid that it has passed down in legend, was replayed last Sunday evening when the Ministry of Culture celebrated the completion of the mosque's seven-year restoration.

The honey-coloured mosque and mausoleum of Al-Moayyad Sheikh stands on the left hand side as one passes through the newly-restored gate of Bab Zuweila, one of the three Fatimid gates leading to the Khan Al-Khalili, or bazaar section, of Cairo. After its long restoration, the mosque is now ready to receive worshippers and visitors.

This edifice is a great example of Mamluke architecture. It has four façades. The main gate, a huge wooden door inlaid with copper, leads to a small vestibule opening on to the mausoleum where Sheikh Al-Moayyad and his eldest son are buried. A short corridor leads to the mosque's open court with its four colonnaded Iwans. The largest of these, the Iwan Al-Qibla, has a wooden ceiling decorated with gilded foliage. The mosque's two soaring minarets were actually constructed on the fabric of Bab Zuweila.

On the day of the reopening, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif and Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, along with scores of other Egyptian ministries and top government officials, watched a 15-minute documentary film narrating in depth the various restoration stages of the mosque — which cost the Ministry of Culture LE14 million...

From prison to prayers, Nevine El-Aref, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 804, July 20 - 26, 2006.