Alan Eames, a cultural anthropologist who specializes in the study of beer in ancient societies, will explain how beer and witchcraft go hand-in-hand tonight at the British Beer Company in Walpole.

His presentation is called "Order of the Goblin...

Beer, Eames said, has played an important part in societies, such as those in ancient Egypt. The beer was basically a form of non-perishable liquid bread. The wealthy Egyptians, when they died, would have an entire brewery buried with them.

"No society was more immersed in beer than the Egyptians," said Eames. "They assumed what we want in this life, we would want in the afterlife."

Eames is fascinating to listen to, either while talking about legends or his own experiences with indigenous people in various countries...

Any excuse to post about beer!

The beer nut: Spooky beer stories, Norman Miller, Milford Daily News, Kansas, USA, October 25, 2006.

Last night's 9 p.m. ET/10 p.m. PT broadcast of the new one-hour special, King Tut's Mystery Tomb Opened was a huge success for Discovery Channel Canada, drawing a record-setting 407,000 viewers A25-54 and 314,000 viewers A18-49 in the Sunday night "Discovery Presents" timeslot. This hour is the highest ever A25-54 "Discovery Presents" audience in the channel's 11 year history. King Tut's Mystery Tomb Opened surpassed previous record holder, Nefertiti Resurrected, which attracted 371,000 viewers in that demo when it premiered in August 2003.

The lead-in companion special, Egypt's New Tomb Revealed, which aired last night at 8 p.m. ET/9 p.m. PT, also drew great numbers for Discovery Channel, attracting 263,000 viewers A25-54 and 193,000 A18-49. These gains represent an increase of +109 per cent and +56 per cent over last October 2005's "Discovery Presents" average.

These two specials follow the Discovery Quest expedition team as they sift through ancient crypts and artefacts to uncover the true identity of the unknown crypt linked to King Tutankhamun. Located less than 50 feet from the tomb of King Tutankhamun (KV62), both specials present startling new information about the remains found in the ancient burial grounds. The expedition team of world-renowned archaeologists excavate and explore this new cache (KV63) — first discovered in the Valley of the Kings in February 2006 — unearthing coffins and delicate artefacts, sifting through intricate inscriptions and discovering unprecedented treasures...

Discovery Channel Canada Nets New Audience Record With King Tut's Mystery Tomb Opened, Channel Canada, Canada, October 23, 2006.

Finding Egyptian tombs is a tricky business that often requires a fair amount of luck. Now geologists have found a way to take some of the chance out of the equation.

While cruising the Nile on a tour of Egypt, Katarin Parizek of Pennsylvania State University in State College noticed that many of the cavelike tombs that house the mummified remains of Egyptian royalty were carved in regions rich in limestone. These areas were likely chosen by the ancient Egyptians because limestone is relatively soft and well suited for excavating. What's more, Parizek — who teaches digital photography and was trained as a geologist — noticed that many of the tombs, including those in the famous Valley of the Kings near the city of Luxor, are located in fracture zones, which are even weaker — and thus more easily carved out by the tomb builders.

After returning to the valley with her father, Penn State geologist Richard Parizek, to map the fracture zones and tomb locations, the two predicted that hidden tombs might be found by following fracture traces on the surface. They were proven right last February when the 63rd known tomb in the area was discovered in a fracture zone...

Unfortunately, the same geology that makes the Valley of the Kings ideal for digging tombs also leaves those tombs susceptible to water damage. Limestone is very permeable rock, and fracture zones are even more easily penetrated by water...

A New Way to Find Hidden Tombs, Betsy Mason, Science Magazine, American Association for the Advancement of Science, USA, October 24, 2006.

cf. Previously: Geological feature key to protecting tombs.

I was able to see some of those beautiful treasures recently on a trip to the Field Museum of History in Chicago. On loan from Egypt, the King Tut artefacts, displayed in a special exposition currently at the museum, comprise only a small fraction of what was inside the tomb. What is in Chicago now, though, is still very impressive. There may not be a greater collection of gold in the United States at this moment, outside of Ft. Knox!

Individual audiotapes with personal earphones were available as people toured the exhibit, and I walked around for several hours listening to Egyptian actor Omar Sharif explain a lot of back-story on the King Tut items I was viewing.

There were many vessels and bowls and utensils King Tut’s subjects thought he would need in the afterlife. There were small, painted boats to carry him “to the beyond.” There were chairs and small cabinets. There were so many gold statues, there was gold jewellery and there was a stunning, simple, hand-made gold crown. There was just gold, as Carter said, “everywhere...”

King Tut's treasure worth the Windy City traffic, Princeton Daily Clarion, Indiana, USA, October 26, 2006.

Research Curator, Ancient Egypt and the Sudan, British Museum, UK, England, London.

As the Research Curator, you will be responsible for researching and cataloguing Coptic material from the archaeological site of Hagr Edfu in Upper Egypt in connection with work currently being carried out by The British Museum at the site...

Applications close Monday 30th.

Jobs: Research Curator, Ancient Egypt and the Sudan, Arts Hub, Australia, October 2006.

You’ve gone on a two-week guided tour of Egypt, and now you’re in Cairo. This morning, you went to the Egyptian Museum and peered at Tutankhamun’s funerary mask in a densely sweating crowd. This afternoon, you’re in a coach coming back from the Pyramids. Your fellow tourists are full of complaints about the lewd liberties taken by the camel-drivers, you're laden down with tawdry purchases, and the coach is stuck in traffic on one of the flyovers that cut through central Cairo. You look out, and in the middle of the expanse of biscuit-dry roofs is an extraordinary thing: a delicate stone pinnacle, carved into elaborate, fantastic forms. A little farther away, another and another; a dome rippling with lace-like arabesques.

The coach moves on and the disloyal thought occurs to you: why aren't we looking at that? But you’re flying to Luxor tomorrow and there won’t be time.

It’s a great oddity. Millions of tourists go to Cairo, and almost all of them take the same route, visiting only the ancient relics at Giza and in the Egyptian Museum. But Cairo was not a city of the ancient Egyptians. The city was founded by the Copts as Babylon — one theory holds that its name has nothing to do with the biblical city, but rather Bab il-On, the Gate of On. After the Arab conquest in 641, it became perhaps the greatest Islamic city in the world...

My secret Cairo, Philip Hensher, The Times, UK, October 28, 2006.

All serious researchers must wish to leave their subjects at least in the condition in which they found them. This might not be a problem for medieval Latin scholars, glycobiologists or infrared astronomers. But spare a thought for the Egyptologists who must record, curate, conserve and study the things they recover from the silent earth and simultaneously work out how to stop the whole lot turning back into pile of sand and broken pottery in a generation.

Kent Weeks, of the American University of Cairo, launched the Theban Mapping Project more than 20 years ago simply because no precise plan existed of the 60 or so tombs in the Valley of the Kings. He is still at it, not least because in the course of taking a closer look at a tomb known as KV5, under threat from a tourist car park, "undecorated, unimportant, uninteresting, unnecessary to save," he made the biggest find in Egyptology: 150 chambers and still counting. But there's the catch: as he and his team crawl through the rubble and flash flood debris of 3,000 years, trying delicately to excavate the burial chambers of the sons of Ramses II, more than 7,000 tourists a day are jostling their way into some of the other tombs in the Valley of the Kings, playing merry hell with the heat and humidity levels in dark places that have survived 30 centuries, but may not survive the next 30 years.

It isn't just the tourists. Egypt's history is under threat from growing cities, agriculture, manufacturing and pollution. So Prof Weeks and his colleagues — at the request of the Egyptian antiquities authorities — have drawn up and posted on the web a master plan to save ancient Thebes from further decay and, at the same time, keep it on the tourist map...

Preserving ancient treasures, Tim Radford, The Guardian, UK, October 27, 2006.

cf. The Theban Mapping Project Valley of the Kings Masterplan.

Seeing dead people is a way of life for Gerald Conlogue.

And although they're shrouded in mystery when he meets them, it is Conlogue's job to demystify his mummified acquaintances by uncovering the truth about them.

"What is amazing is, we think of Egypt as being the place where mummies are. Mummies are everywhere," Conlogue told an audience of about 20 people, half of them teenagers and younger.

A professor at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conlogue is co-executive director, along with Ron Beckett, of Quinnipiac's Bioanthropology Research Institute. In examining mummies, the scientists use a technique they pioneered using radiography and endoscopy, which minimizes the possibility of damage.

"Most of what we do is adapt medical imaging techniques to other types of situations," Conlogue said...

Professor unwraps truth of mummies, Felicia Hunter, The Connecticut Post, Connecticut, USA, October 25, 2006.

cf. The Mummy Roadshow.