A thousand years' worth of offerings to an ancient Egyptian jackal god are the subject of an exhibition that opened on Thursday at Cairo's Egyptian Museum.

The exhibition, "Anubis, Upwawet and Other Deities," is based on votive offerings that British archaeologist Gerald Wainwright found in a tomb built around 1800 or 1900 BC near the southern town of Assiut.

The tomb originally belonged to a local hereditary prince, but for more than 1,000 years local people used it as a shrine for personal devotion, filling it with tablets dedicated to the local jackal god Upwawet.

"The stelae (tablets) offer us unrivalled evidence about the social history of the region. Much may be gleaned from the names and occupations of the people (who dedicated them to Upwawet)," the museum said in a statement...

Egypt Museum airs 1,000 years of jackal god gifts, Reuters via Yahoo! News, USA, March 01, 2007.

A short while ago, I had the privilege of being given a tour of the Griffith Institute Archives here in Oxford by its director, Dr. Jaromir Malek. It is one of the most renowned Egyptological archives in the world and it houses among many other things, all the personal papers of Howard Carter, the excavator of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

It seemed almost as chilly as outside when we ventured into the archive room, which is constantly kept at 18 degrees to preserve the fragile documents it houses, but as I glanced up at the famous portrait of Carter, that I’d seen reproduced many times in books, hanging on the wall, I knew that there were many ‘wonderful things’ to come.

You can see them for yourself on the Griffith Institute website here. Also, check out some of the other links I’ve included and take a look at the amazing resources the Griffith has made available online...

The Griffith Institute Archives, Margaret Maitland, The Eloquent Peasant, UK, March 05, 2007.