The North Carolina Museum of Art has chosen MarketSmart Advertising, a full-service, integrated marketing communications firm and part of Think Partnership’s Think Advertising division, to develop and implement a comprehensive media plan for the upcoming exhibit “Temples and Tombs: Treasures of Egyptian Art from The British Museum.” The exhibit will bring 85 masterworks and seldom-seen treasures to the Triangle area April 15 through July 8 [2007].

“Working with the Museum is an honour — especially during this time of renovation and growth,” said Jan Johnson, MarketSmart’s director of account management. “The Museum experienced unprecedented success with the ‘Monet in Normandy’ exhibit, and we want to help them maintain momentum with ‘Temples and Tombs...’”

North Carolina Museum of Art Selects MarketSmart Advertising to Help Promote Egyptian Exhibit, PR.com, USA, April 05, 2007.

For orthodontists, patients tend to be young — adolescents mostly, with the occasional adult requiring specialized treatment. But [University of South Carolina] orthodontist James Mah may have the oldest client ever — a 2,000-year-old Egyptian girl

His patient was the mummy of a 4- or 5-year-old Egyptian girl. Wrapped and embalmed two millennia ago in North Africa, she called the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, her home for the past 75 years.

Until 2005, the actual contents of the sarcophagus remained a mystery to museum curators — the plate where you typically find hieroglyphic inscriptions bearing the name and rank of the deceased was missing...

Show Me the Mummy, Ben Creighton, Los Angeles Downtown News, California, USA, April 02, 2007.

Greg has posted a review of Robert Bauval's The Egypt Code over at the Daily Grail website. I picked this up as the paperback version is released today

It has been twelve years since ‘The Orion Correlation Theory’ (OCT) was announced to the world in , by and in , and has also been met head-on by an Egyptological orthodoxy not willing to accept that the pyramids of Giza may have been laid out to mimic the stars of the constellation Orion.

It is a little difficult to understand why the OCT has been rebuked so ferociously by not only Egyptologists, but also astronomers such as Ed Krupp. The likeness is quite apparent, and there is much to suggest that the ancient Egyptians revered the Orion constellation in particular — even if one day it is ultimately proven incorrect, it still seems a topic well worth some serious discussion. In all likelihood, the orthodox opposition to Bauval’s research comes not so much from that core theory, but from the other subjects associated with him from the ‘alternative history’ genre throughout the 1990s — the Age of the Sphinx controversy, the 10,500 BCE date given by Bauval for the perfect mirror image of the Giza layout to be present in the sky, and the confluence of this date with theories of a lost civilisation (notably the big ‘A’: Atlantis).

It seems that in The Egypt Code, Bauval has set himself the task of re-establishing his core theory — and the wider gestalt of the Ancient Egyptian cosmology being firmly rooted in events happening in the sky — to the academic establishment. And while he still sits firmly on the fringe, in this book he stays within arms-length of orthodox Egyptology. So, while he cites Colin Reader’s ideas on an earlier dating for the Sphinx, there is no mention of or ...

Ultimately, The Egypt Code offers a glimpse into Ancient Egyptian culture and architecture which suggests that they attributed an immense significance to living in tune with the cosmos, in particular the cycle of the stars. In Bauval’s words: “I believe that I have been able to make visible an ancient ‘code’ that can help Egyptology to shed more light on the greatest and most spiritually enlightened civilisation the world has ever known or is likely to know again in the future. Our present civilisation is in dire need of this ancient model of wisdom.” That is about as New Age as Bauval gets in this book — readers seeking an adventure into the Hall of Records, replete with Atlantean civilisation should stay away. However, for those wishing to revisit Ancient Egypt and the OCT with Bauval, it is definitely a stimulating read.

, Robert Bauval, Century, 2006, pp. 336.

The Egypt Code, Greg, The Daily Grail, October 06, 2006.

Official Egypt Code website.

Were ancient Egyptian cities levelled by the massive volcanic eruption that may have inspired the legend of Atlantis?

Egyptian archaeologists Monday announced they had found traces of solidified lava on the Sinai peninsula while excavating an ancient fort. According to Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities, the lava hails from Santorini, whose giant eruption 3,500 years ago destroyed the Minoan civilization on nearby Crete.

See the evidence that may show how Santorini wrought destruction hundreds of miles away, and learn why experts believe the cataclysmic eruption may have helped free Egypt from the grip of foreign invaders.

Video: "Atlantis" Volcano Devastated Ancient Egypt?, National Geographic News, District of Columbia, USA, April 04, 2007.

cf. Ancient Egypt Cities Levelled by Massive Volcano, Lava Find Suggests, Dan Morrison, National Geographic News, District of Columbia, USA, April 02, 2007.

Previously:

Did the Red Sea Part? No Evidence, Archaeologists Say, April 03, 2007.

Sinai Pumice Linked to Ancient Eruption, April 03, 2007.

DW-WORLD.DE spoke to French marine archaeologist Franck Goddio, who brought lost parts of the legendary port of Alexandria and the ancient cities of Heracleion and Canopus back to light.

"Egypt's Sunken Treasures," an exhibition of artefacts unearthed during Goddio's excavations, went on show in Bonn on Thursday.

DW-WORLD.DE: After thousands of excursions to sunken cities and shipwrecks around the world, your living room must look like an adventurous place.

Franck Goddio: Well, it's not an adventure. I would say it's a job, and we are doing this job very professionally. We plan each mission carefully and train our staff for that, and before starting, there is a lot of paperwork that has to be done.

Before you started to search for sunken treasures, you studied mathematics and worked as a financial consultant. How does that fit with archaeology?

As a matter of fact, it does help. After 10 years in finance, I decided to take a one-year break. I looked at what at the time has been done in underwater archaeology, and I realized that there was a need for a privately funded independent institute that could work for governments and other institutions...

"It's a Bit Like Modern Surgery", Richard Fuchs, Deutsche Welle, Germany, April 05, 2007.

Catharine Roehrig, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Egyptian Art, describes the multifaceted career of the popular novelist and adventurer, Amelia Edwards. Edwards founded the Egypt Exploration Fund, which helped professionalize the field of archaeology.

In MP3 format. This relates to the ongoing exhibition Excavating Egypt: Great Discoveries from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.

Distaff Discoveries: Women in Early Egyptology, Catharine Roehrig, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA, March 02, 2007.

cf. MHC Art Museum to Host Egyptian Exhibition February 17 - July 22, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, USA, January 08, 2007.

Previously:

Treasured seekers: A Mount Holyoke College exhibit celebrates the contributions of two pioneers in archaeology, March 08, 2007.

Great Discoveries from the Petrie Museum, January 02, 2007.

In 1897, 25 years before Carter would make his celebrated discovery in the Valley of the Kings, two excavators from Oxford began digging in an infinitely less glamorous location. Oxyrhynchus — "the City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish" — could boast of no hints of buried kings; but it did offer some promising rubbish dumps.

Peter Parsons is uniquely well qualified to act as a guide to what they found. For more than 50 years he has been working on the treasures exhumed a century ago from Oxyrhynchus: scraps of papyrus, some 500,000 of them, all inscribed with Greek. They date from a period long after the reign of Tutankhamen, when Egypt, having been conquered first by Alexander the Great, and then by Rome, was ruled by men whose culture was proudly classical. The contents of the average municipal tip back then appear to have been a good deal more high-brow than they are today: the Oxyrhynchus elite were endlessly dumping masterpieces of Greek literature, and the fragments of these poems and histories, many of them lost for centuries, are still being painstakingly pieced together by scholars such as Parsons. So too are documents from the earliest days of Christianity: it was at Oxyrhynchus, for instance, that a section of the suppressed Gnostic Gospel of Thomas was first unearthed...

, Peter Parsons, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, pp. 320.

Everyday stories of ancient folk, Tom Holland, The Guardian, UK, March 31, 2007.

An antique dealer from Leeds who paid £50 for a tray of unwanted silver discovered a hidden treasure inside which is expected to fetch up to £4,000 when it goes under the hammer.

Martin Roberts, of Stanningley, found the miniature alabaster torso figure after buying a drawer of discarded silver in a house clearance sale.

Experts confirmed the four-inch high artefact is a royal shabti dating back to 1386BC and found in the tomb of the Egyptian king Amenophis [Amenhotep] III in 1799...

Return on Egyptian find is none too shabti..., Debbie Leigh, The Yorkshire Evening Post, UK, March 28, 2007.

New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World has named a classics professor and former Graduate School dean at Columbia University, Roger Bagnall, as its first director.

In July [2007], he will take the helm of this new, interdisciplinary advanced study centre, located in a seven-floor townhouse at 15 East 84th St., a half-block stroll from the Metropolitan Museum. The institute is funded by a $200 million gift from the Leon Levy Foundation. Asked what his reaction was when offered the post, he said, "I thought, 'This is going to be fun.'" Imagine a professor who studies cuneiform seated alongside an archaeologist of Afghanistan, or a Greek literary researcher talking with a scholar of South Asia. Mr. Bagnall said there is nothing in antiquity — from Portugal to China that is not potentially within the centre's purview. "It's ambitious," he said...

Mr. Bagnall is a papyrologist who has researched the social, administrative, economic, religious, and demographic history of Roman Egypt. He has studied papyri produced under Ptolemaic and Roman rule, and even specimens from after the Arab conquest of the region...

Trained at Yale and the University of Toronto, Mr. Bagnall directs Columbia University's archaeological project at Amheida, in the Dakhla Oasis of Egypt, a site which looks late Roman but dates back much further...

Books by on Amazon.

NYU Antiquities Centre Director Is Named, Gary Shapiro, The New York Sun, New York, USA, April 05, 2007.

A rib bone supposedly found at the site where French heroine Joan of Arc was burned at the stake is actually that of an Egyptian mummy, according to researchers who used high-tech science to expose the fake.

The bone, a piece of cloth and a cat femur were said to have been recovered after the 19-year-old was burned in 1431 in the town of Rouen. In 1909 — the year Joan of Arc was beatified — scientists declared it "highly probable" that the relics were hers.

But starting last year, 20 researchers from France, Switzerland and Benin took another look. Even they were surprised to find the rib bone came from an Egyptian mummy. Their best guess is that the fake was cooked up in the 19th century, perhaps to boost the process of Joan of Arc's beatification. She was canonized as a saint in 1920 by the Roman Catholic Church...

The research team was headed by Dr. Philippe Charlier at the Hôpital Raymond Poincaré, Garches, France.

Supposed Joan of Arc Bone Is Mummy's, John Leicester, AP via Discovery Channel News, USA, April 04, 2007.

cf. Joan of Arc Relics Are Actually Egypt Mummy Remains, Research Reveals, Kate Ravilious, National Geographic News, USA, April 04, 2007.

Update: added the Nature article as this is where the story broke.

cf. Joan of Arc's relics exposed as forgery, Declan Butler, Nature, USA, April 04, 2007, doi:10.1038/446593a.