Culture Minister Farouk Hosni approved the travel of an antiquities team to Japan to inaugurate the Egyptian monuments exhibition to be staged in the museum of the University of Waseda, in the City of Sengoku on July 31, 2007 to last till September 9. The team is headed by Dr. Zahi Hawass Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Hawass said this is the sixth tour for Egyptian antiquities in the Japanese cities which started Mid-July last year and will last till the middle of the year 2008.

The exhibition will include 317 pieces dating back to various historical epochs. The exhibition will be touring Japan until the year 2008.

Egypt will receive EGP1 million in two instalments for the exhibition, he added.

Egyptian monuments touring Japan, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, July 28, 2007.

A French antiquities team working in Al-Kharja's Deir area, New Valley governorate, discovered a big plant for potteries, dating back to the third century.

The site included a large number of rare pots which had been produced for trade purposes and distribution in distant areas.

In terms of production and shape, the pots were the first of their kind to be discovered in Egypt or any other place in the world.

As part of an integrated Deir Castle development project, another collection of pots were found by the same team.

Third century pottery plant discovered in New Valley, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, July 28, 2007.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that researchers running simulations on the Cray supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories have re-created what could have happened 29 million years ago when an asteroid explosion turned Saharan sand into glass. The greenish natural glass, which can still be found scattered across remote stretches of the desert, was used by an artisan in ancient Egypt to carve a scarab that decorates one of the bejewelled breastplates buried in King Tutankhamen's tomb.

"Supercomputers now allow us to approach these problems as if we were conducting actual experiments," said Mark Boslough, the physicist at Sandia whose theory about the origins of Libyan Desert Glass sparked the research. "With this class of computer, we can run multiple simulations at such high resolution and fidelity that we can see phenomena that we wouldn't be able to predict from first principles. That means we can explore alternate possibilities as we go. It's more like doing iterative experimental science than theoretical science..."

"The Libyan Desert Glass study at Sandia is truly exciting research that crosses a number of scientific disciplines — ranging from impact physics and geology to Egyptology," said Jan Silverman, senior vice president, corporate strategy and business development at Cray. "We are delighted to hear about how our highly scalable Cray XT(TM) supercomputer architecture allows iterative modelling techniques to find the most probable explanation. Using the computational power of our supercomputers we also see similar iterative techniques being used to optimize designs from automobiles to airplanes..."

Cray Supercomputer at Sandia Helps Researchers Discover Origin of Mysterious Glass Found in King Tut's Tomb, Market Wire via Macroworld Investor, USA, July 31, 2007.

cf. Solving the riddle of the desert glass, Mark Boslough, Sandia Technology, Sandia National Laboratories, USA, Volume 8, No. 4, Winter 2006 - 2007.

Previously:

Travel: Snap Shots: Desert Glass, April 13, 2007.

Mysterious Egyptian Glass Formed by Meteorite Strike, Study Says, December 29, 2006.

More on Meteorite Crash Helped Form King Tut Necklace, June 30, 2006.

King Tut’s glass beetle came from outer space, June 27, 2006.

An 83-year-old man and his family are due in court in connection with the sale of a fake Egyptian statue thought to be worth £1 million.

George Greenhalgh, his wife Olive, 82, and their sons, George Jnr, 52, and Shaun, 47, who live together at The Crescent, Bromley Cross, Bolton, are accused of running a family firm selling bogus antiquities.

Bolton council bought the Amarna Princess, believed to be around 3,300 years old, for a "bargain" £440,000 in September 2003.

But officers from the Metropolitan Police's Art and Antiques Unit removed the 20-inch artefact in March 2006 after concerns were raised...

Man, 83, in court over fake artefact, ITV News, UK., July 31, 2007.

Previously:

Family in court over fake statue, April 26, 2007.

The largest known fortress from ancient Egypt's days of the pharaohs has been unearthed near the Suez Canal, archaeologists announced on Sunday.

The massive fortress, discovered at a site called Tell-Huba, includes the graves of soldiers and horses and once featured a giant water-filled moat, scientists said.

The discovery dates back to ancient Egypt's struggle to re-conquer the northern Sinai Peninsula from an occupying force known as the Hyksos.

The campaign against the Hyksos was depicted in etchings on the ancient walls of the Karnak Temple, 450 miles (720 kilometres) south of Cairo.

Archaeologists said the new find shows those stone-chiselled tales to be surprisingly accurate.

"The bones of humans and horses found in the area attest dramatically to the reality of such battles," said Zahi Hawass...

Egypt's Largest Pharaoh-Era Fortress Discovered, Experts Announce, Dan Morrison, National Geographic News, USA, July 27, 2007.

Previously:

Mammoth mud brick fort dating from the pharaonic period unearthed in Egypt, July 24, 2007.

Wrinkles improved the face of Nefertiti, the pharaonic Egyptian queen acclaimed as the world's most beautiful woman, German scientists have discovered.

The 3,000-year-old bust of Nefertiti is the greatest treasure at Berlin's Altes Museum.

X-ray pictures of the bust by a computer tomography machine at the nearby Charite Hospital in Berlin revealed that the sculpture is a piece of limestone with details added using four outer layers of plaster of Paris.

'We have discovered that the sculptor later added gentle wrinkles to her face, especially around the eyes,' said Dietrich Wildung, director of the Museum of Egyptology housed in the upper storey of the Altes Museum.

'The wrinkles make the image more individual and expressive...'

Added wrinkles make Nefertiti more beautiful, The Argentina Star, Argentina, July 30, 2007.

Every month, around 3,000 people visit the Egyptian Museum, on Nicaragua street, in Curitiba, capital of the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, to see the relics of the land of the pharaohs up close. The institution has a permanent exhibition of a mummy of an Egyptian who lived in Ancient Egypt. The body, nicknamed Tothmea, was supposedly a singer and musician who honoured goddess Isis, according to data supplied by the museum. The mummy arrived in the capital of Paraná state in 1995, as a donation from the Rosicrucian Museum of San Jose, California, which belongs to the Rosicrucian Order, a mystical and philosophical institution that also owns the Egyptian Museum in Curitiba.

According to the person responsible for the museum, Rodrigo Bontorin, the donation was made at the request of the institution. The mummy was nicknamed Tothmea in honour of pharaoh Thutmose, who governed Egypt in the 18th dynasty. It was discovered in a necropolis, ancient cemetery, in Thebes, in the second half of the 18th century. In the Egyptian Museum, the mummy is in a funeral chamber, similar to the ancient Egyptian tombs, with pictures of daily and religious scenes on the walls, made especially for Tothmea. The embalmed body is one of the main attractions of the Egyptian Museum of Curitiba.

Apart from the mummy, however, the museum houses 497 replicas of historic Egyptian artefacts like the bust of queen Nefertiti, wife of pharaoh Akhenaten, and objects of king Tutankhamun...

Museum from Curitiba houses Egyptian mummy, Isaura Daniel and Mark Ament, ANBA, Brazil, July 23, 2007.

Academics want to test an ancient fake big toe to see if it really did help its owner to Walk like an Egyptian.

They have made a replica of the “Cairo toe”, a bending leather and wood body part which they believe could be the world’s earliest practical prosthetic.

Now they are seeking volunteers who themselves lack a right big toe, to test their theory that it actively helped its original user to walk.

If proved correct, it would mean prosthetic medicine started at least 700 years earlier than previously thought.

Jacky Finch, lead researcher at Manchester University’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology, said the fact that it showed signs of wear indicated it was a practical limb. It was found strapped to the mummified foot of a 50- to 60-year-old woman who had undergone a toe amputation.

“The toe dates from between 1069 and 664BC, so if we can prove it was functional then we will have pushed back prosthetic medicine by as much as 700 years,” she said...

Fellow Egyptologists at neighbouring Salford University are also testing a model of another fake big toe, fashioned from a type of papier-mâché known as cartonnage...

Click on the picture above for another image of the toe.

Is 'Cairo toe' the first practical prosthetic?, Stephen Adams, The Telegraph, UK, July 27, 2007.

cf. Going out on a limb over 'Cairo toe', Sheryl Uberlacker, The Toronto Star, Ontario, Canada, July 27, 2007.

Previously:

Science steps in to discover wonders of Toe-tankhamun, July 26, 2007.

Braving the heat waves that hit Egypt last week, Culture Minister Farouk Hosni embarked on his first field tour of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) to inspect the progress on building the most ambitious archaeological museum ever planned.

At the western edge of the GEM, on a plot overlooking the Al-Rimayah residential complex, a huge high-tech building complex is planned lying 10 metres below street level. The layout is for four main museological facilities; an archaeological conservation centre, archaeological storehouses, a fire-fighting unit and an energy production station which will provide the power needed to operate equipment for restoring the estimated 150,000 objects of the museum's display.

The conservation centre will contain separate laboratories for stone, wood, ceramics, papyri, metal, textile and leather, as well as an organic laboratory -- designed for running tests on ancient textiles, papyri, dried plants, and species of insects found on excavated items.

To guarantee tight security and complete isolation of the complex from the surrounding neighbourhood, an iron surround fence has been erected and is monitored by CCTV cameras. A buffer zone of trees conceals the complex and provides privacy and security for the transfer of artefacts, while the roof has been covered with the natural sand of the main bedrock. Over the forthcoming six months any required equipment will be fitted in each section...

Egypt's fourth pyramid, Nevine El-Aref, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 855, July 26 - August 01, 2007.

A Smithsonian team has now uncovered first underwater evidence pointing to an urban settlement dating back seven centuries before Alexander showed up [in what was to become Alexandria] in 331 B.C...

But little was known about the site in pre-Alexander times, other than that a fishing village by the name of Rhakotis was located there.

Coastal geoarchaeologist Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History said the work by him and his colleagues suggested there had been a much larger community than had previously been believed.

The discoveries, reported in the August issue of GSA Today, the journal of the Geological Society of America, came by accident when his team drilled underwater in Alexandria's harbour, Stanley said...

U.S. geological team uncovers first evidence of city hidden beneath Alexandria, AP via PR Inside, USA, July 26, 2007.

Hidden City Found Beneath Alexandria, Charles Q. Choi, Live Science, USA, July 24, 2007.

cf. Alexandria, Egypt, before Alexander the Great: A multidisciplinary approach yields rich discoveries, Jean-Daniel Stanley, Richard W. Carlson, Gus Van Beek, Thomas F. Jorstad, Elizabeth A. Landau, GSA Today, The Geological Society of America, USA, Volume 17, Issue 8, August 2007. Full text is available free in HTML and PDF formats.

Throwing stone balls along a lane might have been a popular game in ancient Egypt, according to evidence unearthed some 56 miles south of Cairo by Italian archaeologists.

A mixture of bowling, billiard and bowls, the game was played at Narmoutheos [Narmuthis], in the Fayoum region, in a spacious room which appears to be the prototype of a modern-day bowling hall.

The room was part of a structure, perhaps a residential building, which dated from the Roman period, specifically between the second and third century A.D.

"We first discovered a room with a very well-built limestone floor. Then we noticed a lane and two stone balls," Edda Bresciani, an Egyptologist at Pisa University, told Discovery News...

The Roman castrum of Narmuthis, University of Pisa, 2006 - 2007.

Ancient Egyptian Ball Game Discovered, Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News, USA, July 25, 2007.

cf. Egyptians played ancient version of bowling 2000 years back, Daily India, India, July 26, 2007.

An artificial big toe attached to the foot of an ancient Egyptian mummy could prove to be the world's earliest functional prosthetic body part, say scientists.

Research at The University of Manchester is hoping to prove that the wood and leather artefact in the Cairo Museum not only looked the part but also helped its owner walk 'like an Egyptian'.

If true, the toe will predate what is currently considered to be the earliest known practical prosthesis — an artificial leg from 300BC — by several hundred years.

Jacky Finch, who is carrying out the study at Manchester's KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology, is recruiting volunteers whose right big toe has been lost in order to test an exact replica of the artificial toe...

Science steps in to discover wonders of Toe-tankhamun, Manchester University, UK, July 26, 2007.

The Egyptians have landed. Some of them have taken up to 5000 years to get here but their reincarnation at the Art Gallery of WA should be well worth the wait.

More than 100,000 people are expected to see the Louvre’s travelling show of Egyptian antiquities after it opens tomorrow. And the faces of pharaohs unearthed from tombs and shrouded commoners buried in the desert sand will be staring right back at them.

The national tour of more than 500 objects has taken six years to arrange and cost $6 million. It is the first Louvre exhibition to come to Australia in nearly 30 years and is expected to be the gallery’s most popular show since Monet and Japan drew 170,000 people in 2001.

Egyptian Antiquities from the Louvre: Journey to the Afterlife draws its inspiration from the lengths the ancient people of the Nile took to protect themselves on their trip to eternal paradise...

Pharaohs in Perth on trip to paradise, Stephen Bevis, The West Australian, Australia, July 20, 2007.

Meanwhile in Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen (Discovery) the ebullient Dr Zahi Hawass was trying to identify Queen Hatshepsut from four finalists in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. You've heard of the Old Bazaar At Cairo? Then you will love Cairo museum. It has an ample sufficiency of mummies and sarcophagi but very little idea of where any of them are. The dust of dead kings dances in the sunlight. Which is why a Cat scan and sterile lab, on loan from Germany, arrived like a spaceship...

The film, rather American in tone, treated the search like CSI: Cairo. One by one, possible mummies were eliminated. A skull, when the covering was removed, was so clearly screaming, that museum attendants drew back with their hands to their mouths. Hatshepsut's relatives were scanned and fused to find the family face. DNA, nuclear and mitochondrial, was taken from them. Two mummies remained, but which was the queen and which the servant? In dusty death you could not tell.

Germany would soon be wanting its Cat scan back. As a last resort, Hatshepsut's sealed funerary box was scanned and showed a molar with one root. One mummy had an identical molar missing and one root remaining in her jaw. It fitted like a slipper. The Cat scan had shown a serious abscess and, if it had burst when the molar was pulled to ease Hatshepsut's pain, the infection would have killed her...

Last night's TV, Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian, UK, July 18, 2007.

Dr. Mohammad Argon, Director of the Egyptian Space Program said that a composite satellite photo was taken by the MisrSat-1 launched on April, 17, 2007.

The photo presents the colours of the desert areas around Cairo, indicating their geology and the urban communities surrounding the ring road.

The MisrSat-1 will photograph a strip of the Earth equal to its imaging swath with each orbit. As the satellite revolves around the Earth on one axis the Earth rotates on another, shifting the scanned strip with each orbit. This eventually allows the satellite to photograph the entire planet as it circles around it, and the software at the ground station works to fit these images together to create the complete picture.

Egyptian remote sensing satellite unveils Cairo secrets, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, July 24, 2007.

Egypt announced Sunday the discovery of the largest-ever military city from the pharaonic period on the edge of the Sinai desert, part of a series of forts that stretched to the Gaza border. "The three forts are part of a string of 11 castles that made up the Horus military road that went from Suez all the way to the city of Rafah on the Egyptian-Palestinian border and dates to the 18th and 19th dynasties (1560-1081 BC)," antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said in a statement.

Teams have been digging in the area for the past decade, but the Egyptian discovery of the massive Fort Tharo and the discovery of two other fortresses by French and American teams confirmed the existence of the Horus fortifications described in ancient texts.

Fort Tharo, the military headquarters for the eastern defence of Egypt, had 13-meter thick mud brick walls running 500 meters by 250 meters and punctuated by 24 huge towers, said a statement from the Supreme Council of Antiquities...

Mammoth mud brick fort dating from the pharaonic period unearthed in Egypt, AFP via The Daily Star Lebanon, Lebanon, July 24, 2007.

cf. Pharaonic-era fort discovered, News 24, South Africa, July 22, 2007.

cf. Egypt's oldest fortress discovered, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, July 23, 2007.

Memphis-Saqqara-Dashur is a quiet stretch of history, just off Cairo; a superb combination of greenery as well as the barren and rugged desert. We set out on our self guided tour one fine morning to reach Memphis, once the glorious capital of ancient Egypt, now converted to an open air museum, beautifully flanked by the tall date palm trees.

The museum houses a colossal limestone statue of Ramses II, which is kept is a lying position as its legs are broken from the knees and the left arm is totally battered. It is guessed that the statue must have fallen from a great height, causing this condition. The double head gear represented upper and lower Egypt and the waist band has his name written in hieroglyphics, which was only done to pharaohs. The other attraction here was an alabaster sphinx weighing about eight tonnes.

When Memphis was the capital of Egypt, Saqqara was its necropolis. The area around is beautiful with white sand stretching up to the horizon on both sides of the driving road. Apart from King Zsoser’s step pyramid, the other attractions here are a few ancient tombs with magnificent paintings giving a vivid idea about Egypt's wild life at that era and the pyramid of Teti, the first king of the 6th dynasty...

Memphis Marvels, Bidisha Bagchi, Economic Times of India, India, July 11, 2007.

The Egyptians did not invent beer. Rather they had learned the art of brewing from the world's first known brewers, the Sumerians, Babylonian, and Assyrians further to the east in what is now Iraq. The Egyptians, however, left us with the best documentation of ancient brewing practices. Most of the many depictions of Egyptian brewing that have come down to us are murals in vaults, pyramids, and sacrificial chambers. These attest to the importance and high esteem in which the art of beer-making was held in Egyptian society. Yet the find in Meketre's tomb probably ranks among the best preserved and most instructive.

The brewery model in the Metropolitan Museum apparently dates from around 2009 to 1998 B.C. A card at the exhibition in the Museum explains what is going on in the brewery: "The overseer with a baton sits inside the door. In the brewery two women grind flour, which another man works into dough. After a second man treads the dough into mash in a tall vat, it is put into tall crocks to ferment. After fermentation, it is poured off into round jugs with black clay stoppers..."

In Egypt, beer was regarded as food. In fact, the old Egyptian hieroglyph for "meal" was a compound of those for "bread" and "beer". This "bread-beer meal" plus a few onions and some dried fish was the standard diet of the common people along the Nile at the time. Beer came in eight different types in Egypt. Most were made from barley, some from emmer, and many were flavoured with ginger or honey. The best beers were brewed to a colour as red as human blood. The Egyptians distinguished between the different beers by their alcoholic strength and dominant flavour...

Egyptian Beer for the Living, the Dead ... and the Gods, Horst Dornbusch, Beer Advocate, February 28, 2005.

See also the later article in the series "Whatever Happened to Sumerian Beer?"

Museum visitors are being given the chance to help unlock the secrets of ancient Egypt in an innovative exhibition.

The public will be able to vote for six artefacts from an Egyptology exhibition at Harrogate's Royal Pump Room Museum, prioritising the items which will then be taken away for in-depth scientific research.

The idea followed studies of a vase which had been in the museum's collection for almost 30 years but was thought to be a fake because of its pristine condition.

Investigation However, it was established that the artefact did in fact date back 5,000 years.

The latest project is part of the museum's Egyptology: Science Investigation exhibition, which is due to be made a permanent feature later this year after an GBP80,000 grant was secured from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts.

Museum staff will now work alongside York University's Egyptologist Dr Joann Fletcher and scientist Dr Stephen Buckley to study the artefacts selected by the public vote.

Unlock ancient Egypt's secrets, Macroworld Investor, UK, July 18, 2007.

I first met David O'Connor when he came to pick me up from Malawi in Minya, where as a young man I served as an inspector of antiquities at Tuna Al-Gabal. I was lucky to work with him in 1974 at Malkata on the west bank at Luxor, where Amenhotep III built his palace and the lake used for recreation by his wife, Tiye. In 1979, I spent three months with the Pennsylvania-Yale University expedition at Abydos, supervised by O'Connor and William Kelly Simpson. At Abydos, O'Connor used to rest after a long day work and have a beer. After dinner, we would talk about politics with the young American archaeologists. I was very impressed by President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, but when we began arguing O'Connor would always say, "No politics — we are at a dig house, not a congress." Um Seti ("mother of Seti"), the English woman who believed she had served Seti I in an earlier life, would visit us at Abydos and was keen to help me improve my English.

O'Connor and Simpson invited me to Philadelphia, Boston, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and I stayed for a while at his house in Philadelphia. When I went to the University of Pennsylvania as a Fulbright scholar in 1980 he was my adviser for my doctoral dissertation, and became a lifelong friend.

O'Connor is unique. Originally from Australia, he received a postgraduate diploma in Egyptology in 1962 from University College London. He then studied for his doctorate at Cambridge. He was always honest, a good excavator, and a true leader. I learnt a lot from him...

Dig Days: An Egyptologist to be remembered, Zahi Hawass, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 854, July 19 - 25, 2007.

Egyptologist Dr. Kara Cooney visits "The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson" to discuss the Pharaoh Hatshepsut and the Discovery Channel special "Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen".

Dr. Kara Cooney on the Late, Late Show - 7/11/07

Thanks to Anthony Cagle over ArchaeoBlog for this one.

In the first field trip to the Grand Egyptian Museum, Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni inspected on Tuesday 17/07/2007 the second phase which is due to be completed by the end of this year. The phase includes setting up a power station, a monument renovation centre and a fire-fighting unit.

The great achievements in the century's project astonished everyone especially that the 2,700 workers and engineers are working in 24 hour shifts, the minister said. This phase, which will last for 18 months, will be followed by the third phase of constructing the main building at the start of next year.

At a press conference, the Minister confirmed that the museum is designed to withstand all possible dangers, whether natural (earthquakes) or man-made (wars)...

Second phase of Grand Egyptian Museum completed by end of year, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, July 18, 2007.

Egyptian and Czech archaeologists have discovered the remains of historical residential city dating back to the Pharaonic Old State at Al-Bahariya Oasis, Al Ahram newspaper reported Tuesday.

Remains of walls and pots were among the things discovered in the ancient city.

Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawass said the joint archaeological mission had also unearthed mugs, food baskets and two ovens.

He said the findings prove that the discovered city was residential.

Archaeologists discover ancient city in Bahariya oasis, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, July 17, 2007.

Previously:

Old Kingdom settlement found in Egypt Bahariya oasis, July 16, 2007.

Applera Corp-Applied Biosystems Groups announced its collaboration with the Discovery Communications Inc. and Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities in establishing the first laboratory in Egypt dedicated to testing ancient DNA samples. The laboratory, which is located in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, began testing samples of ancient royal mummies dating back to the 18th Dynasty in April as part of a project to identify the mummy of Hatshepsut, Egypt's most famous queen.

Discovery Channel enlisted the services of Applied Biosystems as part of a project aimed at discovering and identifying the lost mummy of Hatshepsut, one of the most important women in ancient Egyptian history. The primary purpose of the new DNA laboratory is to assist in the identification of this and other mummies that have been removed from their original tombs, a