The animal mummy room in Cairo's Egyptian Museum fascinated Salima Ikram the first time she travelled to Egypt. Unfortunately, it had been shut down. Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and co-director of the Animal Mummy Project at the museum resurrected the room six years later. The study of animal mummies can shed light on ancient Egyptian religious and cultural practices, Ikram said Wednesday to a packed audience in the E. William Doty Fine Arts Building. While animals were an important part of Egyptian life, they were "not just lunch on hoof". The mummified remains can give information on veterinary science, changes in the environment, village beliefs and technology. Analysis of evidence shows Egyptians mummified animals to remember beloved pets - as they were believed to be sacred - to present as votive offerings and to serve as sources of food in the afterlife.
Egyptian restorers have accidentally discovered a collection of New Kingdom pillars, lintels and reliefs in the country's southern tourist city of Luxor, Culture Minister Farouq Hosni announced on Thursday. The collection was discovered within the internal walls of the Abul Hagag El-Luxory mosque, built on top of the open court of Luxor temple by restorers from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) while restoring the mosque and its mausoleum, a SCA statement quoted Hosni as saying. Meanwhile, SCA secretary general Zahi Hawas confirmed that the newly discovered collection, which revealed an important part of the history of Luxor Temple, dates back to the reign of King Ramses II in the nineteenth Dynasty from 1,304 B.C. to 1,237 B.C.
Two Sphinxes existed on the Pyramids Plateau, according to a new study by Egyptologist Bassam El Shammaa. El Shammaa said the famed half-lion, half man statute was an Egyptian deity erected next to another Sphinx, which has since vanished without a trace.
German scientists have discovered that the world's most beautiful woman allowed herself to be sculpted with wrinkles to appear more beautiful. Maybe wrinkles are not so bad, after all, some German scientists have discovered. In ancient times, such laugh lines and wrinkles around the mouth improved the face of Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen acclaimed as the world's most beautiful woman. 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.
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. Read more
Alexander the Great founded Alexandria to immortalise his name on his way to conquer the world, but this may not have been the first city on the famed site of Egypts Mediterranean coast. A Smithsonian team has now uncovered the first underwater evidence pointing to an urban settlement dating back seven centuries before Alexander showed up in 331 BC. The city he founded, Alexandria, has long been a source of intrigue and wonder, renowned for its library, once the largest in the world, and the 119-meter lighthouse on the island of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. 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 Smithsonians 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 Alexandrias harbor
The second phase of the Grand Egyptian Museum overlooking the Giza plateau has been completed.
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 firefighting 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.
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.
The legendary city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great as he swept through Egypt in his quest to conquer the known world. Now scientists have discovered hidden underwater traces of a city that existed at Alexandria at least seven centuries before Alexander the Great arrived, findings hinted at in Homer's Odyssey and that could shed light on the ancient world. Alexandria was founded in Egypt on the shores of the Mediterranean in 332 B.C. to immortalize Alexander the Great. The city was renowned for its library, once the largest in the world, as well as its lighthouse at the island of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
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 [BC 1560 to BC 1081]," Supreme Council of Antiquities secretary-general Zahi Hawwas said in a statement.