The IMPACT Radiological Mummy Database is a large-scale, multi-institutional collaborative research project devoted to the scientific study of mummified remains, and the mummification traditions that produced them, through non-destructive medical imaging technologies.

IMPACT focuses on the body,  made artifact through cultural or natural intervention, in bioarchaeology, epidemiology, and social archaeology studies of  past human societies and their genetic and cultural descendents.

Egyptian Mummies shrouded for over 2000 years could be set to give up their inner secrets like never before. Thanks to a 3D hologram imaging process developed by Edinburgh-based Holoxica, the Rhind Mummy has been revealed in true 3D.

Originally excavated from a tomb in Thebes (Luxor) almost 155 years ago, the Rhind Mummy – so named after the renowned Scottish Archaeologist and Egyptologist Alexander Rhind who brought the mummy to Scotland in the middle of the 19th Century – is completely intact in its original black-tarred linen wrapping. The mummy has been in the National Museum of Scotland’s collection ever since.

Under Cairo’s asphalt, under the reverberations of its street traffic, rocks are flowing, compacting, shearing and warping.

The city is built on millions-of-years-old fossil limestone. You have to travel to the outskirts, though, to get a sense of the Cairo’s terra firma — at Moqattam, where the limestone outcrops from the necropolis; on Ain Sokhna Road, where the cuttings hold petrified tree trunks; or at Wadi Degla, a natural valley on the outskirts of Maadi.

One week ago, Egypt Independent joined American oil geologist Bill Bosworth and Egyptologist Ahmed Seddik on a tour of what Seddik called “Egypt’s Grand Canyon,” Wadi Degla.

The story of Cairo’s geology is less well-known than that of most capital cities. The first geologic map was completed in 1983. Since then, the science has improved, but the city has spread outwards, covering the secrets of its underlying rock from prying hammers and eyes.

The study of the "Demon star", Algol, made by a research group of the University of Helsinki, Finland, has received both scientific and public attention. The period of the brightness variation of this eclipsing binary star has been connected to good prognoses three millennia ago. This result has raised a lot of discussion and the news has spread widely in the Internet.

The Egyptian papyrus Cairo 86637 calendar is probably the oldest preserved historical document of bare eye observations of a variable star. Each day of one Egyptian year was divided into three parts in this calendar. A good or a bad prognosis was assigned for these parts of a day.

The study of the "Demon star", Algol, made by a research group of the University of Helsinki, Finland, has received both scientific and public attention. The period of the brightness variation of this eclipsing binary star has been connected to good prognoses three millennia ago. This result has raised a lot of discussion and the news has spread widely in the Internet.

The Egyptian papyrus Cairo 86637 calendar is probably the oldest preserved historical document of bare eye observations of a variable star. Each day of one Egyptian year was divided into three parts in this calendar. A good or a bad prognosis was assigned for these parts of a day.

-The texts regarding the prognoses are connected to mythological and astronomical events, says Master of Science Sebastian Porceddu.

Prosecutors in the case of United States v. Mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer today filed a Reply in Support of Its Motion to Reconsider.  The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri hopes to reverse a judge's April dismissal of the case.  The government ultimately seeks to forfeit the allegedly stolen Ka Nefer Nefer mummy mask located at the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM) and return it to Egypt.  SLAM denies that the mask is stolen and asserts ownership over the artifact.

The museum filed an objection earlier this week to the government's motion requesting the judge to reconsider the dismissal of the case.  Today's pleading by the government responds to the museum's objection.

Min, the ancient Egyptian god of phallus and fertility, might have brought some worldy advantages to his male worshippers, but offered little protection when it came to spiritual life.

Researchers at the Mummy Project-Fatebenefratelli hospital in Milan, Italy, established that one of Min's priests at Akhmim, Ankhpakhered, was not resting peacefully in his finely painted sarcophagus.

"We discovered that the sarcophagus does not contain the mummy of the priest, but the remains of another man dating between 400 and 100 BC," Egyptologist Sabina Malgora said.

According to the researchers, the finding could point to a theft more than 2000 years ago. The relatives of the mysterious man may have stolen the beautiful sarcophagus, which dates to a period between the 22nd 23rd Dynasty (about 945-715 BC), to assure their loved one a proper burial and afterlife.

The King Tut find brought Carter overnight—and lasting—fame, but it was anything but a stroke of luck, experts say.

When talking about the tomb discovery, "everyone likes to use the phrase 'stumble upon,' and that always ticks me off a little bit," said Yale University Egyptologist John Darnell.

Carter spent decades as an archaeological excavator exploring burial sites in ancient Thebes (now Luxor) before finding the roughly 3,000-year-old resting place of Tutankhamen, Darnell pointed out. (Take an interactive tour of Tut's tomb.)

"Carter found [the tomb] in a methodical way ... He did all the necessary background work," he added. "He didn't simply look for the door of a tomb, but rather he went at it in a way that we would probably characterize today as a form of landscape archaeology.

"Carter really worked himself into the lives of ancient Egyptian necropolis workmen. He knew the hills, he knew the paths, he knew what happened when rainstorms hit the area"—allowing him to identify the most likely sites for finding long-buried tombs.

This book builds on earlier projects about the origins and extinctions of script traditions throughout the world in an effort to address the fundamental questions of how and why writing systems change. The contributors—who study ancient scripts from Arabic to Roman, from Bronze Age China to Middle Kingdom Egypt—utilize an approach that views writing less as a technology than as a mode of communication, one that is socially learned and culturally transmitted.

The development of a new CFEETK archives database started in 2009 has required a new unified bibliographic management tool.

To allow a wider diffusion of the researches on the temples of Karnak and offer the online library as complete as possible, a first version of this project, developed since 2010, is now available online.

The Cahiers de Karnak available (PDF files) on the website of CFEETK since 2008 and a series of monographs and articles dedicated to Karnak temples are the core of this project. The resources freely available on other websites (Oriental Institute Chicago, IFAO, HAL-CNRS, etc) or resources with subscription (BiblioSHS, Jstor, etc) are also included.

The Bibliographic Project of the CFEETK includes now around 900 digitized resources and will be progressively increased.

In order to provide as complete and comprehensive an online library as possible for the Karnak temples, authors are encouraged to contact the head of the documentation of the CFEETK (sebastien.bistonmoulin@gmail.com) to have their publications posted here.

200 years ago this year, the future founder of Egyptology, French linguist and archaeologist Jean-François Champollion (1790—1832)—the first person since classical antiquity to be able to read the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs—conducted a primitive experiment. It turned out to be one of the initial scientific steps on the long road to unravelling the mysteries of mummification, first described in the fifth century BC by the Greek historian Herodotus.

In 1812, Champollion was an impecunious 21-year-old assistant professor of history at the University of Grenoble and an assistant at the city's municipal library. A teenage prodigy in Oriental languages, he had become obsessed by understanding ancient Egypt, as a result of his schoolboy exposure to fascinating antiquities brought back from Egypt by the scientist and prefect of Grenoble, Joseph Fourier, who accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte's army on its expedition in 1798—1801.

It was a bit of a schlep up the dusty hillside to the tomb's entrance, and we were pooped out and perspiring after just a few minutes. But it would be well worth the effort, our guide promised, though I had my doubts.

Surely anything really worth looking at would have been included in the group sightseeing during our week's river cruise on the Nile?

But, he explained, the final resting place of Senefer, one-time Mayor of Thebes, among the Tombs Of The Nobles in the Sheikh Abd el-Qurna district on the West Bank of Luxor, was far too tiny to accommodate big numbers of tourists.

Illegal digs near ancient temples and in isolated desert sites have swelled a staggering 100-fold over the past 16 months since a popular uprising toppled Hosni Mubarak's 29-year regime and security fell apart in many areas as police simply stopped doing their jobs. The pillaging comes on top of a wave of break-ins last year at archaeological storehouses - and even at Cairo's famed Egyptian Museum, the country's biggest repository of pharaonic artifacts.

Horrified archaeologists and antiquities authorities are scrambling to prevent smuggling, keeping a watch on European and American auction houses in case stolen artifacts show up there.

"Criminals became so bold they are digging in landmark areas." including near the Great Pyramids in Giza, other nearby pyramids and the grand temples of the southern city of Luxor, said Maj.-Gen. Abdel-Rahim Hassan, commander of the Tourism and Antiquities Police Department.

"It is no longer a crime motivated by poverty, it's naked greed and it involves educated people," he said.

In a country with more than 5,000 years of civilization buried under its sands, illegal digs have long been a problem. With only slight exaggeration, Egyptians like to joke you can dig anywhere and turn up something ancient, even if its just pottery shards or a statuette.

But in the security void, the treasure hunting has mushroomed, with 5,697 cases of illegal digs since the start of the anti-Mubarak uprising in early 2011 - 100 times more than the previous year, according to figures obtained by The Associated Press from the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of police.

In the undecorated tombs KV 26, KV 29, KV 30, KV 31, KV 32, KV 33, KV 37, KV 40, KV 59, KV 61, and KV 64 in the Valley of the Kings

This year’s season of the University of Basel in the Valley of the Kings started on January 07th, 2012 and lasted until April 15th, 2012. . . . .

KV 64

The principal event this season was the discovery of a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

During the season of 2011, three edges of an unknown man-made feature were revealed at 1.80m north of KV 40, on the 25th of January, the first day of the Egyptian revolution. Due to the situation, work was stopped and the feature was covered with an iron door (Fig. 1).

As this structure is so close to KV 40 and since it was impossible to know whether it was merely an unfinished shaft or a real tomb, we gave it the temporary number 40b. As soon as it became apparent during this year’s work that the structure was actually a tomb, the Egyptian authorities decided to give it the final designation KV 64. The discovery was officially announced on January 15th.

WWII fighter plane hailed the 'aviation equivalent of Tutankhamun's Tomb' found preserved in the Sahara.

A Second World War aeroplane that crash landed in the Sahara Desert before the British pilot walked to his death has been found almost perfectly preserved 70 years later.

The single-seater fighter plane was discovered by chance by Polish oil company worker Jakub Perka exploring a remote region of the Western Desert in Egypt.

The Kittyhawk P-40 has remained unseen and untouched since it came down on the sand in June 1942 and has been hailed the "aviation equivalent of Tutankhamun's Tomb".

It is thought the pilot survived the crash and initially used his parachute for shelter before making a desperate and futile attempt to reach civilisation by walking out of the desert.

The RAF airman, believed to have been Flight Sergeant Dennis Copping, 24, was never seen again.

The single-seater fighter plane was discovered by chance by Polish oil company worker Jakub Perka exploring a remote region of the Western Desert in Egypt, about 200 miles from the nearest town.

Minister of Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim said that a committee has been formed to receive the artifacts that were smuggled by an Egyptian woman inside two wooden replicas of ancient statues to Brussels in 2010.

He added that a series of legal procedures and measures as well as negotiations with the Belgian side were carried out since then until the monuments have been handed over to the Egyptian embassy in Brussels.

Last November, three American students studying in Egypt were arrested as they watched the protests leading up to parliamentary elections from a rooftop in Tahrir Square. That’s sure to freak out parents whose budding Egyptologists are lobbying for Cairo-based study abroad programs.

Rest easy, 'rents. With new 3-D software, developed by the French firm Dassault Systèmes, Harvard University, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, anyone with a computer can roam the famous Giza plateau and wander through its pyramids for an archeologist’s close-up look at the mummies, tombs, shafts, and artifacts as they look now--and might have looked when pharaohs were in residence--without worrying about ending up in a damp cell in Cairo.

Giza 3D was officially unveiled at the Boston museum earlier this week. 

Harvard Egyptology students are being offered innovative courses using an immersive 3D real-time virtual reconstruction of the Giza plateau, based on actual archeological data gathered by Harvard and MFA expeditions to Egypt in the first part of the 20th century.

Peter Der Manuelian, the Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University, uses the immersive 3D experience to virtually transport his students to the Giza plateau itself and enhance the way ancient Egyptian history and archaeology are taught.

“The virtual environment provides a new means for learning about Egyptian civilization. The project has allowed my students and colleagues to visualize the Giza data and update and integrate them in a way that was not possible in the past,” stated Der Manuelian.

“Students transition from an environment where the instructor essentially drives the learning process to one where the students are immersed in the environment and drive the dialogue and discussion themselves,” added John Shaw, chair of Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “The technology associated with the project helps researchers portray their understanding of the past and show interpretations of the applicable science to students.”

The only English words heard in Said Gomaa's coffee shop are expletives shouted by the action stars blasting their way through a satellite network's afternoon feature. The TV hangs on a braided hemp wall that lets in the fertile smell of the farm next door.

"I would like tourists to come in greater numbers, but they have not come since the revolution," says Gomaa, 26, in Arabic.

He seems anxious. Unlike his nearby clothing stores or his share in a local sand and gravel mine, Gomaa's cafe in downtown Dahshur, a Cairo exurb, represents something of a gamble. He is betting that tourists will be willing to venture off the well-beaten path between Cairo and Giza, that they want more from their visits to the pyramids than snapshots and souvenirs.

If he's right, Gomaa will become a notable person, a young leader who helped Egypt usher in a new age of sustainable tourism, but his vision remains radical.

To appreciate just how radical, drive a little farther. Only a mile or so after passing the cafe and the concrete heart of town, the ribbon of pavement weaves past an empty parking lot, an oil refinery, the short dunes marking the edge of the Sahara and the two oldest pyramids in Egypt. The road is as empty as the desert.

Dahshur has a 4,600-year-old miscalculation to thank for its ancient endowment.

Objects and artwork from an exhibition in the Netherlands, along with explanatory text, on various aspects of ancient Egyptian magic, sorcery, superstitious beliefs and the occult

The ancient Egyptians were firmly convinced of the importance of magic, which was both a source of supernatural wisdom and a means of affecting one’s own fate. The gods themselves used it for creating the world, granting mankind magical powers as an aid to the struggle for existence. Magic formed a link between human beings, gods, and the dead. Magicians were the indispensable guardians of the god-given cosmic order, learned scholars who were always searching for the Magic Book of Thoth, which could explain the wonders of nature. Egyptian Magic, illustrated with wonderful and mysterious objects from European museum collections, describes how Egyptian sorcerers used their craft to protect the weakest members of society, to support the gods in their fight against evil, and to imbue the dead with immortality, and explores the arcane systems and traditions of the occult that governed this well-organized universe of ancient Egypt.

This summer, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is hosting the UK’s largest ever exhibition of ancient Egyptian artefacts on loan from the British Museum. PHARAOH: King of Egypt features amazing objects from the British Museum’s world-class collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts, and allows visitors of all ages to explore the myths and realities of being a king in ancient Egypt.

Andy Horn, Exhibitions Manager at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery comments: “We are very proud to be hosting this amazing exhibition in Birmingham this summer. The exhibition showcases some of the UK’s most fascinating ancient Egyptian artefacts, and it complements Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s own impressive Egyptian collection. And alongside the exhibition throughout the summer break, we will have lots of Egyptian-themed family activities on offer.”

John Orna-Ornstein, Head of London and National Programmes at the British Museum, said: “I am delighted that PHARAOH: King of Egypt is coming to Birmingham. It’s the largest group of Egyptian objects ever lent in the UK – a real once in a lifetime opportunity to see some extraordinary objects at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.’

Tomb N°5 of el-Kab was created by the nomarch Paheri for his maternal grandfather, Ahmose, son of Abana. It includes a famous historic autobiography of this great soldier and sailor, which has been the object of numerous studies. This is because it is one of the only documents relating the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt and the military campaigns of the first sovereigns of the XVIIIth Dynasty.
But the rest of the monument has never been the object of publication to this day.  This is why it seemed interesting to us to present on OsirisNet the entire chapel.

On Thursday I met with a group of around 30 visitors from Henshaws, a charity that provides support for blind and visually impaired people.

I confess to a little trepidation at the task of describing in sufficient detail objects that I am used to presenting in primarily visual terms – through photos or line drawings. We tend to speak of Egyptian ‘visual culture’ rather than ‘tangible culture’, and most museum displays assume that objects – because they are usually behind glass – are only viewed by sight. But what if you are blind or visually impaired?

The selection of objects for the session was dictated mainly by texture. Along with Conservator Irit Narkiss, Andrea Winn, the Museum’s Curator of Community Exhibitions, and I chose objects that provided a range of surfaces.

In the Parque del Oeste in Madrid tourists can visit the Temple of Debod, which originally stood on land that was flooded after the building of the Aswan High Dam

It’s a sunny day in Madrid. In the Parque del Oeste (Western Park), a couple of teachers herd a group of excited young school kids dressed as Pharaohs into the long queue to enter Debod, one of three Pharaonic temples in Europe.

A visit to this ancient Egyptian site, reassembled in a European city, raises questions about whether  sacredness is site-specific. Is it lost when the geo-cultural context is altered?

The temple of Debod may provide an answer. The setting is a perfect one from an aesthetic viewpoint: the temple dominates a beautiful park, surrounded by an artificial pond, in an attempt to recreate the original context.

A closer look reveals that it is not that perfect from a conservation perspective, because – unlike other Pharaonic temples outside Egypt - Debod is set in the open, subject to Madrid’s polluted air and extreme weather conditions.

Why Madrid then? What brought the temple to Spain in the first place? The answer takes us back to the Egypt of the 1960s, and to the epic UNESCO campaign to save the monuments of Nubia from being lost forever.

Hoskins was a British traveller, antiquary and amateur artist. Born, 1802. Died, Rome 1863. Visited Egypt in 1832-3 and 1860-1. Worked with Robert Hay at Qurna. Secretary and Treasurer of the White Nile Association, 1839. Published Travels in Ethiopia above the Second Cataract of the Nile (1835), Visit to the Great Oasis of the Libyan Desert (1837), and A Winter in Upper and Lower Egypt (1863).

As part of the Petrie Museum’s A Fit Mind in a Fit Body season of events for summer 2012, we are encouraging you to explore Egypt in London. We have run walks in London for some time now; visiting cemeteries, factories, cinemas, parks and mausoleums in the search for Egyptian influences on London monuments, architecture and places.

We’d love to hear about any more places that you think are a bit of ‘Egypt in London’  – visitors have suggested the Homebase on Warwick Rd for example. Tweet pictures and places to @PetrieMuseEgypt.

In her inscription at the Middle Egyptian shrine called the Speos Artemidos in Greek, Hatshepsut had something to say about people living at the Delta city of Avaris. Her assertions have been the source of some controversy, both linguistic and historical. Right from the outset of the section where she refers to the Hyksos, Sir Alan Gardiner chose to begin the phrase with the word “Dr”, which he translated as meaning “since” in this case. [Egyptian Grammar, page 131, where he supplies the entire phrase: “Dr wn aAmw m-qAb-n TA-mHw Hwt-wart”, rendering it “since the Asiatics were in Avaris of Lower Egypt”.] After that comes “SmAw m-qAb=sn”. Because the determinative of the plural noun “SmAw” is a man holding a stick with a bundle on his shoulder, it is clear that “wanderers” are meant, they being "in the midst of" the “aAmw”.

At the heart of the Golden age of Egyptology stands archaeologist Howard Carter a talented artist with a keen eye for beautiful objects and the good fortune to excavate the tombs of a number of kings in the Valley of Kings including the semi-intact tomb of Tutankhamun with it's beautifully preserved objects.

The former head of Egypt's Supreme council of Antiquities has praised Howard Carter for his work on the tomb though a series of great men took part in the excavation including the Metropolitan Museum of art expedition photographer Harry Burton who's photo's of the excavation are now famous.

The problems really started in the early 1920's during a dispute between Howard Carter and the head of the Egyptian antiquities service Pierre Lacau who suspected that Carter and his financier Lord Carnarvon were smuggling out objects from Tutankhamun's tomb believing that the contents of the tomb belonged to them and not Egypt's antiquities service.

What is Egypt like in 2012 after the revolution, well to be honest not much different here in Luxor. The temples and tombs are still here, the tourists still come although numbers are down. The sun still shines. The redevelopment of Luxor centre has almost come to a close as most things are finished and those that haven’t money is needed in other areas. The new cornice is a pleasant place and as it matures it will get more character.

The plaza in front of Luxor temple has successfully held a number of events like Egypt Moving Forward and the Conference Centre had a great celebration of the anniversary of the revolution. The changes as a result of the revolution are minimal, people do seem to have to the courage to demonstrate but the many of the changes they demand are beyond the gift of the government, council and employers because of the state of the economy. As tourism recovers these will be achievable but Egypt’s revolution will not happen overnight. It will take time but the signs are promising.

Here on the West Bank a new dewatering project has started protecting the temples for the rising ground water.