Eight years after giving the go-ahead for the National Project to Document Egypt’s Heritage, Beni Hassan necropolis in the Upper Egyptian town of Minya has become the first site on the list to be documented.

The Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA) is responsible for archaeologically documenting Egypt’s cultural and historical heritage, in an attempt to protect and preserve it, as well as providing comprehensive and detailed studies of every site and monument in Egypt for researchers and students in the field.

Mohamed Ibrahim, antiquities’s minister, told Ahram Online that Egyptologists used state-of-the-art equipment and modern technology to document the necropolis and published the findings in a booklet of 337 pages, including 268 photos and 62 drawings and charts.

Director of the ministry's registration department, Magdi El-Ghandour, described the documentation effort as one of Egypt’s major projects to preserve its heritage. He added that the project aims to establish a scientific database for every monument in Egypt, to help the work of researchers.

"It is the second documentation project to be established in Egypt; the first was carried out in 1985 during the Nubian temples salvage operation, documenting the Nubian temples whether rescued or inundated in Lake Nasser."

A number of archaeologists have launched a project to develop archaeology in Egypt to be carried out by the new government, according to MENA.    

The project, which was launched under the title, ‘Egyptian Antiquities’ Renaissance Project ‘ includes a plan to develop archaeology to occupy a prestigious position as one of the state’s main economic sources, said Mohamed Abdel- Maqsoud ,deputy chairman of the Egyptian antiquities sector.

The project aims at changing the technique of work in this field that should  controlled  by a specialised  state security body to protect Egypt’ monuments and archaeological heritage .

Abdel-Maqsoud noted that the antiquities sector is facing financial problems due to the reduced number of tourists visiting Egypt  during the last couple of years. The archaeologists have called for cultural tourism  to be mainly based mainly on visiting monumental sites throughout Egypt.

It is know the antiquities sector is self -financing , says Abdel -Maqsoud, adding that the annual revenues of the monuments normally reaches to LE1.2 billion  nearly($200 million) annually.

St. Catherine’s Monastery is going digital. The monastery that claims to be the oldest in the world ­— not destroyed, not abandoned in 17 centuries — has begun digitizing its ancient manuscripts for the use of scholars. A new library to facilitate the process is about five years away.

The librarian, Father Justin, says the monastery’s library will grow an internet database of first-millennium manuscripts, which up until now have been kept under lock and key. Should a scholar want a manuscript, they need only email Father Justin.

“And if I don’t have book but see a reference, I can email a friend in Oxford. They can scan and send it the next day,” he says.

Still, as natural and inevitable as it sounds, that’s quite the sea change. Just 10 years ago, bad phone lines made it hard to connect a call with the monastery. One hundred years ago, it took 10 days to travel from Suez with a caravan of camels. 

Since the very beginning of human evolution, communication has played a crucial role in social development. In our modern world, when messages are conveyed through countless routes, it is very appropriate to look back and understand how interaction influenced past societies.

‘Connections’ aims to explore the ways in which the ancient Egyptians communicated between each other and those in a wider international environment. The methods they used are not far removed from our own, using various verbal and non-verbal techniques. Contributions to this study include investigations of written communication, along with interaction through material culture, gestures and much more. ‘Connections’ hopes to provide a unique insight into the ways that the Egyptians communed with the deceased, the illiterate, the divine and sacred worlds, foreign countries and different social groups.

An online catalogue accompanies a physical exhibition taken from objects loaned to the University of Birmingham from the Eton College Joseph William Myers Collection of Egyptian antiquities. These objects are among the finest items of Egyptian art to have been collected during the late nineteenth century. Many of them are small masterpieces in their own right – but those less aesthetic objects also communicated messages, and have not been neglected in this project.

We present to you today the tomb of Amenemope, TT148, which dates from the 20th Dynasty.
Amenemope was Third Prophet of Amon, descended from a powerful family of which many representatives are mentioned in the chapel. The monument is on the north hillside of Dra Abu el-Naga, an area of which the prestige and the direct view of the pylons of Karnak, compensated for the poor quality of the local rock, which along with the prolonged occupation, caused serious damage to the decoration. What has survived is of a great artistic quality and allows the previous splendour of this tomb-temple to be realised.

On 30 December 1961 an EES expedition led by Professor Bryan Emery returned to Buhen in the Sudan, as part of the UK contribution to the UNESCO campaign to save the monuments of Nubia. In two short seasons in the winters of 1961/2 and 1963/4, the team excavated the Old Kingdom town at this site better known for its impressive  Middle Kingdom brick fortress. Emery only published only two very short descriptions of the work – one, which was not illustrated, in the editorial foreword to JEA 48 (1962) and another, with some photographs  and a plan, in Kush XI (1963).  He also included information about the town in his book Egypt in Nubia (1965). After completing the work at Buhen, Emery moved back to Saqqara and on his death in 1971 the excavations at Buhen remained unpublished.  Professor Harry Smith, with colleagues, published the fortress in two EES volumes in 1976 and 1979, and he had, in 1972, invited David O’Connor, who had been one of the Field Supervisors, to publish the Old Kingdom Town. 

Egypt's Ministry of State for Antiquities just issued a new book, 'The Tombs of Beni Hassan in Minya: The Picture and the Significance,' the first in a series in an ongoing project aimed at documenting Egypt's monuments and archaeological heritage.

The project, which began in 2004, aims to register all monuments throughout the country.

According to Minister of State for Antiquities Ahmed Ibrahim, the project will utilise the latest recording and documenting technologies.

The 377-page book includes 268 high-resolution photos of the tombs, along with 62 diagrams.

Magdy El-Ghandour, head of the Egyptian Centre for Recording Monuments, says the project's next step is to publish the scientific studies and make them available to future scholars.

Trout’s book presents an interesting hypothesis about the origins of myth and storytelling. The author conceives the development of storytelling in the very ancient past as a mechanism of early human beings to cope with the fear of predators. The purpose of the book is to “explain in detail how and why the animal predators of the Pleistocene got inside our heads and our stories” (25). Trout reminds his readers right at the beginning that, before human beings became the most efficient predators on the planet, they were the prey for about two million years, and until only about ten thousand years ago. For most of this time, humans had only stones and sticks to ward off predators.

The book is divided into ten chapters. The first introductory chapter, in which the purpose and method of the book are explained, is very short. Trout sets out to clarify why we are still so fascinated with stories about predators, real or fictitious. His purpose is also to discover the role that predators played in the evolution of storytelling itself.

The second chapter, "Bringers of Death", presents a survey of the predators which our ancestors encountered. Besides those still living and devouring humans in our own times, such as tigers, lions, wolves, bears, crocodiles, sharks, and snakes, the Pleistocene had a variety of fierce and dangerous animals to fear. Not only were those animals much larger than the current ones, but human beings were also not yet confident hunters, although not completely defenseless.

All exhibitions focusing on ancient Egypt (3100-332 B.C.) smell of the tomb to some degree, simply because the best artifacts have been recovered from the graves — this is true of "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs," an exhibition currently being held at the Osaka Tempozan Exhibition Gallery and which comes to the Ueno Royal Museum on Aug. 4. According to professor Jiro Kondo, a director of the Institute of Egyptology at Waseda University and the curator for the "Book of the Dead" exhibition here, such shows usually follow a set pattern.

"Every two or three years in Japan we have some sort of ancient Egyptian exhibition," Kondo says. "The focus is on golden objects and jewelry rather than a theme, leading Japanese people to think ancient Egyptian civilization is gold, mummies and jewelry. But this time, we are following the British Museum exhibition and taking a deeper look at the beliefs related to the afterlife."

The exhibition features around 80 objects sourced from a show held in autumn 2010 at the British Museum, with the centerpiece being the Greenfield Papyrus. This remarkable scroll, made for a high-ranking priestess named Nestanebtasheru in 930 B.C., contains a richly illustrated version of the Book of the Dead, an ancient Egyptian funerary text that is a rich source of information about the civilization.

Want to walk around the Sphinx? Clamber inside the Great Pyramid of Giza and seek out the pharaoh's burial chamber? Visit the magnificent tombs and temples of ancient Thebes? In this multi-layered, highly visual interactive, view 360° panoramas, "walkaround" photos, and other breathtaking imagery shot throughout the Giza Plateau and ancient Thebes (modern-day Luxor), often with special permission. You'll see Old and New Kingdom tombs and temples, pyramids and statues, and a 140-foot-long wooden boat that is 4,600 years old. Enjoy this unique journey through the Land of the Pharaohs.

Abstract

This thesis aims to further the understanding of the cultural and social history of the Middle Kingdom nomes. Two different approaches have been taken. The first examines coffin texts unique to individual coffins from the provincial cemetery of El Bersheh in the 15th Upper Egyptian nome. The evidence presented suggests that these texts were products of the Hermopolitan House of Life and were likely to have been created for specific individuals. It is concluded that the provincial elite were the driving force behind this innovation. In the second approach this thesis turns its attention to the pottery of Beni Hasan and the 16th Upper Egyptian nome. It is argued that the pottery corpus of Beni Hasan is reflective of the independence of the provincial administration and that the appearance of the Residence style during the mid 12th Dynasty is reflective of the social changes undertaken during the reign of Sesostris III. In the concluding section both approaches have been brought together, in doing so this thesis has been able to observe the independence and creativity of provincial culture which arose out of the unique power and authority held by the nomarchs.

Abstract
The modern metric system defines units of volume based on the cube. We propose that the ancient Egyptian system of measuring capacity employed a similar concept, but used the sphere instead. When considered in ancient Egyptian units, the volume of a sphere, whose circumference is one royal cubit, equals half a hekat. Using the measurements of large sets of ancient containers as a database, the article demonstrates that this formula was characteristic of Egyptian and Egyptian-related pottery vessels but not of the ceramics of Mesopotamia, which had a different system of measuring length and volume units.

English Abstract
The Opet temple, which rests atop the ruins of some 2000 years of Pharaonic history, was erected in thesecond century BCE by Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II. It was dedicated to the hippo goddess Opet, who was widelyregarded as a protector of mothers and children. In the sanctuary, she was incorporated into the myth of Osirisin order to facilitate the rebirth of the god Amun. The interior decorative program recounts several episodes of this myth, including the well-known representation of the resurrection of Osiris.This compact and discrete temple, located in the southwest corner of the enclosure at Karnak, lies far fromthe steady stream of tourists passing through the great temenos-wall of Amun-Re (see chapter I). In thiscontext, the monument’s position—almost touching the neighboring sanctuary of Khonsu—is surprising. The building itself rests atop the high bedrock with an architectural plan characterized by the placement of numerous crypts around a cruciform core. The Opet temple belongs to that rare category of sanctuaries thatcan be designated as “mythological temples”.A restoration program and study of the architectural, archaeological, and epigraphic material began in2005 under the direction of Emmanuel Laroze of the Centre Franco-Égyptien d’Étude des Temples de Karnak (CFEETK), a scientific collaboration of French and Egyptian missions to that site (Mansour Boraik, IbrahimSuleiman, Hamdi Ahmed Abd al-Jalil for the Supreme Council of Antiquities ; Emmanuel Laroze thenChristophe Thiers for the French National Center for Scientific Research – authors thank them all for their continuous support). The restoration and excavation projects have been supported by the private patronage of Ms. B. Guichard; additional excavation support has been provided by the Michela Schiff-Giorgini Foundation.

Author: Harold M. Hays
Subjects: Ancient Near East & Egypt

    Overview
    Chapters (17)

The ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts form the oldest body of religious texts in the world. This book weds traditional philology to linguistic anthropology to associate them with two spheres of ritual action, mortuary cult and personal preparation for the afterlife.