Enlarge / The burial mask of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen recovered from the boy king’s tomb. (credit: Hannes Magerstaedt/Getty Images) Among the many items recovered from King Tut’s tomb was a dagger made of iron, which is a material that was rarely used during Egypt’s 18th dynasty. That iron likely came from a meteorite, and a […]
Enlarge (credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities) Archaeologists in Egypt recently rediscovered two sphinxes that guarded the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, the grandfather of Tutankhamun. Despite 3, 400 years of weathering, the sphinxes still bear the carved limestone face of the pharaoh, who is adorned with a royal headdress and beard. The […]
Enlarge (credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities) Twenty-four hundred years ago, Heraklion was ancient Egypt’s largest port on the Mediterranean Sea. Today, the ancient city lies submerged beneath Abu Qir Bay, a few kilometers off the coast of Alexandria. Archaeology recently discovered the wreck of a warship from the city’s final years buried in the […]
Enlarge / Egyptian archaeologists have discovered a 3400-year-old city just outside Luxor, dating back to the reign of Amenhotop III, grandfather to King Tut. (credit: Zahi Hawass) A team of Egyptian archaeologists has unearthed what some describe as an industrial royal metropolis just north of modern-day Luxor, which incorporates what was once the ancient Egyptian […]
Enlarge (credit: University of Copenhagen) Egyptologists have recently translated the oldest-known mummification manual. Translating it required solving a literal puzzle; the medical text that includes the manual is currently in pieces, with half of what remains in the Louvre Museum in France and half at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. A few sections are […]
Enlarge (credit: Saleem and Hawass 2021) CT scans of a mummified Egyptian pharaoh, once suspected to be the victim of a palace assassination, suggest that he was actually executed after being captured in battle in the mid-16th century BCE. Pharaoh Seqenenre led his army from Upper Egypt in the 1550s BCE to face the Hyksos, […]
Enlarge / Sir Charles Nicholson donated the mummified person and the coffin to the University of Sydney in 1860, apparently having realized that an entire dead body is a pretty horrific travel souvenir. (credit: Sowada et al, PLOS ONE (CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)) Approximately 3,200 years ago in Egypt, ancient embalmers encased a mummy in […]
Enlarge / Copies of the Book of the Dead, or excerpts from it, were often included in burials so the deceased would have a guide to the afterlife. (credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities) Archaeologists in Egypt are preparing to open a 3,000-year-old burial shaft at the Saqqara necropolis, south of Cairo, in the […]
Expand / / Detail of a medical treatise in the Tebtunis Temple Library with key words indicated in red ink. (charge: The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection) An global group of scientists employed high-energy x-rays to examine 12 objects from ancient Egyptian papyri and discovered lead chemicals in both black and red inks utilized. Based on their recent […]