Wasous

The archaeological mission working in the archaeological site of al-Khalwa area, Fayoum, has uncovered a burial shaft, located to the east of the Prince Waji’s tomb dating back to the Middle Kingdom, Ministry of Antiquities announced on Thursday.

Credit: Egypt. Ministry of Antiquities

Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Mostafa Waziri said that al-Khalwa, located at southern Fayoum, contains a cemetery dating back to the Middle Kingdom era, namely Amenemhat III era (1842-1799 BC).

He added that the cemetery has the tomb of Prince Waji, the ruler of Fayoum in the Middle Kingdom, as well as the tomb of his mother "Nabat Mout", which lies to the east of it.

Meanwhile, Head of the archaeological mission Ayman Ashmawy said that the shaft contains three burial chambers, in which the mission found the upper part of a statue (40 cm height) made from sandstone of a person holding his hand on his chest along with the middle part of a basalt statue (30 cm height).

Credit: Egypt. Ministry of Antiquities

The mission also discovered inside the three burial chambers a number of pottery vessels and three heads of Canopian vessels, but some of them were broken into pieces.

Ashmawy pointed out that these chambers were likely to have been looted in ancient times and reused for burial in later eras.

Hani Abul Azm, the head of the Central Administration for Antiquities of upper Egypt, remarked that Waji's tomb was carved in rock and was discovered by the Italian mission of the University of Pisa in 1981 through the archaeological survey project in the area.

Credit: Egypt. Ministry of Antiquities

He added that the mission found a limestone statue inside the tomb, on which the name of the prince was written, a part of a wooden coffin and a pottery vessel. He explained that the statue is currently kept inside the museum store of Kom Oshim, Fayoum.

“The ceiling of the tomb was completely collapsed, maybe due to a massive earthquake in ancient times or the weight of the roof stones,” said Sayed Al Shoura, General Director of Antiquities Sector.

He said that Italian mission has built a new ceiling to protect the tomb’s inscriptions under the supervision of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Source: Egypt Today [December 07, 2018]

The Charter for the Protection of the Byzantine Heritage Monuments was uninanimously ratified after a three-day debate held in Thessaloniki over the weekend. The officials agreed on a framework of commonly accepted principles for the protection of the Byzantine heritage monuments for all states which own and manage monuments of the former Byzantine Empire, which spanned 11 centuries and three continents and whose monuments are now spread out among 23 countries with different cultures, languages and religions.

Ceiling mosaics from the baptistery of San Giovanni in Naples, Italy [Credit: Cambridge University Press]

The voting of the Charter was the culmination of a lengthy process conducted over four meetings held in 2001, 2003, 2006 and this year, organised by the European Centre of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Monuments.

It is a charter of principles that aims to be a useful scientific tool to the countries that have Byzantine-era monuments in their territories. The principles encourage the inclusion into countries' national law of measures to protect, study, record and incorporate the monuments into modern societies, in order to tell their story to citizens and visitors.

Representatives from Egypt, Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Jordan, Spain, Israel, Italy, Croatia, Cyprus, Lebanon, Palestine, Romania, Serbia, Syria, Bahrain and Morocco participated in Thessaloniki meeting, which was concluded on Sunday. The participation of Tunisia and FYROM, which was initially scheduled, was cancelled.

The Charter will be submitted to UNESCO for ratification and will remain open for other countries with Byzantine monuments in their territory to join.

Source: ANA-MPA [December 03, 2018]

Egyptologists and archaeologists specialising in Egypt do not often talk about the clothes worn by ancient Egyptians. This topic is still poorly researched - scientists have long neglected it and focused on other aspects of this civilization, despite the fact that a lot of fabrics have survived to our times.

Credit: Dr. Aleksandra Hallmann

Egyptologist Dr. Aleksandra Hallmann from the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Oriental Institute in Chicago decided to explore this topic. In February this year the researcher organized an international conference in Chicago on the subject of clothing in various ancient civilizations. As for the clothes of the ancient Egyptians, she has important findings.

"Egyptians most often used rectangular fabrics of various lengths and widths, which they wrapped in many ways around their bodies" - says Hallmann. But the known items also include socks, gloves, loincloths and even underwear - a triangular piece of fabric girded around the waist.

The most popular clothing fabric was linen. But it was also used for other purposes: for wrapping statues for ritual purposes (for example the jackal in the tomb of Tutankhamun was wrapped in a linen tunic) and various ritual objects. Linen was also an expensive product in barter transactions. "Linen was present in almost all areas of life of the ancient Egyptians" - the expert says.

The ancient Egyptians also used wool. Archaeologists sometimes find it during excavations within the ancient Egyptian settlements. Unfortunately, it is difficult to distinguish between the types of fabric on bas-reliefs. Because of the popularity of linen, scientists often assume that Egyptians were depicted in robes made of this fabric.

"Linen cloth was used to wrap mummies. Egyptians used both long bandages made especially for the needs of a given burial, as well as bandages made of old fabrics that had been used as clothing. Some of them even showing traces of mending!" - says Hallmann. It was the consequence of the fact that fabrics were very expensive in ancient Egypt, so they were reused for various purposes, including wrapping mummified corpses. But there are cases when folded clothes were placed in boxes that served as wardrobes in the tombs of wealthy Egyptians.

According to Hallmann, Egyptian clothing can be divided into two categories - wrapped and sewn clothes. The former were much more common. Egyptians knew tailored and sewn clothes, such as tunics, but most clothes were created by wrapping or draping of a rectangular piece of material.

Credit: Dr. Aleksandra Hallmann

"Bas-reliefs depict women in dresses, but not a single sewn-up dress has been found during excavations. They were appropriately arranged and draped rectangular pieces of fabric, and not specially sewn clothes" - says the Egyptologist.

An example of sewn clothes are simple tunics, worn by the Egyptians with varying frequency, depending on the era. These were rectangular fabric stripes folded along the short edge, stitched to the side. In addition, a hole for the head and a neckline was made. Sometimes separately sewn sleeves were attached.

"Women, men and children wore such tunics. Their length and width, as well as their popularity, varied throughout the history of ancient Egypt" - Hallmann said.

In turn, it was very characteristic for men to wear linen loincloths, called kilts or skirts in the professional literature due to the lack of the original Egyptian name. They belong to the same category of wrapped clothes as women`s dresses. They were draped from a rectangular piece of linen around the hips - reliefs and statues depict pharaohs, but also by farmers dressed in them. Their length changed over time - some were very short, covering half of the thigh, and some reached to the ankles. Kilts were often worn one over another, or together with a tunic.

"Of course, fabrics had different quality and finishes, which also influenced their prices. Royal garments were more colourful and had more decorative elements, such as tassels or decorative hem" - says Hallmann.

Due to the wrapped style of many Egyptian clothes, reliefs from tombs are very helpful in ancient Egyptian clothing studies, because they show finishing of clothes that is rarely preserved in the case of fabrics. Unfortunately, scientists sometimes encounter a problem, because decorative elements are often painted, not etched, so they fade over time.

Hallmann believes that many elements of the ancient Egyptian culture have survived to this day. For example, the tunic is very similar to today`s jellabiya, a wide garment reminiscent of a nightgown, very popular especially in the rural Egypt.

Author: Szymon Zdziebłowski | Source: PAP - Science in Poland [December 01, 2018]

A team of scientists led by Mohamed Sahnouni, archaeologist at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), has just published a paper in the journal Science which breaks with the paradigm that the cradle of Humankind lies in East Africa, based on the archaeological remains found at sites in the region of Ain Hanech (Algeria), the oldest currently known in the north of Africa.

Archaeological excavation at Ain Boucherit, Algeria [Credit: Mathieu Duval]

For a long time, East Africa has been considered the place of origin of the earliest hominins and lithic technology, because up to now, very little was known about the first hominin occupation and activities in the north of the continent. Two decades of field and laboratory research directed by Dr. Sahnouni have shown that ancestral hominins actually made stone tools in North Africa that are near contemporary with the earliest known stone tools in East Africa dated to 2.6 million years.

These are stone artifacts and animal bones bearing marks of cutting by stone tools, with an estimated chronology of 2.4 and 1.9 million years, respectively, found at two levels at the sites of Ain Boucherit (within the Ain Hanech study area), which were dated using Paleomagnetism, Electron Spin Resonance (ESR), and the Biochronology of large mammals excavated together with the archaeological materials.

Fossils of animals such as pigs, horses and elephants, from very ancient sites, have been used by the paleontologist Jan van der Made, of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, to corroborate the ages yielded by Paleomagnetism, obtained by the CENIEH geochronologist Josep Parés, and ESR, found by Mathieu Duval, of Griffith University.

Members of Ain Hanech team excavating at Ain Boucherit [Credit: Sahnouni et al., 2018]

The artifacts of Ain Boucherit were manufactured of locally available limestone and flint and include faces worked into choppers, polyhedra and subspheroids, as well as sharp-edged cutting tools used to process animal carcasses. These artifacts are typical of the Oldowan stone technology known from 2.6-1.9 million-year-old sites in East Africa, although those from Ain Boucherit show subtle variations.

"The lithic industry of Ain Boucherit, which is technologically similar to that of Gona and Olduvai, shows that our ancestors ventured into all corners of Africa, not just East Africa. The evidence from Algeria changes the earlier view that East Africa was the cradle of Humankind. Actually, the whole of Africa was the cradle of humankind," states Sahnouni, leader of the Ain Hanech project.

Ain Boucherit is one of the few archaeological sites in Africa which has provided evidence of bones with associated marks of cutting and percussion in situ with stone tools, which shows unmistakably that these ancestral hominins exploited meat and marrow from animals of all sizes and skeletal parts, which implied skinning, evisceration and defleshing of upper and intermediate extremities.

Two examples of stone tools from Ain Boucherit. An Oldowan core from which sharp-edged cutting flakes were removed (left). Sharp-edged cutting flake that may be used for butchery activities on the bones (right) [Credit: Mohamed Sahnouni]

Isabel Cáceres, taphonomist at the IPHES, has commented that "the effective use of sharp-edged tools at Ain Boucherit suggests that our ancestors were not mere scavengers. It is not clear at this moment whether they hunted, but the evidence clearly shows that they were successfully competing with carnivores and enjoyed first access to animal carcasses."

At this moment, the most important question is who made the stone tools discovered in Algeria. Hominin remains have still not been found in North Africa which are contemporary with the earliest stone artifacts. As a matter of fact, nor have any hominins yet been documented in direct association with the first stone tools known from East Africa.

Nevertheless, a recent discovery in Ethiopia has shown the presence of early Homo dated to 2.8 million years, most likely the best candidate also for the materials from East and North Africa.

A small bovid bone with stone tool cutmarks [Credit: Isabel Caceres]

Scientists thought for a long time that the hominins and their material culture originated in the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. Surprisingly, the earliest known hominin, dated to 7.0 million years, and the 3.3 million years Australopithecus bahrelghazali, have been discovered in Chad, in the Sahara, 3000 km from the rift valleys in the east of Africa.

As Sileshi Semaw, scientist at the CENIEH and a co-author of this paper, explains that the hominins contemporary with Lucy (3.2 million years), were probably roamed over the Sahara, and their descendants might have been responsible for leaving these archaeological puzzles now discovered in Algeria, that are near contemporaries of those of East Africa.

"Future research will focus on searching for human fossils in the nearby Miocene and Plio-Pleistocene deposits, looking for the tool-makers and even older stone tools," concludes Sahnouni.

Source: Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) [November 30, 2018]

An ancient tomb containing belongings and remains, which dates back to the Roman era in the second century AD, was discovered in the area of Dogha in Tarhuna city, 65 kilometres (40 mi) to the southeast of Tripoli.

Credit: Municipal Council of Tarhuna

Credit: Municipal Council of Tarhuna

Credit: Municipal Council of Tarhuna

The Municipal Council of Tarhuna said that the new archaeological discovery goes back to more than 1,700 years, clarifying that the tomb consists of a rectangular chamber with two openings and contains three coffins made of limestone, one of them has the name of its owner, carved on it.

Source: The Libya Observer [November 29, 2018]

During excavation work in the area to the northeastern side of Amenemhat II’s tomb in the Dahshour necropolis in Giza, an Egyptian archaeological mission has stumbled upon eight graves from the Late Period.

Credit: Egypt. Ministry of Antiquities

Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, explains that the graves contain limestone sarcophagi with mummies inside, three of which are in very good conservation condition.

Credit: Egypt. Ministry of Antiquities

The mummies are covered in cartonnage adorned with paintings of the faces of the deceased. The cartonnage is painted in blue, brown and green.

Credit: Egypt. Ministry of Antiquities

Waziri said that the mummies have been taken to store galleries for restoration and suggested that they could be put on display at the newly established museum in Sharm El-Sheikh or Hurgada.

Credit: Egypt. Ministry of Antiquities

Dahshur is a royal ancient Egyptian necropolis that houses the Bent and Red pyramids of the fourth dynasty pharaoh Sneferu, as well as the black pyramid of pharaoh Amenemhat III, among other royal pyramids.

Author: Nevine El-Aref | Source: Ahram Online [November 28, 2018]

Egypt on Saturday unveiled an ancient tomb, sarcophagi and funerary artefacts discovered in the Theban necropolis of Al-Assasif in the southern city of Luxor.

Sarcophagus containing the well-preserved mummy of a woman named "Thuya" wrapped in linen, discovered by a French mission at the site of Tomb TT33 which dates to the 18th dynasty (16th-13th century BC) at Al-Assasif necropolis on the west bank of the Nile north of the southern Egyptian city of Luxor [Credit: Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters]

In a ceremony in front of the temple of Queen Hatshepsut, Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani announced that French and Egyptian archaeologists had discovered "a new tomb... with very nice paintings".

Located between the royal tombs at the Valley of the Queens and the Valley of the Kings, the Al-Assasif necropolis is the burial site of nobles and senior officials close to the pharaohs.

Egyptian workers and archaeologists standing next to an opened intact sarcophagus containing the well-preserved mummy of a woman named Thuya [Credit: Khaled Desouki/AFP]

Among the finds in the tomb are sarcophagi, statues and some 1,000 funerary figurines called "Ushabtis" made of wood, faience and clay.

The tomb dates back to the Middle Kingdom, which spanned the 11th and 12th dynasties, and belonged to "Thaw-Irkhet-If", mummification supervisor at the Temple of Mut in Karnak, according to the ministry.

A carved black wooden sarcophagus inlaid with gilded sheets, dating to Egypt's Late period (7th-4th century BC),  lying in a burial chamber decorated with coloured scenes depicting the owner with members of his family,  discovered by an Egyptian archaeological mission at the site of Tomb TT28 at Al-Assasif necropolis on the  west bank of the Nile north of the southern Egyptian city of Luxor [Credit: Egypt. Ministry of Culture]

Separately, archaeologists from the French Institute of Eastern Archaeology (IFAO) and the University of Strasbourg have discovered two sarcophagi dating back to the 18th dynasty, Anani told a news conference.

One of the two contains the "well-preserved" mummified remains of a woman named Thuya, the antiquities ministry said in a statement.

Carved wooden statues and funerary figurines made of wood, faience and clay discovered at the site of Tomb TT28 at Al-Assasif necropolis [Credit: Khaled Desouki/AFP]

Broken stele fragment inscribed with hieroglyphics, discovered by a French mission at the site of Tomb TT33 which dates to the 18th dynasty (16th-13th century BC) at Al-Assasif necropolis [Credit: Khaled Desouki/AFP]

But ministry spokeswoman Nevine Aref told AFP later that work was still ongoing to definitively identify the name of the mummy.

Egyptian authorities regularly announce archaeological discoveries with great fanfare, although the country is often accused of a lack of scientific rigour and neglect of its antiquities.


Archaeological sites, particularly in Luxor, make Egypt a major draw for foreign tourists.

Hit by the turmoil that enveloped Egypt after the 2011 uprising that ousted longtime president Hosni Mubarak, the tourism sector has picked up this year.

Source: AFP [November 26, 2018]