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EGYPTOLOGY
Mummy in the Louvre Egyptology is the study of the language, history, and culture of ancient Egypt. Archaeology is one its tools.
Egyptology is dominated by foreigners, An effort is being made to make Egypt the center of Egyptology by placing restrictions on non-Egyptians such as preventing them from working at more than one site per season and defining the area of the excavation and not allowing work outside that area.
In the tightknit circles of Egyptology, it has been said, the loudest theories typically win the most attention. The writer Jo Marchant said: “Egyptology, as sold to the public, is sometimes not so far from show business,” As far as carrying out excavations, archaeologists often have to deal with a political climate that is always changing and fickle government officials that can withdraw approval for projects in a flash of whimsy.
Egyptology is often more of an exercise of conjecture rather than a science built on solid facts. As the protagonist of Arthur Phillips’ 2004 novel “The Egyptologist writes” says pharaohs, “these once-great men and women now cling to their hard-won immortality by the thinnest of filaments...while, across that chasm of time from them, historians and excavators struggle to build a rickety bridge of educated guesses for those nearly vanished heroes to cross.”. [Source: Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine, December 2014]
Websites on Ancient Egypt: UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, escholarship.org ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Egypt sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Discovering Egypt discoveringegypt.com; BBC History: Egyptians bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians ; Ancient History Encyclopedia on Egypt ancient.eu/egypt; Digital Egypt for Universities. Scholarly treatment with broad coverage and cross references (internal and external). Artifacts used extensively to illustrate topics. ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt ; British Museum: Ancient Egypt ancientegypt.co.uk; Egypt’s Golden Empire pbs.org/empires/egypt; Metropolitan Museum of Art www.metmuseum.org ; Oriental Institute Ancient Egypt (Egypt and Sudan) Projects ; Egyptian Antiquities at the Louvre in Paris louvre.fr/en/departments/egyptian-antiquities; KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt kmtjournal.com; Egypt Exploration Society ees.ac.uk ; Amarna Project amarnaproject.com; Abzu: Guide to Resources for the Study of the Ancient Near East etana.org; Egyptology Resources fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
Ancient Egyptian Archaeology
"boomerang" in King Tut's tomb Egypt can be an extremely challenging places to do archaeological digs. In Luxor, for example, temperatures often rise above 38°C (100°F).
Unraveling the genealogies and pharaohs and their queens is difficult. The historical records are incomplete, tombs have been disturbed (with the mummies of rulers put back in the wrong caskets) and brothers and sisters and even fathers and daughters intermarried.
Scholars often use hairstyles to date mummies and images and objects with human figures on them. Artifacts dated using tree rings include timbers from an Egyptian shipwrecks that revealed a gold scarab with Queen Nefertari's name, cut in 1316 B.C.
By one estimate one day in the field generates three or four days work in the laboratory as reliefs are compared to others; pottery is reconstructed and dated; bones are identified and tested; and research is carried out in libraries, computers and offices. Archaeologists have to deal finding stuff under cities and private agricultural land needed by farmers. Those working in tombs often cough up flecks of mud. This is called "tomb cough.”
Only since the early 1970s has proper archaeology techniques been widely applied in Egypt. Before then pyramids were blasted open with explosives; doors to tombs were knocked opened with battering rams; and coffins were hastily pried to open to get at the potential goodies that lay inside them. Expose to air and humidity after sealed tombs are opened are among the biggest dangers to artwork (See King Tut's Tomb).
Modern alternations of the topography around the Valley of Kings has created channels that directs waters from rainstorms directly into the tombs. One particularly nasty storm in November 1994 generated flash floods, with waters that reached speeds of 30mph, severely damaged several tombs. Fortunately major flash floods occur only once very 300 years or so.
See Separate Article: ANCIENT EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY: TOOLS, METHODS, EXCAVATIONS africame.factsanddetails.com
Papyrology
papyrus
John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker: “Papyrology is a study that combines aspects of textual scholarship, philology, and archeology. It requires Olympian patience to find letters and words amid such badly damaged material, and immense learning to divine the meaning within. It’s unusual to get three words in a row without lacunae. [Source: John Seabrook, The New Yorker , November 16, 2015 \=/]
“Compounding the difficulty is the fact that scribes wrote Greek without spaces between words. A single line can easily take six months to decipher. Sometimes educated guesses about missing bits are wrong, causing the reader to arrive at different meanings from what was intended. One of the revelations following the Brigham Young MSI studies was how wrong many of the earlier readings of the scrolls were. Some editors were essentially making up their own texts.
““Papyrologists are a special breed,” Anthony Grafton, a professor of Renaissance and Reformation history at Princeton, says. “They work with really badly damaged manuscripts. But they live with the promise of finding something really new—which is very rare in most classical scholarship.” There, marginalia is the only hope.” \=/
Egyptologists
There are only a few hundred Egyptologists in the world. Most of them are art historians or philologists. Only a few are archaeologists. Ian Parker wrote in The New Yorker, the study of ancient “Egypt is a small, backbiting world. Internationally, fewer than seven hundred scholars work full time in the field, in no more than a hundred institutions, people labor for decades waiting for a professor to move aside or die.”
Many important discoveries of ancient Egypt in the later part of the 20th century were made by Jean-Phlippe Lauer (1902-2001), a Frenchman considered at one time to be the "dean of Egyptologists". He has spent over 68 years studying the Step pyramid at Saqqara, twice as long as it took to build it. American archaeologist Ken Weeks discovered the Tomb of Ramses Sons. The German archaeologist Uvi Hölscher hired scores of workers during the four days it took him to organize the transportation of a 17-foot-high statue of King Tutankhamun a half a mile.
Toby Wilkinson
Toby Wilkinson, an Egyptologist at the University of Cambridge, and Dr Joyce Tyldesley, a mummy expert at the University of Manchester, appear a lot on televison specials about ancient Egypt. For a while Bob Brier’s name popped up a lot in National Geographic articles on Egypt. Tyldesley is an Author and broadcaster. She teaches Egyptology at Manchester University, and is Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, Liverpool University. She is author of “Tales from Ancient Egypt” (Rutherford Press, 2004) and “Egypt: How a Lost Civilization was Rediscovered” (BBC Publications, 2005), written to accompany the BBC TV series of the same name.
Mark Lehner of the University of Chicago has worked on the restoration of the Sphinx, intensively explored the pyramids and studied the pyramid builders. He even baked bread using the same methods as the pyramid builders. Lehner first came to Egypt as member of the Edgar Cayce Foundation to find a "Hall of Record” under the Giza Plateau. The foundation believes the pyramids were built by the people of Atlantis. He got his Ph.D. at Yale and has been employed by the University of Chicago and Harvard’s Semitic Museum and has worked extensively with the Egyptian Egyptologist Zahi Hawass.
Ian Shaw is Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Liverpool. He excavates regularly in Egypt, and his research interests include Egyptian urbanisation, ancient technology and the provenancing of ancient materials. From 1986 to 1990 he edited the ancient Egyptian section of the Macmillan Dictionary of Art. From 1990 to 1994, he undertook research into Egyptian quarrying and mining sites as a British Academy Research Fellow at New Hall, Cambridge. From 1994 to 1999 he was Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He is the author of Egyptian Warfare and Weapons (Shire Publications, 1992) and Exploring Ancient Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2003), co-author of the British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt (British Museum Press, 1995), editor of The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2000), and co-editor of Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Blackwell's Dictionary of Archaeology (Basil Blackwell, 1999).
John Ray is the Herbert Thompson Reader in Egyptology in the University of Cambridge. He has held posts in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities in the British Museum and in the University of Birmingham. His publications have concentrated on the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods of Egyptian history and he is a regular reviewer on historical and literary themes for the Times Literary Supplement. His book, Reflections of Osiris, was published by Profile Books in the winter of 2001. |::|
Los-Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute has done first rate work restoring tombs like the one belonging to King Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings and the Tomb of Nefertari in the Valley of the Queens near Luxor. The museum also designed air-tight cases for the mummies in the Egyptian Museum.
Zahi Hawass
Zahi Hawass shows Laura Bush and Liz Cheney the Giza Pyramids
Egypt’s best-known archaeologist, Zahi Hawass has served as the secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) from 2002 until 2011, when the Mubarak regime that supported him was toppled. Pugnacious, irrepressible and coming across like a senior, Semitic Indiana Jones, he was the leader of the effort to bring Egypt’s treasures back to Egypt, promoting Egyptian Egyptologists and making money from Egypt ‘s glorious past (he was involved in the profitable King Tut exhibit in the 2000s). For a while it seemed that whenever a discovery was made or major article, television show or documentary on ancient Egypt came out it it seemed that somehow he was always at the center of it. Among his good friends are Omar Sharif, star of "Doctor Zhivago" and "Funny Girl". Among those that kowtowed to him were were presidents of the History and Discovery channels.[Source: Ian Parker, The New Yorker, November 16, 2009]
Time magazine named Hawass as one the world’s 100 most influential people. In the magazine’s profile, Elizabeth Peters wrote, “He walks briskly toward the television cameras, the prefect image of a modern-day archaeologist...His confident stride is justified” as he “is The Man. He determines who will excavate in Egypt and when and where. Unlike some of his predecessors, he does not keep a low profile, he ranges the world lecturing, making TV appearances and turning out a stream of books and articles...He is passionate about Egypt and its antiquities had doesn’t hesitate to use words like magical, thrilling and marvelous...he isn’t a afraid of controversy—in fact, some might say he courts it. He makes news by demanding the return of objects "stolen" from Egypt by excavators and museums.”
Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: For more than a decade Zahi Hawass was, arguably, the Osiris of antiquities. A regal combination of showman and scholar, he ruled a netherworld of tombs and temples, investigating age-old mysteries — the burial place of Antony and Cleopatra, the cause of death of Tutankhamen — for rapt television audiences. Hawass’ megalomania was legendary: In “Chasing Mummies: The Amazing Adventures of Zahi Hawass,” a reality television series on the History Channel, the archaeologist led his trainees on Howard Carter-type adventures, an exercise in self-aggrandizement so unabashed that it prompted a New York Times critic to smirk: “One hopes. . . Dr. Hawass will unearth some ancient Egyptian chill pills and swallow a generous helping. ” Yet he also earned the admiration of peers and millions of fans. The National Geographic Society named him explorer-in-residence in 2001, an honor he shared with primatologist Jane Goodall, filmmaker James Cameron and paleontologists Meave and Louise Leakey. He wrote best-selling books. He commanded lecture fees ranging from $10,000 to $50,000.A traveling exhibition he put together of five dozen artifacts from the Egyptian Museum, “Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” earned $110 million for Egypt during its tour of seven cities in Europe and the United States. It was one of the most lucrative museum shows of all time. [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013]
Ian Parker wrote in The New Yorker, “Among the National Geographic Society’s Explorers in residence...Hawass is the only one to have a staff of thirty thousand people.” When U.S. President Barrack Obama visited Egypt in 2009 it was Hawass that gave him a guided a tour. He is Egyptology’s C.E.O.—“or, as he puts it, ‘in charge of everything in Egypt.’ It’s as if Jacques Cousteau, in his heyday, had taken on the task of approving everyone else’s scuba-diving permit....the oddity of this role, at the intersection of archaeology, show business and national politics, make controversy unavoidable.”
Hawass has many critics. Some of them say he runs the antiquities department like a dictator and controls Egypt’s archaeological sites as if they were his fief, stealing the spotlight and taking the credit of archaeologists who have labored for decades in their area of expertise, denying archaeologists he doesn’t like access to sites, and exploiting Egypt’s antiquities for money. Parker, wrote, “he appears to be enlivened and empowered by his battles with enemies, real or imagined: overseas archaeologists, foreign museums, amateur theorists who speculated the pyramids were built by lizards, and other ‘assholes.’...he enjoys making provocative announcements...as when he says he’s about to find Cleopatra’s body” or will “somehow copyright the shape of the pyramid.”
See “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Zahi Hawass” by Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian magazine smithsonianmag.com
Zahi Hawass’s Life
Hawass with Barack Obama at the Pyramids in 2009
Hawass was born in 1947 in a village near Damietta, a city in northern Egypt. His father was a farmer who died when Hawass was 13, On his youth he told The New Yorker, “I was a famous soccer player, and people loved me...When I was young, I used to make plays, theater, cultural activities in my village. And I was a leader of the kids, they followed me in Everything...All the ladies loved me and wanted to marry me.” He went to college in Alexandria when he was 16 and studied Greco-Roman archaeology. Although he was said to have been quite a ladies man he married a woman from his village, a gynecologist, and they had two sons.[Source: Ian Parker, The New Yorker, November 16, 2009]
In 1968, Hawass was hired by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities as an inspector, a government official that watched over work done by other archaeologists. He was sent to remote places in the desert and for ths most part didn’t like the work. In 1974 he was given an office with a view of the Pyramids of Giza and was on hand when the Grateful Dead played there. Later, admitting he was a “stupid asshole’ who “didn’t know anything” he took a postgraduate course in Egypt ology at Cairo University and thought about becoming a career tour guide, Instead he won a Fullbright grant and a place in the Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was regarded as a “outstanding” student. He lived in Philadelphia for seven years and returned to Egypt at the age of 40 as “a solid scholar” and today still retains a fondness of American ways.
In 1987, Hawass appointed director of the section of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization (formally known as the Egyptian Department of Antiquities and soon to become the SCA) that oversaw the pyramids. As the one in charge of the pyramids he made it his mission to transform it from “ a zoo to an open park” much to the ire of families involved in selling trinkets and camel rides. As an archaeologist he did important work at Giza, uncovering mysteries on how the pyramids were made and finding out much about the people who built the pyramids by excavating a cemetery where they were buried. He also developed his style of showmanship there, often making sure the media was on hand when interesting tombs were opened and using his confrontations with wackos with strange views on the origins of the pyramid to generate interest among tourists in Egypt.
Before Mubarak was ousted as part of the Arab Spring protests in 2011, Hawass worked out of an office in Cairo. He was regarded as a master of multitasking and the layered meetings. Often doing an interview, barking orders to his subordinates and taking phone calls at the same time. A couple doors down from his main office was his English-speaking office run by Janice Kamrin, an American with a Ph.D. For the King Tutankhamun exhibit and made a deal with A.E.G. the sport-arena owner and events organizer, that gave SCA almost total control of the exhibit, with the museums that hosted the exhibits doing little more than providing a floor space and getting a cut of the action.
Zahi Hawass After Arab Spring in 2011
The February 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak also ended Hawass’ controversial reign as the supreme chief of all Egypt’s antiquities. It also threatened to unravel Hawass’ legacy as well. With tourists nearly gone, funds dried up and the Ministry of Antiquities leadership reshuffled several times. The new minister in charge ub 2023 diverted reconstruction money into hiring thousands of unemployed archaeology graduates. Hawass said this was a desperate move to stop protests. “He has done nothing,”
Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: Hawass was vilified when protests against President Mubarak erupted in Tahrir Square in January 2011.Protesters called him “the Mubarak of Antiquities” and accused him of corruption. Underlings in the antiquities department and jobless and frustrated archaeology graduates besieged his office, demanding his ouster. “And take your hat,” they shouted. In April 2011 he was sentenced to a year in jail, stemming from an alleged case of rigged contract bidding at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. (The verdict was later overturned. ) In July 2011, after serving two successive post-Mubarak governments, Hawass finally was obliged to give up his job. According to one Egyptian blogger, Hawass was “escorted out the back door of the ministry into a cab, showered with insults and angry chants from young archaeologists,” an event captured on video and watched by thousands of Egyptians. [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013]
mummy of Ramses IV
“I had lots of enemies — the enemies of success,” he says. “They are the friends of the god Set, the evil desert god in ancient Egypt. ” Many in the archaeological community seem to agree. “No one in Egyptology. . . has accomplished even a tiny fraction of what Zahi has. That, plus his fame, enrages people,” says Peter Lacovara, an Egyptologist at Emory University in Atlanta who has known Hawass for decades. “Zahi is a lightning rod, because he’s got so much energy and passion, and he doesn’t pull any punches,” says one noted Egyptologist in the U. S., who insisted on anonymity because her museum wants to stay on the sidelines. “People became envious of how high his profile became. ” Others say that his blustering style and sometimes belittling manner, as well as his utter misreading of the public mood on the eve of Mubarak’s overthrow, all but assured his downfall.
Whatever its ultimate cause, Hawass’ departure has raised concerns about the future of Egypt’s antiquities. He may have antagonized people, but he was also an effective and enthusiastic manager who “cut through the bureaucracy,” says Naguib Amin, a consultant and friend since their days as graduate students in the U. S. Now many projects, including Saqqara, have stalled, and some say that Hawass’ fall has adversely affected both fund-raising and stewardship of the country’s treasures. “Antiquities are collapsing in front of my eyes,” Hawass says. Lacovara says that the new director of antiquities, Mohamed Ibrahim Ali, “is well respected and has done an excellent job. . . . He has restored stability [and] things are running smoothly. ” But Hawass says that Lacovara, who has ongoing projects in Egypt, may be reluctant to criticize the new boss. “I wanted to support Ibrahim, I wanted him to be good, but he is not doing anything,” he insists. Some colleagues in the ministry agree, saying that Ibrahim lacks Hawass’ dynamism, and has been forced to slash budgets because of a steep decline in revenue.
Egyptian Museum
The Egyptians Museum (located at Tahir Square next to the Nile in Cairo) contains the largest collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts and treasures in the world. On view are the treasures taken from King Tut's tomb and many other great ancient Egyptian treasures which were not taken by Britain, France, Germany or looted for private collectors.
Also called the Cairo Museum, the Egyptian Museum is located inside a huge pink sandstone building and contains two floors. But as large as the museum is it still doesn’t have room for all the stuff that is packed into it. Items that would be valued pieces in other museums are shoved into dark corners, clustered in tight groups or kept in storage.
The Egyptian Museum in Cairo opened on November 15, 1902 with treasures unearthed in the 1800s. It celebrated its centennial in 2002. There are plans to build a new building.
Egyptology and Modern Technology and Science
Ultrasound and seismic generating machines are now being used to locate temples and ruins covered by sand. Scientists are also using theodolites, electric distance measurers and the technique of photogrammetry. Mummies are pumped full of hydrogen to slow decomposition and sealed in climate-controlled glass cases. Virtual reality tours of famous tombs are accessible online.
Mummies are being scanned with CT (computerized tomography) technology to determine their age, sex and cause of death and whatever else can be gleaned from them. With this technique a mummy is X-rayed at different angles to produce a 3-D composite image of the entire body. One advantages of such scans is that the mummies do not have to be unwrapped and details are more pronounced than images taken with X-rays. Using CT scans archaeologists and specialists check for evidence of trauma, vitamin deficiencies and degenerative diseases.
extracting a tooth sample from a mummy for DNA testing
In 2010 a program was launched to do DNA testing and take CT scans of hundreds of mummies to determine their identities and family lineages, Among the first to be checked out was the mummy of Kind Tutankhamun (King Tut). See King Tut.
A device called a fluxgate gradiometer, a type of magnometer, is used to locate buried ruins. It detects slight variations in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by certain type of iron oxides beneath the surface, These oxides are found in Nile mud. The most commonly used building material in ancient Egypt was sun-dried brick made from Nile mud.
The salts and perfumes used in the embalming process make tissues from mummies unsuitable for DNA analysis. Contamination is also a problem. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities does not allow DNA testing of mummies in Egypt unless they say it is okay. Some scientists say the tests are accurate enough for the results to be accepted. Some also perhaps worried about what the results might disclose.. Hawass told Archaeology magazine: “DNA testing is not permitted. From what we understand, it is not always accurate and it cannot always be done with complete success when dealing with mummies. Until we know for sure that its is accurate we will not use it in our research.”
Return of Ancient Egyptian Items
Egypt has a Department of Stolen Artifacts. In an effort to get object back that were taken from Egypt mainly by Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries, the organization has threatened museums with lawsuits, nasty Internet web postings and denial of scientific ties if the objects are not returned. Harwass was not shy about applying whatever political pressure he could muster, even going as far as bringing in the U.S. Homeland Security Department—an organization set up to fight terrorism—to investigate. Between 2002 and 2008, Hawass said Egypt had recovered about 5,000 stolen artifacts. [Source: Ian Parker, The New Yorker, November 16, 2009]
The Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) is trying to get back such treasures as the Nefertiti bust in Berlin, the Rosetta Stone in London, the Zodiac of Dendarra and the obelisk in the Place de Concorde in Paris and the statues of Hatshepsut in New York.
Nefertiti's bust
In October 2009, Hawass announced that the SCA was severing ties with the Louvre over the museum’s refusal to return painted wall fragments of a 3,200-year-old tomb neat Luxor, jeopardizing future excavations by the museum in Egypt. The aggressive tactic worked almost immediately. After the threat was made the Louvre and France’s Culture Ministry agreed to return wall fragments which were sent to Cairo within a couple of weeks of the demand, with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak traveling to Paris to oversee their transfer. The fragments in question were said to have been stolen in the 1980s from the tomb of the noble Tetaki.
Hawass took a similar measure against the St. Louis Art Museum over its refusal to return a golden burial mask of of nobleman. The 3,200 mask was found in 1952 by Egyptian archaeologist Mohammed Zakaria Ghoneim at a Saqqar pyramid , who meticulously documented the discovery and placed the mask in a warehouse. Records in 1959 show the mask was still in storage. In 1998 the mask resurfaced at the St. Louis Art Museum which had just acquired it. Hawass argues the mask should be returned because there is no evidence that the mask left Egypt legally. The St. Louis Art Museum has countered that Egypt has no proof that it was stolen. A spokesperson for the museum said that when the museum made the purchase in 1998 it checked with the international Art Loss Register to see if the mask had been stolen, and made sure everything was in order before approving the purchase, and said the purchase was approved with Egyptian Museum.
In December 2009, Hawass demanded the return of the famous 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti from the Museum in Berlin on the basis it was sneaked out of Cairo through fraudulent means. Documents from 1914 presented by Egyptian authorities show that the German excavator of the bust. Ludwig Borchardt, listed it as belonging to a princess while writing in his diary that he knew it belonged to Nefertiti.
In 2010 the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to return 19 items—including a small bronze dog and a sphinx bracelet-element— taken from King Tutankhamun’s tomb. The items—which are easy to overlook—were returned because Howard Carter, the discoverer of King Tut’s tomb, promised that all the finds from Tutankhamun’s tomb would stay in Egypt. The Met still holds thousands of objects from ancient Egypt.
Return of Ramses I’s Mummy
In October 2003, the mummy of a pharaoh was returned to Egypt by the Michael Carlos Museum at Atlanta’s Emory University. Much fanfare was made about the return of the mummy, which some believe is Ramses I based on the way the arms are crossed high over the chest, as was the custom with royal mummies in Ramses time and the resemblance of the face to faces of Seti I, Ramses II and Ramses VII.
Ramses I mummy
The mummy thought to be Ramses I was sold by dealers in the 19th century and ended up in the Niagra Falls museum where it was displayed next to a two-headed calf and barrels used by daredevils to go over the fall. The mummy was handed over to the museum at Emory after the Niagra museum was closed.
A wooden coffin said to have belonged to Pharaoh Ames, who ruled from 1081 B.C. to 931 B.C., was confiscated by customs officials in Miami in 2008 after its American owner was unable to provide sufficient paperwork to prove ownership. The coffin was bought from a dealer in Spain. The SCA made an official request for its return, presenting papers that it was illegally taken out of Egypt in 1884. In 2010, the coffin was returned by the United States to Egypt. It turned out it didn’t belong to a pharaoh but to a private individual named Imesy and was dated to the 21st Dynasty (1070-945 B.C.). An investigation revealed that the coffin had left Egypt sometime after 1970 and was displayed in Madrid in 2007. [Source: AP]
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, escholarship.org ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Egypt sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Tour Egypt, Minnesota State University, Mankato, ethanholman.com; Mark Millmore, discoveringegypt.com discoveringegypt.com; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art”by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated September 2024