February 10, 2006

• ahhh...WOW!! this is reeaaally amazing. I cannot wait to hear about the various artifacts etc., altho it will be a while to excavate such a find. wow. WOW. I am completely blown away by this.
• I think this is amazing and great too, but...five meters? I mean, don't you think they should have canvassed the area a little more thoroughly back in 1922?
• (And my apologies for not knowing how to spell.)
• When I read this on msnbc the other day, I thought they said that it was not a Pharoah's tomb, but probably a relatives. Not full of gold like Tut's but still a significant find because it had been unopened previously. The main thing it does is reawaken hopes that not all has been discovered.
• They certainly didn't look very well. Tut, tut!
• When is the FOX TV special with that Egyptian guy and the robot who climbed the little shaft in the Great Pyramid? Maybe this time out he'll be teamed with Geraldo to open it up together. I do hope they find some cool stuff in there.
• This. Is. Awesome.
• An astonishing find. Have to wonder what else has been overlooked.
• It's not a pharaoh's tomb, it's more likely a courtier or other lower status individual. There are no rich grave goods in this burial, just canopic jars and other stuff. It's not another King Tut or the lost Akhenaton mummy, as some are saying.
• as someone who once studied archaeology, I really appreciate Chyren's comment. for so many, the excitement of a find like this is in the shiny objects and trappings of royalty. if, in fact, this tomb is unadulterated, the wealth of information it may furnish is of inestimable value, although perhaps not so interesting as a museum exhibit ;)
• Great. Now the curse is unleashed and we're all going to die. Thanks a lot, science.
• Not me! I've been eating my ground-up rhino horn every day.
• But does he have a condo made of stone-a?
• It belongs in a museum! *Claps battered fedora on head, gets hopelessly tangled in bullwhip and breaks ass*
• its underpants jones!!
• I've been eating my ground-up rhino horn every day. Mmmh, so that explains the enjaculations, Capt. : )
• 
• This is very exciting, all the more perhaps because it isn't about royalty! When I was a kid I wanted to be an Egyptologist. I read all of these books, and my parents bought me a poster that had some basic Egyptian writing on it. Then I took my first archaeology class and decided I hated it. But I'm still so interested in it!
• I once wrote what I think is a fairly comprehensive course on how to become an archeologist (warning, self-linkage ahead): A Beginner's Introduction To Amateur Archeology.
• "Have to wonder what else has been overlooked." The Valley of the Kings and the other burial sites in Egypt have by no means been completely explored and the totality of extant burials has certainly not been completely exposed. There is every possibility of finding another rich burial site such as that of King Tutankhamun or others. We are still missing some important figures from the 18th dynasty for instance. Akhenaton has never been discovered, for instance, although if there is anything in the old Osarseph legend, perhaps he's not buried in Egypt at all.
• Is part of the issue in searching for remaining tombs anything to do with the Egyptian government? I could imagine they'd be instrumental in approving / denying requests to perform acheological excavations, particularly if the Valley of the Kings is considered an important cultural artifact in and of itself.
• Finding Akhenaton would totally rock. What an interesting feller he was. We'd best be about it. Emerson, dear, bring my my toolbelt and have Gargery pack up the children. I'm off to mend the mosquito netting and write Abdullah of our impending arrival!
• "Is part of the issue in searching for remaining tombs anything to do with the Egyptian government?" Yes. The Supreme Council of Antiquities, an influential arm of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, seems to be responsible for the exclusionist attitude to foreign research currently apparent. Given the past history of plunder from Egypt to other countries' museums, you can probably understand the attitude, but the Egyptians themselves also ran tomb robbery as a national business for centuries, so it appears to be a bit of a hypocritical stance. As you can understand, these organisations control a considerable resource for the focus of national pride, and thus political currency, so the tensions in Egyptology will always mirror somewhat the political tensions at large. Currently the SCA is headed by the great Zahi Hawass, former director of the Giza Plateau, and a bit of a tyrant. He has almost single-handedly (if you believe his own claims) turned the antiquities authority from a notoriously inept and corrupt institution, into a rather powerful department of the bureaucracy. He's no stranger to controversy and could be seen as both a monster and a genius. There's no lack of archeological work underway, of course, just less free-for-all independant work by anyone. I personally doubt Akhenaton's body was left undesecrated by succeding kings. He was the great heretic; they probably chopped his mummy up and scattered it to the sands, if it even was buried in Egypt at all. I would be interested in finding a definitive Smenkaure or Nefertiti, too.
• Great, now they're gonna make The Mummy Returns Again.
• Chy, do you have a background in archeology, or are you more an interested amateur? Just curious, because you seem very knowledgeable about it as a topic.
• Just avid reader of the subject, I would call it.
• There is very little sexier than avid reading. I speak from experience.
• Do you think they let Akhenaton leave a body to find? I would have thought they (the people who brought back the old religion) would have destroyed his mummy posthaste.
• I found this tomb, like, ages ago. But there was nothing good to eat left in it, so I covered it up again. The chocomel had well gone off.
• "How come there isn't any valley of the Queens?" "I expect they haven't found it yet."
• It's been a good week for archaeology. New big excting tomb found in Greece, too. Huzzah!
• That we've broken their statues, that we've driven them out of their temples, doesn't mean at all that the gods are dead. O land of Ionia, they're still in love with you, their souls still keep your memory. When an August dawn wakes over you, your atmosphere is potent with their life, and sometimes a young ethereal figure indistinct, in rapid flight, wings across your hills. --Constantine P Cavafy
• Good point on the grave goods, Chyren, but the cartouches on the royal seals (if that's how they decide they're 'royal' seals) on the jars are reserved for royal or deity signature aren't they? The rich grave goods may have been lifted by looters before they were reburied (if that's the reason they were reburied - if it is secondary burial). I know less than the next guy about Egyptology tho' so I have no idea in what contexts royal seals have been discovered in Egyptian burials. But, I have to agree with you on the skepticism. Alot of intelligent archaeologists jump the gun on things. Some go really far too. Take Dennis Stanford, who runs the risk of reliving the racism of the Moundbuilder controversy with his European settlers theory for Clovis, New Mexico. Considering the results of mtDNA research on First Nations and Asian Peoples and their shared dental traits, the sensibility of the coastal refugia and the fact that two people oceans apart can conceive the same stone technology this Atlantic crossing theory is a far cry from Occam's razor. Even Derek Freeman went way too far giving up on his own research just to attempt debunking Margaret Meade. But if it makes a really fun story to tell the media, serves your megalomanical needs, or even gets your name into everyone's home instead of mouldering in peer-reviewed journals in the ill-used stacks of some dusty library, why not? After all, what makes more money: reality TV or documentaries? Still, I've mucked things up before.
• "but the cartouches on the royal seals ...are reserved for royal or deity signature aren't they?" Well, they could be identified as royal seals by a number of different things, the number of titles or other names, and other things. I can't remember if only pharaohs used a cartouche or anyone in the immediate family. I think the latter. But you'd have to be cautious about using the term 'royal seal' here because that's just something the article says. Hawass says he thinks they're probably nobles, but I bet this is based on the location, the workmanship and sheer expense of the tomb rather than anything on the seals - having a tomb hacked out of the rock, even without gravegoods, it's far beyond the sort of burial used by commoners, if all Egyptians even got buried. National focus seems to have been on the pharaoh's burial rites rather than the ordinary everyday bloke. Full mummification was expensive and only for nobles. If the seals had an immediately identifiable royal house hieroglyph or a known pharaonic name, the archeologists would have known for certain what they had in front of them and not hedge their bets, I think. But it's a safe bet that this is a tomb of a royal family member, or a powerful noble. It's possible, though very unlikely, that one of these mummies is Nefertiti, moved down from Amarna. If that were to happen, it would probably eclipse the Tutankhamun find in every way but the riches found with him. Tut was historically insignificant. But thats a longshot. Tombs containing sarcophagi from other locations that have been moved have been found before. The tomb of Amenhotep the somethingth had a bunch of sarcophagi in there that had been moved from their original locations much later than era of burial, I think several hundred years, and that's in the valley of the kings. Can't be bothered looking it up. If the new tomb is a storage house for stuff from another site, that is interesting, & I would wonder what makes them think this. It's possibly the layout of the tomb or something else which makes them think it's not the intended sepulcher.
• (AP)"Inside the rectangular tomb, the five wooden sarcophagi were surrounded by the jars, which appeared placed haphazardly, suggesting the burial was completed quickly." This article also mentions pharaonic seals. And all the site specific details are from Hawass' media release so he would have to be the one saying this (he, incidentally, is quoted as saying "royals or nobles" which in my opinion equals "we don't know who the hell they are yet, since it really can't be anyone else"). I doubt that it would be released to the media unless they could identify them as royal seals which suggests a cartouche displayed in the seal for ease of recognition. I don't know anything about 18th Dynasty Egypt specifically, but commonly cartouches were the logos of gods and kings. Or both. Modern English doesn't really help there. I seriously doubt that common people were 'buried' with much ceremony in ancient Egypt (they were certainly not mummified) unless their death fulfilled some sort of symbolic or 'ritual' purpose (like mass sacrifice in the 'death pits' in Ur or the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan). But again, I know less about mummies than Lon Chaney Jr.
• I challenge you to a duel!!
• Is that a harpsichord I hear...?
• Hatshepsut!
• Hatshepsut!
• The Pharoah so nice, I linked her twice.
• Tomb of Aztec Emperor Ahuizotl may have been found. Something big, anyway.