Thursday, September 15, 2005

We'll start off today with the news from the EEF:

Press report: "Attempt to smuggle pharaoh's statue foiled"
http://snipurl.com/hpp2

"Egyptian police have foiled an attempt to smuggle an ancient statue of
Pharaoh Ramses II out of Egypt for sale to a foreign museum or private
collector." [Yay!]

Press report: "Analysis unravels more on mummy"
http://snipurl.com/hnl6
About the Louisville mummy called "Tchaenhotep" [previously read
as "Then-Hotep", see EEFNEWS (307)], which - after being crushed
by a piano in 1937... - "will be displayed in the Discovery Gallery
of the $5 million 'World Around Us' exhibit that opens Sept. 24 at
the Louisville Science Center." [For that permanent exhibition, see
http://www.louisvillescience.org/happening_wau.shtml ]

Press report: "Stela depicting Cleopatra as male pharaoh discovered in China"
http://english.pravda.ru/main/18/90/363/16113_cleopatra.html
English version of the report about the refound Duan Fang Collection
[see EEFNEWS 370].

Egypt Today Magazine vol. 26 issue 9 (September 2005) has an article online (in HTML) called "A Sad Obsession. George Gliddon was also one of his era's top Egyptologists - for a time"
http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=5670
About the 19th c. habit of the public unwrapping of mummies, which could result in embarassing shows.

Lucas Livingston (Art Institute of Chicago) has put some of his
papers online at his website (in HTML):
http://www.artic.edu/~llivin/research/
-- "Saites, Persians, and Greeks, Oh My! A Brief Look at Egyptian
Cultural Influence on Greeks in Egypt during the Saite Period and
the Effect of the Persian Conquest"
-- "Greek and Egyptian Religious Parallels: Egyptian Gods with
Greek Names in Herodotus and Votive Statuary"
-- "Egyptian Influence on Ionic Temple Architecture"

"The Theban Necropolis Database"
http://www.littera.waseda.ac.jp/egypt/
"The purpose of this database is to introduce all the data available so far
concering the details of the private tombs in the Theban Necropolis, such as
location, plan, the name and title of the owner, family relationship, wall
decoration, funerary cones, etc., and the complete bibliography of the past
research, in order to prepare the framework and to enhance the future
research of the Theban Necropolis."

End of EEF news

Lost civilization town. . .found! Greek archaeologists unearth large Bronze Age town on Cycladic island

Greek archaeologists have discovered the "well-preserved" remains of a large Bronze Age town dating from at least 1,900 BC on the Cycladic island of Andros, the culture ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
ADVERTISEMENT

Archaeologists found at least four "well-preserved" buildings - one of them retaining its ground floor walls - in the remains of a quarter, and a graded road believed to lead to a square.


Lost civilization. . .found! Research team finds new evidence of Amazonian civilization

A joint Japanese-Bolivian research team has completed the first stage of a three-year investigation that aims to shed light on a little-known high culture that existed in the present-day Bolivian Amazon.

The investigation, named "Project Mojos," is headed by Katsuyoshi Sanematsu, a professor of anthropology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo.

In an interview Wednesday, Sanematsu, 56, told Kyodo News that the team, composed of four Japanese researchers and four Bolivian researchers, succeeded in finding hundreds of archaeological artifacts during a monthlong excavation that ended earlier this month.


Huh Secret of Delphi Found in Ancient Text

Researchers at the University of Leicester have unravelled a 2,700 year old mystery concerning The Oracle of Delphi – by consulting an ancient farmer’s manual.

The researchers from the School of Archaeology and Ancient History sought to explain how people from across Greece came to consult with the Oracle – a hotline to the god Apollo- on a particular day of the year even though there was no common calendar.

Now their findings, published in this month’s edition of the journal Antiquity, suggests celestial signs observed by farmers could also have determined the rituals associated with Apollo Delphinios


Seems interesting, but why couldn't the Delphi people just, you know, walk over to a flat spot if they wanted to see what stars were coming up? Seems like they could figure out how to do that.

Everybody. . .start Googling Enthusiast uses Google to reveal Roman ruins

Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river, visible because former watercourses absorb different amounts of moisture from the air than their surroundings do.


Very neat. Professionals ought to be picking up on this, too.