Article from the Telegraph with pictures.
Death on the Nile Mysterious case of death on the Nile, 4,000 years ago
Archaeologists have begun to piece together the story of a mysterious massacre more than 4,000 years ago in the former royal city of Mendes, which flourished for 20 centuries on a low mound overlooking the green fields and papyrus marshes of the Nile delta north of Cairo.
Donald Redford of Pennsylvania State University had begun to excavate the foundations of a huge temple linked to Rameses II, the pharaoh traditionally linked to the biblical story of Moses, when he found an earlier structure destroyed by fire, and evidence of a grisly episode of death on the Nile, he told a Bloomsbury Academy conference in London on Saturday.
"We were under the misapprehension that it was a new temple on a new site," he said. "But in fact I sunk a trench below the existing temple and was really surprised beyond belief by what I found. There was a late Old Kingdom structure of some sort, a great mud brick platform 40 metres wide, on which a temple had once stood."
They've found other bodies scattered around the site as well, usually not as formal burials. Something obviously went on at this site during the latter Old Kingdom involving violence.
'New' science gleans knowledge from ancient lands and societies
Understanding how pollution effects the dynamics of Earth and the spread of disease in ancient times are two areas in which ASU's new School of Human Evolution & Social Change can make a dramatic and immediate impact, said Sander van der Leeuw, director of the school.
By drawing from a wide range of expertise and considering several perspectives outside the traditional anthropology disciplines, researchers at the school will be well equipped to take on important problems of today by understanding what they looked like in the past.