Monday, January 30, 2006

Tiy statue update

A couple more stories on the head and two others found with it:

Egyptian Statue Met Undignified End

In life, King Tut's grandmother was a powerful woman in ancient Egypt, but after death a monument to her met an undignified end.

A Johns Hopkins University archaeological team found a life-sized statue believed to represent Queen Tiye buried face down under the floor of the sprawling Karnak Temple site in Luxor, the ancient Egyptian royal city.

The statue, which dates to between 1391 and 1352 B.C., was found under the platform of a temple of the goddess Mut, which dates to about 700 B.C. It appears to have been tossed in with rubble used to fill in the floor during that temple's later expansion, said Betsy Bryan, a professor of Egyptian art and archaeology at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

"The reason for using the statue as construction material, however, remains unknown," Bryan said in an e-mail from Egypt.


Ancient Egyptian royal head puzzles archaeologists

A German archaeological mission stumbled on a mystery with the discovery of three partial pharaonic statues in Luxor, Egyptian officials announced on Monday, because one appears to date to a later period than most previous finds at the site.

Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) announced on Monday the discovery of two statues of Sakhmet, the goddess of war, as well as the head of a member of the royal family, at the temple of Amunhotep III on the west bank of the Nile River in Luxor, 700km south of Cairo.