Ancient Near East .net

Word arrives today that the Egyptian Museum in Cairo has placed an additional 11 mummies of 20th Dynasty date on display. BBC Video News.

The ubiquitous Zahi Hawass, Chairman of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, naturally was present at the museum for the occasion. Hawass wanted to impress that the mummy identified as Ramesses III was now on display. Some exception, however, could be taken with Hawass’ characterisation of Ramesses III as the “last fighter of the pharaohs”… What exactly does Hawass think Sheshonq was doing in the southern Levant less than two centuries later?

Recent exciting news from the Getty Research Institute:

The Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) is embarking on a six-year partnership with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) on the conservation and management of Egypt’s Valley of the Queens…. located on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor (ancient Thebes) (and) also the site of the Valley of the Kings….

The GCI will be working with the SCA on developing and implementing a plan for the Valley of the Queens to address… threats to the site, which include natural forces (particularly flooding) and mass tourism… In addition to the development of a conservation and management plan for the Valley of the Queens—which will involve the assessment of some eighty ancient tombs at the site—an important part of the project will be training for Egyptian professionals….

The Valley of the Queens Project is the GCI’s latest collaborative project with Egypt. Twenty years ago, Institute staff worked with Egyptian colleagues and an international conservation team on the conservation of the wall paintings in the tomb of Queen Nefertari, the powerful queen of ruler Ramses II. The thirteenth-century B.C. tomb, considered among the most beautiful to have survived from Egyptian antiquity, is located in the Valley of the Queens.

Other GCI collaborative work… has included the development of oxygen-free display and storage cases for the Royal Mummies in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, an environmental monitoring study of the Great Sphinx at the Giza Plateau outside Cairo, and preparatory work for the conservation of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Full Press Release

Further to the announcement last Friday week of the exciting discovery of a new (probably non-royal) tomb in the Valley of the Kings (to be designated KV 63), the excavation team from the University of Memphis, Tennessee, has started construction of a new website, KV-63.com, to document the discovery as details emerge.

The front page currently features photographs from the previous week’s media event and includes details for monetary donations towards the team’s efforts (a very worthy cause indeed!)

The clutch of new discoveries at Karnak and on the West Bank of Luxor were somewhat overshadowed late this week with the official announcement, yesterday, of the discovery of a new tomb (KV 63) in the Valley of the Kings. Although several funerary caches and workers’ buildings have been revealed over recent decades, the somewhat unexpected find marks the first actual burial uncovered in the Valley since Howard Carter’s uncovering of the Tomb of Tutankhamun (KV 62) in 1922.

Interior view of tomb KV 63 (Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images - non-exclusive access to tomb supplied by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. Claim: Fair Use)

The last fortnight has witnessed a number of exciting archaeological discoveries in Luxor, the ancient Egyptian politico-religious capital of Upper Egypt.

At the end of January came news of twin discoveries from the remains of the Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III at Kom el-Hetan, adjacent to the so-called Colossi of Memnon: a statue of the lion goddess Sakhmet and a rare statue of a king with Nubian features.

Shortly thereafter, on February 1, the John Hopkins University team excavating the compound of the Temple of Mut at Karnak announced the end of another highly successful excavation season for 2006. Easily the most spectacular single find was a sublime statue of a royal female, revealed to the excavators on January 19, though not publicised until January 22.

The focus of new discoveries swung back across the Nile on February 7 with the announcement of the discovery of a colossal head of the 18th Dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III within his mortuary temple compound at Kom el-Hetan.