ANCIENT EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY
Howard Carter opening Tutankhamun's coffin Egypt's monuments that are with us today are the result of the presence of stone to build them and a desert climate that has preserved them. The Phoenicians were almost as great of civilization but little remains of their civilization because it was largely built from wood.
The climate is so dry and rain is so rare in Egypt that millennia-old perishable items like papyrus scrolls have been preserved.
Egypt's sands have preserved many monuments. The Sphinx would be in much worse condition were it not buried for a long time.
Egypt’s leading archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, estimates that only a third of treasures that lie buried in Egypt have been found.
Herodotus devoted nearly all of Book 2 of “History to describing the achievements and the curiosities of the Egyptians. On the Egyptian customs Herodotus reported "In any home where a cat dies" the residents "shave off their eyebrows" and “sons never take care of their parents if they don’t want to, but daughters must whether they like it or not." He also noted “Women urinate standing up, men sitting down.” More on Herodotus, See Greeks
Websites on Ancient Egypt: UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, escholarship.org ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Egypt sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Discovering Egypt discoveringegypt.com; BBC History: Egyptians bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians ; Ancient History Encyclopedia on Egypt ancient.eu/egypt; Digital Egypt for Universities. Scholarly treatment with broad coverage and cross references (internal and external). Artifacts used extensively to illustrate topics. ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt ; British Museum: Ancient Egypt ancientegypt.co.uk; Egypt’s Golden Empire pbs.org/empires/egypt; Metropolitan Museum of Art www.metmuseum.org ; Oriental Institute Ancient Egypt (Egypt and Sudan) Projects ; Egyptian Antiquities at the Louvre in Paris louvre.fr/en/departments/egyptian-antiquities; KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt kmtjournal.com; Egypt Exploration Society ees.ac.uk ; Amarna Project amarnaproject.com; Abzu: Guide to Resources for the Study of the Ancient Near East etana.org; Egyptology Resources fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
Politics and Exploitation of Ancient Egyptian Archaeology
Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: The European preoccupation with ancient Egypt began in the Napoleonic period. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt was motivated by a desire to destabilize the British, but when his fleet sank in 1798 at the Battle of the Nile the French rebranded the enterprise as a scientific endeavor. In scientific terms, the French had been successful, it was during this period that they acquired the Rosetta Stone, which they subsequently handed over to the British. [Source:Candida Moss, Daily Beast, July 21, 2019]
As a result of failed political ambitions, there was a frenzy of interest in Egyptian antiquities. Speaking in 2017, museum curator Tom Hardwick said “Ancient Egypt [was] a way of legitimizing interest [in the country] – by using arguments like: ‘then they built pyramids, now they live in mud huts. It’s clever white people who need to look after this’.” The idea of a lost, technologically sophisticated civilization had a certain romanticism and this was only amplified by myths about the “Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb” and the perceived strangeness of ancient Egyptian religion. Combined together these factors made ancient Egyptian artifacts among the most desirable in the world.
It was only in the 1830s, with the awareness of just how many Egyptian artifacts had been exported from the country, that the government stepped in and began to restrict the mining of the country’s non-renewable antiquities reserves. Even then excavations were a financial operation. The renowned archaeologist Flinders Petrie, pioneer of modern archaeological methods, sold futures in order to fund his excavations. The consequences of doing this was that anything he found would be broken up and divided between the museums and collectors who invested in him. The Egypt Exploration Fund, which was founded in the late nineteenth century to “explore, survey, and excavate Egypt” was very explicit about this aspect of their work. Nongbri pointed me to the Secretary's report from 1899-1900, which records that the “distributions” were “a duty which the Committee performs with a full sense of responsibility, especially towards the subscribers in America, with whom we have entered into a formal undertaking that antiquities shall be distributed in strict proportion to subscriptions received.” .
Egyptology and the French
The science of Egyptology began with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798-1801. The invasion force included 150 scientists, artists geographers, and linguists, and included some of the greatest minds of Europe. They produced 24 volumes of material (published mostly between 1809 and 1824), made some of the first and greatest discoveries of ancient Egypt and orchestrated the massive carrying off of booty and treasure to France.
Egyptian didn't care much for archaeological treasures. They were amendable to get rid of "ancient debris" such as the Rosetta Stone and the obelisk of Luxor. Frenchmen headed the Egyptian antiquities department until 1952.
When the French were ousted by the British, British scientist arrived on the scene. The Rosseta Stone, but little else, was turned over to the British.
Great early French Egyptologist included Jean Francois Champollion (1790-1852), who broke the code on the Rosetta Stone; Vivian Denon, who accompanied Napoleon in 1798 and made many sketches of the great monuments; and Aguste Mariett, who helped assemble the Louvre collection and worked as a curator for the Ottoman Turks.
Giovanni Battista Belzoni
Perhaps the greatest rediscover of ancient Egypt was a flamboyant son of a barber named Giovanni Battista Belzoni. Born in Padua, Italy and named after John the Baptist, this six-foot-six former circus giant, who used to carry twelve people around on a stage with a special harness, uncovered many of Egypt's most famous monuments including Abu Simbel, the tomb of Seti I and giant statues of Ramses the Great. [Source: Dora Jane Hamblin, Smithsonian magazine]
After living in Paris and Holland, Belzoni ended up in England where he married an English woman and made a living making fountains with different colored water and playing musical glasses filled with water. While on tour with a traveling circus, which employed his as the "Patagonian Sampson," Belzoni met the an Albanian soldier of fortune named Mohammed Ali, who later would become the leader of Egypt. Ali invited Belzoni to Egypt where the Italian introduced a waterwheel "constructed on the principal of a crane with a walking wheel, in which a single ox by its own weight alone could affect as much as four oxen employed in the machines of the country."
While in Egypt Belzoni was hired by a British general counsel named Henry Salt who urged the former circus strongman to collect antiquities "whatever the expense" for "an enlightened nation.” In Luxor Belzoni met another Italian, Bernardino Drovetti, who had been hired by the French to do pretty much the same thing. Drovetti had established himself at Luxor (his discoveries form the cornerstone of the Louvre Egyptian collection) so Belzoni moved on to the Valley of the Kings where he made two great discoveries — the tomb of Ramses the Great and the tomb of his father Seti I.
Belzoni's Discovers Memnon's Head
Describing his 1816 discovery of the nine-foot-high head of "Young Memnon," now in the British Museum, Belzoni wrote: "I found it near the remains of its body and chair, with its face upwards, and apparently smiling on me, at the thought of being taken to England...my expectations were exceeded by its beauty, but not by its size." Using "fourteen plows...four ropes of palm leaves and four rollers" he managed to move the head only a "few yards" the first day and 50 yards the next day. "To make room for it pass we had to break the bases of two columns." When the Rosetta stone was deciphered it was revealed that the head of "Young Memnon" actually belonged to Ramses the Great.
When a local official told the Egyptian labors not to report to work Belzoni used his bare hands to disarm the bureaucrat of two pistols and a sword, and afterwards "gave him a good shaking." The laborers returned to finish their tasks of carrying "Young Memnon" to the Nile where it was transported by ship to London.
On falling on a heap of mummies Belzoni wrote, "Fortunately, I am destitute of the sense of smelling,” but "I could taste that mummies were rather unpleasant to swallow...I sought a resting place, found one, and contrived to sit; but when my weight bore on the body of an Egyptian, it crushed it like a bandbox...so that I sunk altogether among the broken mummies with a crash of bones, rags, and wooden cases, which raised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an hour."
Belzoni's Discoveries at Aswan and the Pyramids
Ramses II at the Louvre A similar episode occurred while removing an obelisk from the island of Philae near Aswan. "The pier [we had built] appeared quite strong enough...but alas, when the obelisk came gradually on from the sloping bank...the pier...and some of the men, took a slow movement, and majestically descended into the river...For some minutes, I must confess, I remained as stiff as a post." in the end the obelisk was rescued and nobody was seriously hurt." Abu Simbel was covered in sand when Belzoni arrived at the site. He enlisted the help of some British tourist to remove several tons of sand.
To find the burial chamber in the second great pyramid of Giza Belzoni looked for "the spots where the stony matter is not so compact as the surrounding mass; and...the concavity of the pyramid over the place where the entrance might have been expected to be found." Upon locating the right passageway he found his progress blocked by a granite stone. "After thirty days of exertion I had the pleasure of finding myself in the way to the central chamber of one of the two great pyramids of Egypt...my torch, formed of a few candles, gave but faint light." Inside was the sarcophagus of the pharaoh, which had been looted centuries before.
The book Belzoni wrote to describe his adventures was entitled “ Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia; and of a Journey to the Coast of the Red Sea, in Search of the Ancient Berenice; and Another to the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon” . Belzoni died of dysentery while on an expedition on the Benin River in Africa in 1823 at the age of 45.
Excavating the Royal Bark of Khufu
The royal bark of Khufu was discovered in 1954 when a mountain of debris was removed from the south face of the great Pyramid and investigators found two pits carved in the bedrock. The chambers were covered with limestone blocks that weighed 15 tons and were up to two meters thick. The first boat was excavated in the 1950s. It was almost perfectly preserved in a chamber that was so well sealed a person who entered it after it was opened said he smelled “vapors, perfumes of the wood, sacred wood of the ancient religion.” Excavating the bark and carefully reconstructing it took several years.
The second chamber was examined with an underground camera in the 1980s. Drilling through the two-meter-thick limestone block took 48 hours. It was hoped that this chamber was sealed but it was not. The air in it was almost the same the air outside the tomb. The boat there was not in nearly as good of condition as the first boat. Why was there more than one boat? There are depictions of funerary barks being pulled by another vessel.
See Remote Sensing of Tombs and Chambers Under Archaeology
Discovery of the Tomb of King Tut
Moment Carter opens Tutankhamun's tomb
The discovery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb is regarded as perhaps the most spectacular archaeological find of all time. Tutankhamun was by no means one of the great pharaohs — he didn't build a pyramid and he died when he was 18 — but it just so happens that the room of his tomb where the treasures were found was one of the few in the Valley of the Kings unmolested by looters. The tomb of Ramses II, the greatest pharaoh of all, probably contained a greater horde of treasures but we will probably never know what those treasures were — his tomb was looted only 150 years after his death.
The tomb of King Tutankhamun-was discovered by British explorer Howard Carter on November 26, 1922 in the Valley of the Kings. According to one story an opening to the tomb was discovered by a water boy who had dug a hole on a barren hillside under three feet of debris under an ancient workman's hut to keep his personal water bottle cool. The water-carrier stumbled on the corner of a door that was almost completely buried in sand. It opened up to a steep flight of stairs that led to what became known as KV62 (Valley of the Kings 62). A total of 61 royal tombs had been found up until that time, all of them looted.
After Carter made the discovery, he showed incredible restraint and patience. Instead of entering the tomb, he ordered the stairs filled in, to hide the the discovery, placed some of his most trusted workmen as guards and he sent a famous cable to Carnarvon: “At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley a magnificent tomb with seals intact recovered same for your arrival congratulations.”
Carter waited for three weeks for Carnavon to arrive from his castle in Hampshire England. It took Carnarvon and his daughter, the 21-year-old Lady Evelyn Herbert, two and a half weeks to reach Luxor by train and boat. To reach the Valley of the Kings, the earl and his daughter crossed the Nile by ferry and rode donkeys to Carter’s excavation site.
See Separate Article: DISCOVERY OF THE TOMB OF KING TUTANKHAMUN (KING TUT) africame.factsanddetails.com
Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone is a black basalt slab 45 inches long and 29 inches wide. Inscribed in three languages: 53 lines of Greek, 32 lines of a cursive script now called demotic script and 16 lines of hieroglyphics. Both the demotic script and hieroglyphics were initially indecipherable. It was written by a group of priest assembled in Memphis to mark the ascension to the throne of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes in 190 B.C. and carried a Memphis decree concerning the cult of the king.
The Rosetta Stone was unearthed in August 1799 by French soldiers, excavating ruined Fort Rachid near the town of Rosetta at the mouth of the Nile. Around the time the stone was found France went to war with Britain. When the French were forced out Egypt the stone fell into the hands of the British and was taken to the British Museum in 1802, were it remains today. Egypt wants the Rosetta Stone back.
Deciphering the Rosetta Stone
Rosetta Stone Hieroglyphics in their developed form were phonetic symbols not merely pictures. The first man in modern history to realize this was a German mathematician named Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) who discovered that hieroglyphics were an early form of the Coptic language. Up until his discovery it was thought that the hieroglyphics were symbols of ideas and objects not the phonetic symbols that they really were.
The Frenchmen Jean-Françious Champollion (1790-1832) is given credit with the deciphering the hieroglyphics using the Greek on the Rosetta Stone. Champollion became aware of the Rosetta Stone when he was 12 and, the story goes, he became obsessed with deciphering it. Before he reached the age of 20 he had mastered Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, Latin and Coptic (a language related to ancient Egyptian).
Champollion was given clues by Dr. Thomas Young, a British scholar who theorized the hieroglyphics were phonetic and had an alphabetical base using a bilingual-Greek-hieroglyphic text on an obelisk in Philae, Egypt. He found that seven elongated ovals or cartouches spelled something phonetically — the name of Ptolemy and also found the name of Cleopatra.
The proper names of Ptolemy, Cleopatra and Ramses gave Champollion the necessary clues to crack the ancient Egyptian written language. Using his knowledge of Coptic, Champollion went much further than Young and devised a complete system of decipherment rules and basic grammar. He realized that hieroglyphic language was alphabetic in principal but included pictorial signs representing complete words and other signs, when attached to words, represented the word’s category (e.g. "an animal name").
The stress of the intensive work is believed to have contributed to Champollion's death from a stroke at the age of 42. The genius of his work wasn't fully appreciated until 30 years later. After his death German scholars figured the full complexity of the hieroglyphics and gave accurate translations for texts misunderstood by Champollion. Today hieroglyphics can be read about as well as the writing for most languages.
Other Famous Ancient Egyptian Archaeologists
British archaeologists W.M. Flinders Petrie, who did some important work in the 1880s, lived in a tomb in Giza and sometimes emerged at night in his pink long underwear to the horror of tourists that sometimes saw him.
Bernardino Drovetti was the French consul general of Egypt. H e was a notorious tomb raider and "sold mummies by the pound."
Many works of art were snapped up European and American collectors. A 19th century writer wrote of the art market in Thebes: “As workmen, the Copts are perhaps the more artistic. As salesmen, the Arabs are perhaps the least dishonest. Both sell more forgeries than genuine antiquities.” Mummies were unwrapped to look for jewels. Diplomats used their immunity to work as middlemen between looters and collectors.
Tomb of Ramses Sons
On February 2, 1995, American archaeologist Ken Weeks discovered a huge tomb with at least 108 chambers in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor. Archaeologists considered it the most significant discovery in Egyptology since the discovery of King Tut's tomb.
Known officially as KV5 (the 5th tomb discovered in the Valley of the Kings) and located about 100 feet from the tomb of Ramses the Great, the tomb is believed to have been a burial place for many of Ramses the Great' sons.
KV5 is the largest and most complex Egyptian tomb every discovered and the only multiple tomb for pharaoh's children. Inscriptions on the walls mentions two of Ramses' sons, which is what led archaeologists to believed it may be a tomb for his sons.
Book: “ The Lost Tomb” by Kent R. Weeks (William Morrow & Co.) is the story of the tomb of the children of Ramses II.
Discovery Tomb of Ramses Sons
The tomb was found under an area that had been earmarked for a parking lot and discovered by digging a series of tunnels. The entrance was beside an asphalt road about ten feet below the grade and behind a boot that sold T-shirts and souvenir scarabs. In 1825, an Englishman named James Burton crawled partway inside but was turned by debris and rubble.
Most of the chamber had been looted it gave scientist new insights into a side of Egyptian culture that had appeared before.
Tomb 5 won't be open to tourists until around 2005. Many have of the chambers have been damaged by looters and water from flash flood. Few pieces of jewelry, gold or silver or other valuables were found.
Inside the Tomb of Ramses Sons
Describing the sensation of being in the tomb, Douglas Preston wrote in the New Yorker, "Nothing in twenty years of archaeology has prepared me for this great wrecked corridor chiseled out of the living rock, with rows of shattered doorways opening into darkness, and ending in the faceless mummy of Osiris...As I stare at the walls ghostly figures and faint hieroglyphics; animal-headed gods performing mysterious rites. Through doorways I catch a glimpse of more rooms and doorways beyond."
After being the first person to enter one chamber, "I sit up and look around....There is three feet of space between the top of the debris and the ceiling, just enough for me to crawl around...The room is about nine feet square, the walls finely chiseled from the bedrock...In run my fingers along the ancient chisel marks...Their only source of light would have been the dim illumination from wicks burning in a bowl of oil salted to reduce smoke.
Details about the Tomb of Ramses Sons
Ramses III mummyKV5 has a T-floor plan and is made up of a series of boxcar-like chambers connected by corridors, and ending with a burial vault. There are a number of descending passageways and side chambers and suites and false doors. One of the largest chambers is sixty square feet. It is supported by four huge pillars arranged in four rows.
There are reliefs that show Ramses presenting various sons to the gods, with the names and tools recorded in hieroglyphics. Objects found include faince jewelry, fragments of furniture, pieces of coffin, humans and animal bones, mummified body parts, chunks of sarcophagi, remains of jars used for mummified organs — all debris left behind by looters.
The purpose of the tomb is a mysterious. Its design is radically different from other ancient Egyptian tombs. The rooms are not believed to have been burial chambers because the doorways are too narrow to admit sarcophagi. Instead they are believed to have been chapels where priest made offerings to the dead sons.
One corridors heads in the direction of the Tomb of Ramses and some scholars speculate that they might be connected. No two tombs are known to be connected. Some scholars believe Ramses's daughters might be buried in the tombs, others say that is unlikely. Archaeologists have found no evidence of Moses or the Exodus.
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, The Louvre, The British Museum, The Egyptian Museum in Cairo
Text Sources: UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, escholarship.org ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Egypt sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Tour Egypt, Minnesota State University, Mankato, ethanholman.com; Mark Millmore, discoveringegypt.com discoveringegypt.com; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated July 2024