Tag: archeology

Calendar: February 16

Year: Day to Day Men: February 16

A Daydream Moment

The sixteenth of February in 1923 marks the opening of the sealed door to the burial chamber of the Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh, Tutankhamun. During his reign of ten years, Tutankhamun restored the traditional polytheistic form of the ancient Egyptian religion from the religious-political changes enacted by the former pharaoh Akhenaten.

Born in May of 1874, British archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter was from an early age interested in Egyptian artifacts; he would often visit and draw illustrations of specimens in the collection owned by the Amherst family. Impressed by his skills, Lady Amherst made arrangements for seventeen year-old Carter to assist British Egyptologist Percy Newberry in an excavation at Middle Kingdom tombs on the Lower Nile River.

After training under Egyptologists Flinders Petrie and Édouard Naville, Carter was appointed in 1899 as Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt by the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Based at Luxor, he oversaw excavations at nearby Thebes and supervised American archaeologist Theodore Davis’s systematic exploration of the Valley of the Kings. During his service, Carter improved the protection and accessibility to existing excavations and developed a grid-block system for tomb searching.

In 1907, Carter began his employment with George Edward Herbert, 5th Lord of Carnarvon, a financial backer for Egyptian antiquities research. Lord Carnarvon received in 1914 the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings. Carter led a systematic search for any tombs that were missed in previous expeditions, including that of Tutankhamun. The search was halted during the years of the First World War and resumed in 1917. After five years with no major finds, Carnarvon became dissatisfied with the project; howver, after a discussion with Carter, he agreed to fund one more season of work in the Valley of the Kings. 

On the fourth of November in 1922, a water boy discovered a buried flight of stairs cut into the bedrock. After partially digging out the steps, a mud-plastered doorway was found stamped with indistinct cartouches. Howard Carter had the staircase refilled and notified Lord Carnarvon of the find by telegram. On November twenty-third, Carnarvon arrived accompanied by his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert. The full extent of the stairway was cleared on the next day; it revealed Tutankhamun’s cartouche on the outer doorway. The doorway was removed and the corridor behind it was cleared of rubble.

With Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Carter’s assistant Arthur Callender present, Howard Carter opened a tiny breach in the door of the tomb and was able to see the many gold and ebony treasures within. Carter had in fact discovered the burial tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The site was secured until the morning of the twenty-seventh of November, at which time the tomb was officially opened in the presence of a member of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.

Tutankhamun’s tomb was virtually intact with all its furnishings and shrines, in spite of previous ancient break-ins. Two life-sized statues of Tutankhamun guarded the sealed doorway to the inner burial chamber. Assisted by staff members of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art which included archeologist Arthur Mace and photographer Harry Burton, Howard Carter over the next several months catalogued and preserved the contents of the chambers. 

On the sixteenth of February in 1923, Howard Carter opened the sealed inner doorway and confirmed it led to a burial chamber that contained the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. His tomb was considered the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings. Carter’s meticulous assessing and cataloguing the thousands of objects in the tomb took nearly ten years; the final work was completed in February of 1932.

Despite the significance of the find, Howard Carter received no honors from the British government. In 1926, he received the Order of the Nile, third class, from Egypt’s King Fuad I. Carter was also award an honorary Doctor of Science from Yale University and a honorary membership in Madrid’s Real Academia de la Historia.

Tutankhamun’s Burial Dagger

Tutankhamun’s Burial Dagger, Blade Composit of Nickel and Cobalt, Egyptian 18th Dynasty

A team of researchers have confirmed that the iron in one of the daggers found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, as well as a number of other precious artifacts from Ancient Egypt, have celestial origins as they were made from meteorites. The research was undertaken by an international team of scientists from the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin, the University of Pisa, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the CNR, the University Fayoum, and the XGlab company. Archeologists had suspected for many decades that the iron used during the reign of the New Kingdom Dynasties and earlier, could come from meteorites.

The composition of iron used in Tutankhamun’s dagger, is nickel and cobalt, which is commonly found in meteorites. In addition, the study of the iron beads from Gerzeh, which are c. 5,000 years old, confirmed that in the times of the eighteenth dynasty, ancient Egyptians were advanced in working iron and that the iron used to create them comes from meteorite.  Previously, it had been believed that the Egyptian Iron Age started after 600 BC.

Calendar: January 15

Year: Day to Day Men: January 15

Southern Edge of the Lake

On the fifteenth of January in 1962, the Derveni papyrus was found at a site in Derveni, Macedonia, northern Greece. Discovered among the remnants of a funeral pyre in the necropolis that belonged to the ancient city of Lete, it is the oldest surviving manuscript in the Western tradition and possibly the oldest surviving papyrus written in Greek regardless of provenance. 

The papyrus dates to approximately 340 BC, making it Europe’s oldest surviving manuscript. Composed near the end of the fifth-century BC, its text is a mix of dialects, mainly Attic and Ionic Greek with a few Doric forms. Occasionally the same word appears written in different dialectic forms.

The content of the Derveni papyrus is divided between religious instructions on sacrifices to gods and souls, and an allegorical commentary of a genealogical poem of the gods, ascribed to Orpheus. The identification of the papyrus’s author is a matter of  dispute among scholars. Names like Euthyphron of Prospalta, Diagoras  of Melos, and Stesimbrotus of Thasos have been proposed with varying degrees of likelihood.

The reconstruction of the papyrus involved the exacting job of unrolling and separating the layers of the charred papyrus roll. The surviving two hundred and sixty-six fragments of the papyrus were conserved under glass in descending order of size; however, due to the existence of unplaced smaller fragments, reconstruction is exceptionally challenging. Modern multispectral imaging techniques were used to take digital microphotographs of the papyrus fragments. From this work, twenty-six columns of text were recovered, all with their bottom parts missing, as they had perished on the pyre.

The Derveni papyrus is now included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, a compendium of the world’s documentary heritage, such as manuscripts, oral traditions, audio-visual materials and library and archive holdings. The papyrus is noted in this register as being the oldest known European book.

Note: The Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC is the location of the Interdisciplinary Research Project for the Derveni Papyrus. Over the last forty-five years, the text of the papyrus has undergone extensive reconstruction and study. Among the leaders of the Imouseion Project have been Theokritos Kouremenos, George M. Parássoglou, and Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou. A user-friendly copy of the latest reconstruction of the papyrus is now available online at: https://chs.harvard.edu/derveni-papyrus-introduction/

An extensive and informative review written by Patricia Curd of Purdue University on the 2004 publication “The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation” written by Hungarian academic Gábor Betegh, the eighth Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University, can be found in the University of Notre Dame’s “Philosophical Reviews” located at: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-derveni-papyrus-cosmology-theology-and-interpretation/

Unbroken Necropolis Seal

Unbroken Necropolis Seal on King Tutankhamun’s Tomb

This seal was actually a seal to King Tut’s fifth shrine. The king was buried in a series of four sarcophagi, which were in turn kept inside a series of five shrines. This unbroken seal stayed 3,245 years untouched. The late discovery of Tut’s tomb in 1922 resulted from the fact that it was covered by debris from that of Ramesses IV which was located directly above its entrance. While the outermost shrine of the youthful pharaoh had been opened not once but twice in ancient times, the doors of the second of the huge shrines of gilded wood containing the royal sarcophagus still carried the necropolis seal which indicated the pharaoh’s mummy was untouched and intact.

Aztec Sun Stone

Aztec Sun Stone, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City

The Aztec Sun Stone (or Calendar Stone) depicts the five consecutive worlds of the sun from Aztec mythology. The stone is not, therefore, in any sense a functioning calendar, but rather it is an elaborately carved solar disk, which for the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican cultures represented rulership. At the top of the stone is a date glyph (13 reed) which represents both the beginning of the present sun, the 5th and final one according to mythology, and the actual date 1427 CE, thereby legitimizing the rule of Itzcoatl and creating a bond between the divine and mankind.

The stone was discovered in December 1790 CE in the central plaza of Mexico City and now resides in the National Museum of Anthropology in that city. The richly carved basalt stone was once a part of the architectural complex of the Temple Mayor and measures 3.58 metres in diameter, is 98 centimetres thick, and weighs 25 tons. The stone would originally have been laid flat on the ground and possibly anointed with blood sacrifices.

Ceiling at Dendera

 

Astronomical Ceiling, Dendera

The ceiling of the Hypostyle Hall at Dendera Temple is enriched with an incredible amount of figurative detail carved in low relief and painted in subtle shades against a blue background. The subjects include numerous deities and hybrid figures (some familiar, others much less so) and even astrological elements, such as recognisable figures from the zodiac.

Fantastic photos of the “astronomical ceiling” at Dendera, posted on LiveJournal by aksanova.

Mayan Hacha

Mayan Fish Hacha, 6th-8th Century, Mexico (Veracruz), Stone with Traces of Plaster, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Mesoamerican ballplayers wore protective gear called dachas, palmas, and  yokes to protect their hips and abdomens from the impact of the game’s solid rubber ball . In painting and sculpture, the yoke is shown worn around the player’s hips, the palma or hacha attached at the front. Those used during active play were most likely made of wood or some other light material; stone versions such as this one were worn, if at all, during ballgame-related rituals, or placed on display. Given the distinctive design of each hacha, both those worn and those carved in stone may have served to identify teams or individuals.

Hachas also vary greatly in form and size, so much so that they qualify as a group only in contrast to the taller and thinner palmas. Hachas can appear in the form of human or animal heads, full figures, even representing a pair of human hands. The name hacharefers to the axe-like form of many (hacha is Spanish for axe), including the example seen here. In these, the back is slightly wider than the front where the sides converge in a sharp point. Facial features and any other details are carved on low relief, each side a mirror image of the other.

In other ways this stone hacha is unusual in both its subject and composition. In order to conform to the classic hacha shape, the artist has rendered the face, body and tail fin in consecutive, ascending registers of low relief. The artist has carefully rendered each scale individually, with increased depth of relief from front to back, mimicking how fish fins overlap in nature. The rounded form of the cheeks, slightly open mouth, and flared gills suggest the respiration and movement of the fish as it passes through the water.

In jarring contrast to this naturalistic image is the fish’s unusual profile. The inclusion of what looks like a very human nose suggests a composite being of the supernatural realm. The belief in a watery underworld inhabited by deities was widespread throughout Mesoamerica. At the Classic Veracruz city of El Tajín, scenes of ballgame-related rituals both on earth and in the underworld are carved on the walls of one of its many ball courts.

In one such scene, a man wearing a fish helmet sits in a water-filled temple, surrounded by supernatural figures. The unusual blending of fish and human elements on this hacha may reflect the widespread Mesoamerican belief that the ball court was a conduit, the game and its rituals a way of connecting humans to the deities dwelling in that realm. –Patricia Joan Sarro, 2017