Archaeologists Stumble Upon 10 Egyptian Late Period Rock-Hewn Tombs

Ancient Origins

An Egyptian mission from the Ministry of Antiquities recently came across 10 previously undiscovered rock-hewn tombs on the West Bank of Aswan. They say the tombs date to the Late Period (664‒332 BC) and contain sarcophagi, mummies, and funerary collections.

The team was working at the nearby Agha Kahn mausoleum when they found the tombs. Nasr Salama, director-general of Aswan and Nubia Antiquities, told Ahram Online the tombs are architecturally similar. All feature sliding steps leading to an entrance, followed by a small burial chamber. Inside those chambers the researchers have found stone sarcophagi and mummies, as well as artifacts such as a gilded coffin, painted mummy mask, clay pot, and canopic jars.

A painted mummy mask found as part of one of the funerary collections. ( Ahram Online )

Funerary goods were very important elements of ancient Egyptian burials. As Ancient Origins writer Dhwty explained in an article on enigmatic funerary cones :

 “Ancient Egyptians were extremely concerned about the afterlife, and they did all they could to provide for the dead. Funerary goods were buried with the dead to provide protection and sustenance in the afterlife. Amulets and magic spells, for example, protected and aided the dead in their journey through the Underworld, whilst little figurines called shabtis could be magically animated to perform tasks for the dead in the afterlife. Other common items buried with the dead include jewelry, pottery, furniture and food.”

A canopic jar found in one of the Aswan tombs. ( Ministry of Antiquities )

An initial study of the tombs suggests that they are likely an extension of the Aswan necropolis containing overseers from the Old, Middle, and New kingdom. The team will return to excavations and conservation work on the tombs in September. They hope to learn more about the deceased at that time.

 In June 2015, Mark Miller reported for Ancient Origins that six other ancient Egyptian tombs belonging to elite members of the 26th dynasty of the Late Pharaonic Period were found in the necropolis near Agha Khan’s mausoleum. Before that, only tombs from the early and middle dynasties had been excavated in that part of Aswan.

Those tombs were looted in the unrest of 2011, but a number of stunning artifacts were still found including some sarcophagi with mummies intact, statues of the falcon-headed god Horus and his four sons, and amulets of different colors, shapes and sizes.

Statues found in the 26th dynasty Aswan tombs in 2015. (Ministry of Antiquities/ Egitalloyd Travel Egypt ) 

The 26th dynasty has been called both a Renaissance, after Assyrian conquerors left and Egyptian governors declared themselves kings, and as the last gasp of a once great culture. As Mark Miller wrote: 

“Historians say the prosperity of the time is evident in the many temples built then and the precise care taken to reproduce ancient artworks and literary texts. Also, archaeologists have found that the number of contracts written on papyrus from this era was increasing.”

The Brooklyn Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian medical papyrus dating from about 450 BC. ( Brooklyn Museum )

Top Image: Part of a gilded coffin which was found in one of the Aswan tombs. Source: Ministry of Antiquities

By Alicia McDermott

Ancient Egyptian Papyrus Reveals Odd Cure for Ingrown Eyelashes – Bull Fat, Bat and Donkey Blood

Ancient Origins

An Egyptian medical document dating back about 3,500 years is being translated by a Danish Egyptologist, who reveals strange ingredients that to most modern people may not seem beneficial. The recipes call for bull fat, blood of a bat and donkey, heart of a lizard, pulverized pottery, honey, lizard dung and the milk of a mother nursing a boy.

 Egyptologist Sofie Schiød spent six months translating the ancient text but says she could spend another year working on it, Science Nordic says in an article about her research.

 One side of the text includes what may be a treatment for trichiasis or ingrown eyelashes. The other side is a gynecological text that may relate to the gender of a fetus.

“It’s something to do with whether someone is having a boy or a girl and birth prognoses. But I’ve mainly been working on the other side,” Schiødt told Science Nordic.

The recipe on the other side includes the fat of a bull, blood of a bat, blood of a donkey and possibly the heart of a lizard. The recipe or treatment also calls for the apothecary to add a little pulverized pottery and a little honey.

The ingredients on the side that records gynecological treatment include lizard dung, beer, celery, and the milk of a woman who has delivered a boy.

The hieroglyphs include small birds, snakes and ships, reading from right to left. She says the characters in red are recipes and quantities, while the black texts give ingredients and how to put the concoction together.

Schiødt is at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. A German researching a similar text gave Schiødt some help with the meaning of the papyrus, which has been untouched in Copenhagen for 80 years.

She said working with the German colleague was a eureka moment because her papyrus and the text in Germany had similar ingredients. She hopes to do further research into the texts as part of her Ph.D. project.

 She told Science Nordic that there is much to be studied just in these papyrus fragments. She added that many ancient texts of Egypt appeared later in Greek. She wants to explore further why people adopt others’ culture and what barriers, whether cultural or linguistic, there are.

The Weird Sisters of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Wikimedia Commons/Wellcome images)

Indeed, about 2,900 years after this Egyptian document was written, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, in which appear three witches or the Weird Sisters. Shakespeare sets out a strange scene in which they are gathered around a cauldron in a cave with thunder crashing. They throw ingredients similar to the ancient Egyptians’ into the cauldron:

FIRST WITCH
Round about the cauldron go, In the poisoned entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Sweltered venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i' th' charmèd pot.

ALL
Double, double toil and trouble, Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

SECOND WITCH
 Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake. Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

The list of ingredients in Macbeth goes on at some length. You can read it in its entirety in Act 4, Scene 1.

Schiødt does not reference Shakespeare in the Science Nordic article, but she says:

Several treatment methods travel throughout the Arabian countries to Greece and on into Europe. Parts are weeded out along the way, the religious aspects especially disappear. But many of the ingredients, like lizards and bats appear again. I’d really like to map this transfer of knowledge,” she says.

The text she translated is in seven fragments that make together a document about the same size as an A4 sheet of paper, 21 by 29.7 cm (8.5 by 11 inches).

Top image: An ancient Egyptian medical text from 3,700 years ago; this is not the papyrus that Sofie Schiødt worked on. (Wikimedia Commons/Jeff Dahl photo)

By Mark Miller

Ancient Egyptian Logbook of Inspector Who Helped Construct the Great Pyramid Revealed

Ancient Origins

Some of the details of the construction of the Egyptian Great Pyramid are revealed to the public for the first time when they go on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The information comes in the form of a papyri logbook written by an inspector named Merer. While much about the building of the pyramids remains unknown and speculative, the precious text sheds at least some light on the later aspects of the building process.

According to Live Science, Merer wrote in hieroglyphics how he was in charge of about 200 men and gave some information about the construction process while he was working on it in the 27th year of Khufu's reign.

Statue of Khufu in the Cairo Museum. (Public Domain)

Writing on the document in 2014 (it was unearthed in 2013), the archaeologists Pierre Tallet and Gregory Marouard said that the pyramid was nearing completion when the text was written. Merer wrote that the work at that time was focused on creating the limestone casing to cover the pyramid.

• 4,600-year-old step pyramid uncovered in Egypt and its purpose is a mystery
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The archaeologists’ research on the logbook was published as an article in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology. They explained in their article that the document is comprised of more than 300 fragments of varying sizes and provides details on the inspector’s daily activities over several months.

Concentration of papyri in the rubble on which the logbook was written. (P. Tallet)

The logbook was discovered at the Red Sea harbor of Wadi al-Jarf and Live Science reports that “It dates back about 4,500 years, making it the oldest papyrus document ever discovered in Egypt.”
Apart from the information on daily activities, Merer’s log (and others found at the site) also provide additional interesting tidbits of data. The archaeologists wrote in their articles that:

“Merer's journal also mentions his passage at an important logistic and administrative center, ‘Ro-She Khufu’ - which seems to have functioned as a stopping point near by the Giza plateau. It is especially specified that this site is under the authority of a high rank official, Ankhhaef, half-brother of Khufu, who was his vizier and “chief for all the works of the king” at the end of the reign. Other logs found in the same archive also give information about others missions accomplished by the same team of sailors during the same year, notably the building of a Harbor on the Mediterranean Sea coast.”

Bust of Prince Ankhhaef, Khufu’s half-brother and vizier. ( Keith Schengili-Roberts/CC BY SA 2.5 )

Live Science reports that it is uncertain how long the logbook will be on display at the Egyptian Museum.

• Sarcophagus of Egyptian High Priest Unearthed with Hieroglyphic Inscriptions and Scenes of Offerings
• Analysis Begins on Cosmic Particles in the Egyptian Bent Pyramid – Will This Help Explain How the Pyramids Were Built?

The Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Cheops and Pyramid of Khufu, is comprised of more than 2 million limestone blocks weighing from 2 to 70 tons. Thus, it is interesting to note that Merer’s logbook explains from where this material was quarried and how it was transported towards the pyramid’s site. Tallet and Marouard’s article says that the logbook:

“records a period over the course of several months – in the form of a timetable with two columns per day – with many operations related to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza and the work at the limestone quarries on the opposite bank of the Nile. On a regular basis, there are also descriptions concerning the transportation, on the Nile and connected canals, of stone blocks, which had been extracted from the northern and southern quarries of Tura. These blocks were delivered within two or three days at the pyramid construction site, called the ‘Horizon of Khufu’.”

Some researchers say that the ’Horizon of Khufu’ refers to the pharaoh Khufu’s name for his necropolis.

Left: Part of a papyrus inscribed with an account dating to the reign of Khufu (13th cattle count). ( G. Pollin )  Right: Account on a papyrus (A) and a detail of one page of inspector Merer's “diary” (B), mentioning the “Horizon of Khufu.” ( G. Pollin )

The Great Pyramid is the only Giza pyramid that has air shafts . This pyramid was built with such precision that it has been said that it would be difficult to replicate it even with today’s technology. This point is one of the reasons why so many people are fascinated by the pyramid’s construction.

 Within the Great Pyramid, there are areas that are called the King's Chamber, the Queen's Chamber, and the Subterranean Chamber. It should be noted however that there is much debate over these names and the purpose of the pyramid itself. Mainstream archaeology accepts that the pyramid was built around 2500 BC and commissioned by King Khufu for his tomb. However, much controversy surrounds these conclusions. For example, German archaeologists in 2013, argued that the Great Pyramid is much older and served a different purpose .
The debate over the pyramid’s construction and use continues to enthrall many researchers and, although work continues at the site, many of the questions behind this fascinating ancient structure remain unanswered.

The Great Pyramid of Giza. Source: BigStockPhoto

Top Image: One of the papyri in the ancient logbook which documented some details on the later construction period of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Source: Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities
By Alicia McDermott 

Ancient Hangover Cure Discovered in Greek Texts

Live Science

This recently translated papyrus, dating back to the second century, contains a recipe for several ailments, including a "drunken headache.Credit: Photo courtesy Egypt Exploration Society


Hiding a hangover in ancient Egypt would've taken some work. Rather than popping an ibuprofen for a pounding drunken headache, people in Egypt may have worn a leafy necklace.
That's according to a newly translated and published papyrus written in Greek with the recipe for a "drunken headache" cure. The alcohol victim would have strung together leaves from a shrub called Alexandrian chamaedaphne (Ruscus racemosus L.), possibly wearing the strand around the neck, the text revealed.
Though people in the ancient world believed Alexandrian chamaedaphne could ease a headache, whether the cure really worked, let alone on a drunken headache, is unknown. [Myth or Truth? 7 Ancient Health Ideas Explained]
Largest collection of medical papyri
The 1,900-year-old papyrus containing the hangover treatment is one of over 500,000 such documents found in the ancient Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus by researchers Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt about a century ago.
The study and publication of so many papyri is a long and slow task that has been going on for a century. Recently, volume 80 was published, containing studies and decipherments of about 30 medical papyri found at Oxyrhynchus, including the papyrus with the hangover treatment.
This newly published volume represents "the largest single collection of medical papyri to be published," wrote Vivian Nutton, a professor at University College London, at the beginning of the volume. The collection includes medical treatises and treatments for a wide variety of ailments, including hemorrhoids, ulcers, tooth problems and even some fragments discussing eye surgery.
The writers of these ancient papyri relied heavily on Greek knowledge. The ancient residents of Oxyrhynchus strongly embraced Hellenistic (Greek-influenced) culture, something that spread throughout Egypt, and the wider Middle East, after the conquests of Alexander the Great, Nutton said.
Eye recipes
Some of the most interesting treatments in the texts deal with the eyes.

This papyrus, found in Oxyrhynchus in ancient Egypt, contains a tooth powder recipe said to help with gum problems.
Credit: Photo courtesy Egypt Exploration Society

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One text contains about a dozen recipes for an eye-cleaning lotion called collyrium. One such recipe meant to treat rheum, a discharge of mucus from the eyes, contains a medley of ingredients, including copper flakes, antimony oxide, white lead, washed lead dross (produced in smelting), starch, dried roses, rainwater, gum Arabic, poppy juice and a plant called a Celtic spikenard.
That treatment seems relatively mild compared with techniques for eye surgery laid out in the collection. One fragment contains what appears to be a first-person account of surgery performed on an everted eyelid, an eyelid that has turned inside out causing irritation. The text is fragmentary, and some of the words are uncertain; however, it's clear this was not an operation for the faint of heart, especially given that anaesthesia hadn't been invented yet.
Part of it reads: "… the eye … I began … by the temple … the other from the temple … to remove with a small round-bladed knife … the edge of the eyelid from outside … from within until I scooped out …" (translation by Marguerite Hirt,  a researcher at the University of Cambridge who analyzed the text).
The medical papyri are now owned by the Egypt Exploration Society and are kept at the Sackler Library at Oxford University.

New Tech Could Reveal Secrets in 2,000-Year-Old Scrolls

by Tia Ghose
Live Science

Hundreds of rolled, charred papyrus scrolls that were buried in ash in Herculaneum after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 could finally be read, thanks to a new technique that uses X-ray tomography. Here, letters from one of the interior layers of a charred scroll can be read. In the top the sequence of Greek capital letters spells PIPTOIE (pi-iota-pi-tau- omicron-iota-epsilon); in the bottom the letter sequence of the next line, EIPOI (epsilon-iota-pi-omicron-iota) Credit: Mocella et al, Nature Communications

Hundreds of ancient papyrus scrolls that were buried nearly 2,000 years ago after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius could finally be read, thanks to a new technique.
The X-ray-based method can be used to decipher the charred, damaged texts that were found in the ancient town of Herculaneum without having to unroll them, which could damage them beyond repair, scientists say.
One problem with previous attempts to use X-rays to read the scrolls was that the ancient writers used a carbon-based material from smoke in their ink, said study co-author Vito Mocella, a physicist at the National Research Council in Naples, Italy.

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Hundreds of rolled, charred papyrus scrolls that were buried in ash in Herculaneum after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 could finally be read, thanks to a new technique that uses X-ray tomography. Here, letters from one of the interior layers of a charred scroll can be read. In the top the sequence of Greek capital letters spells PIPTOIE (pi-iota-pi-tau- omicron-iota-epsilon); in the bottom the letter sequence of the next line, EIPOI (epsilon-iota-pi-omicron-iota) Credit: Mocella et al, Nature Communications View full size image

Hundreds of ancient papyrus scrolls that were buried nearly 2,000 years ago after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius could finally be read, thanks to a new technique.
The X-ray-based method can be used to decipher the charred, damaged texts that were found in the ancient town of Herculaneum without having to unroll them, which could damage them beyond repair, scientists say.
One problem with previous attempts to use X-rays to read the scrolls was that the ancient writers used a carbon-based material from smoke in their ink, said study co-author Vito Mocella, a physicist at the National Research Council in Naples, Italy.

"The papyri have been burnt, so there is not a huge difference between the paper and the ink," Mocella told Live Science. That made it impossible to decipher the words written in the documents.
If the new method works, it could be used to reveal the secrets of one of the few intact libraries from antiquity, the researchers said. [See How the New X-ray Method Works]
Buried in ash
Both the Roman city of Pompeii and the nearby, wealthy seaside town of Herculaneum were wiped out when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, killing thousands of people and covering fine villas in ash and lava.
In the 1750s, workers uncovered a library in a villa thought to be the home of a Roman statesman. The site, known as the Villa of the Papyri, contained nearly 2,000 ancient papyrus scrolls that had been charred by the volcanic heat.

The papyrus scrolls found in a Herculaneum villa in the 1750s were badly charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Since their discovery in the 1700s, researchers have tried many techniques to unroll the charred, delicate texts.
Credit: E. Brun

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Since then, historians have tried many ingenious (and some not-so-ingenious) methods for reading the damaged scrolls.
"They poured mercury on them, they soaked them in rosewater — all kinds of crazy stuff," said Jennifer Sheridan Moss, a papyrologist at Wayne State University in Detroit and the president of the American Society of Papyrologists.
From the few scrolls that could be unrolled and deciphered, historians determined that the library was filled mainly with writings on Epicurean philosophy — a school of thought that holds, among other things, that the goal of human life is happiness, characterized by the absence of pain and mental strife — and was part of the collection of a prolific writer named Philodemus.
"Most of what we know of Epicureanism is from these papyri," Mocella said.
Though some of the methods used to unroll the scrolls, such as a clever unrolling machine designed by a monk in the 1700s, were fairly successful, most wound up damaging the fragile documents.
Revealing secrets
Historians decided that the potential for damage was too great, and thus locked the remaining scrolls, still rolled up, in the National Library of Naples in Italy. A few years ago, researchers tried to read the scrolls without unrolling them, using X-ray tomography, which takes X-rays from multiple angles to recreate a 3D image of an object.
But this process is based on the fact that hard, dense materials absorb more X-rays than softer materials, and it didn't work for the scrolls because the smoke-based ink was too similar to the charred paper.
So the team looked to a similar technique, called X-ray phase-contrast tomography. Because the letters on the papyrus are slightly raised in height, the waves of X-rays that hit the letters would be reflected back with a slightly shifted phase, compared with the waves that hit the underlying material. By measuring this phase difference, the team was able to reproduce the shape of the letters inside the rolled scrolls.
So far, the team has analyzed six scrolls that were given to Napoleon Bonaparte as gifts and are now housed at the French Institute in Paris. They have deciphered some of the Greek letters and words written inside the rolled-up, burned, smushed scrolls.
Still, deciphering the words in the innermost layers was extremely challenging, the authors wrote in their paper.
Promising technique
The texts on the scrolls are unlikely to yield earth-shattering insights, given how many of the other scrolls have been deciphered, Moss said.
But the new technique holds promise for other burnt papyri as well, Moss said.
"Most people now believe there is a whole other library under there in that Villa of the Papyri," Moss told Live Science. That's because, in the Roman world, most libraries held all the Greek treatises in one section and all the Latin books in another, she said.
Archaeologists have a good idea of where the Latin library may be, but so far, they've found no trace of the Latin texts, in part because noxious gases released from the ground make the site difficult to excavate. But if they do find the hidden library, this new technique could become very useful there, Moss said.
"We could easily find more things that are in bad shape like this, and then the technology could be applied to them," Moss said.
The new technique was described today (Jan. 20) in the journal Nature Communications.

'Last Supper' Papyrus May Be One of Oldest Christian Charms

By Jeanna Bryner

A Greek papyrus dating back some 1,500 years from an ancient Egyptian city refers to Jesus' Last Supper and manna from heaven. Credit: University of Manchester, John Rylands Research Institute

A 1,500-year-old fragment of Greek papyrus with writing that refers to the biblical Last Supper and "manna from heaven" may be one of the oldest Christian amulets, say researchers.
The fragment was likely folded up and worn inside a locket or pendant as a sort of protective charm, according to Roberta Mazza, who spotted the papyrus while looking through thousands of papyri kept in the library vault at the John Rylands Research Institute at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.
"This is an important and unexpected discovery as it's one of the first recorded documents to use magic in the Christian context and the first charm ever found to refer to the Eucharist — the Last Supper — as the manna of the Old Testament," Mazza said in a statement. The fragment likely originated in a town in Egypt
The text on the papyrus is a mix of passages from Psalm 78:23-24 and Matthew 26:28-30, among others, said Mazza, who is a research fellow at the institute. "To this day, Christians use passages from the Bible as protective charms so our amulet marks the start of an important trend in Christianity."
The translated text on the papyrus reads:
"Fear you all who rule over the earth.
Know you nations and peoples that Christ is our God.
For he spoke and they came to being, he commanded and they were created; he put everything under our feet and delivered us from the wish of our enemies.
Our God prepared a sacred table in the desert for the people and gave manna of the new covenant to eat, the Lord's immortal body and the blood of Christ poured for us in remission of sins."
People of the time believed such passages had magical powers, Mazza told Live Science. Supporting that idea, creases can be seen on the fragment, Mazza said, suggesting the papyrus was folded into a rectangular packet measuring 3 by 10.5 centimeters (1.2 by 4.1 inches), and either placed into a box at home or worn around a person's neck.

The ancient amulet, which consisted of a mix of biblical passages, was written on the back of a receipt for payment of a grain tax.
Credit: University of Manchester, John Rylands Research Institute

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The amulet was written on the back of a receipt that seems to be for payment of a grain tax. The nearly illegible text refers to a tax collector from the village of Tertembuthis, located in the countryside of Hermoupolis, an ancient city in what is now the Egyptian town of el-Ashmunein.
"The text says that the receipt was released in the village of Tertembuthis. Therefore we may reasonably guess that the person who re-used the back for writing the amulet was from that same village or the region nearby, although we cannot exclude other hypotheses," Mazza told Live Science.
Carbon analysis dates the fragment to between 574 and 660, Mazza said. And while the creator knew the Bible, he or she made plenty of mistakes. "Some words are misspelled and others are in the wrong order," Mazza said in the statement. "This suggests that he was writing by heart rather than copying it."
The discovery, which Mazza presented this week at an international conference on papyri at the university's research institute, reveals that Christians adopted an ancient Egyptian practice of wearing such charms to ward off danger.
"This practice is not very far from nowadays use to wear necklaces with the cross or images of Jesus, Mary, or the saints, for protection," Mazza said. "In many Catholic churches nowadays believers are given holy pictures of the saints with a prayer on the back that you can bring along again for protection."
Mazza will submit a paper on the discovery for publication to Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.


Live Science