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Now they look as realistic and life-like as these icons!

Thank you for your personal definition but I will go with the dictionary one thanks.

I said, "A currency is simply something that is generally accepted in exchange for goods and services. "

The dictionary says:
currency
1. something that is used as a medium of exchange; money.
[snip]
I think my statement is a fair paraphrasing of the dictionary definition and is certainly what i think of when i think of the concept of "currency". I would say that you are the one redefining the term by trying to limit it to concepts with which you are familiar. The world has seen a great many objects most of us would see as strange used as currency. Salt, squirrel pelts, sea shells, and giant stones up to 12 feet in diameter. And yes, in ancient Egypt, beer was even used as currency.

I really hate this "let's make it difficult to communicate just so I can trick others into misunderstanding what I mean and make it look like I've won an argument" shit that has been disgorged from the ugly end of US politics. You can be a better person than that.

Ditto. You jumped in in the middle of a conversation I was not having with you. I'm not clear on what you were objecting to and why, and you have yet to explain it. If you want me to address a specific objection you will have to state it clearly and forthrightly. As of now you're just playing games and being deliberately obtuse. Not to mention hypocritical in trying to accuse me of being anything less than forthright in the face of your semantic games.

If you object to the word "currency" being used to describe Bitcoin you're going to have to come up with something pretty convincing, as all the evidence is stacked against you. If you object to something else, you're going to actually explain what that is.

It's not entirely worthless - it makes good kindling, and bad toilet paper. (or very bad kindling if you use it as toilet paper first)

You have to let it dry first, obviously.

Case in point: many rural populations use dried animal dung as fuel

Or the Mugamma. I read a story about 6-8 years ago about the trials and tribulations of getting anything done in Cairo and it was about going here.

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/mugamma.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mogamma

Indeed, Hippocrates used it, and it goes further even to ancient Egypt and the oldest known surgical treatise.

"Guns were necessary for slavery"

I wonder how the Egyptians had slaves thousands of years before the invention of firearms? http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/slaves.htm

Perhaps those ancient cultures were so *clever* that they tricked the slaves into thinking they had invented guns?

secrets and power. a few weeks ago there was a show on the history channel (i believe..) that was showcasing the secrets of ancient priests. the priests used their wealth (i assume donated, or mandated fees) to hire the brightest people around and turned the temples into giant entertainment venues. light a fire underneath a canopy of sorts, heat some water, create steam, route steam to massive doors which open upon mysteriously during the sacrifice. everyone leaves in awe, someone just got roasted and the doors opened on their own. the only people at the time who knew of these tricks were the "scientists" and priests. everyone else blindly followed. priests also knew of various poisons, just incase. sure these scientiests, via being paid were motivated into creating incredibly advanced devices for the time, but they might just have done it on their own and the entire public would have benefit.

my point is that religion just CAN'T be good in the end from a humanity perspective. if you want instant gratification, want to feel good, donate to something other than give your time/money to people wearing silly hats, robes, and especially if they are threatening your life when you don't follow them. or smoke pot.

http://www.touregypt.net/science.htm
Just something i googled real quick to show scope

honestly, look at the scope, look how long this has been going on. I hope that, it being 2007, the world could wake up. free flow of information please, stop the stifling, the trickery, it is doing humanity so much more harm than good. it's frustrating enough knowing that big business uses power to deceive and steal these days.

just to poke some fun now, all these diety clubs are hindering the enjoyment of my sundays. so many people devoting 52 +/- days a year is causing a lot of traffic jams on my local roads. just knock it off already

Hatshepsut is a very interesting historical figure.

She reigned during Egypt's New Kingdom, a little after Ahmose drove out the Asiatic Hyksos from the north, and unifying Egypt again under native rule, and bringing Egypt to it final age of glory in ancient times.

She was the Pharoah of Egypt, marrying her half brother, Thutmosis II (a common practice then), who had a son, Thutmosis III by a lesser wife, and co-ruled with her nephew.

She sent ships and explorers to the Land of Punt (thought to be Somalia).

The explorers who returned recorded their findings on the walls of her temple (El Deir El Bahari: modern name: the Northen Monastery, original "Djeser djeseru").

You can see amazing details of Red Sea fauna there, such as spiny lobster, squid and other creatures.

There are inscriptions of natives from Africa too in meticulous detail, as well as their dwellings (thatched huts). There is even an obese queen from Punt with some disfigurement.

You can see a replica of the inscriptions at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto (rather there was big room full of that when I was there a few years ago).

So, when Thutmosis III finally took over, he went through a campaign of removing her memory from history. Although being his aunt, she was also his step mother, and God knows what relationship they had when his father was alive.

Although other Pharoahs did this regularly, it was not targeted towards any particular one specifically, but rather an attempt to claim the monuments of predecessors as his own.

Her statues were toppled in wells (where they were discovered in the 19th century).

More detail here.

Hatshepsut is a very interesting historical figure.

She reigned during Egypt's New Kingdom, a little after Ahmose drove out the Asiatic Hyksos from the north, and unifying Egypt again under native rule, and bringing Egypt to it final age of glory in ancient times.

She was the Pharoah of Egypt, marrying her half brother, Thutmosis II (a common practice then), who had a son, Thutmosis III by a lesser wife, and co-ruled with her nephew.

She sent ships and explorers to the Land of Punt (thought to be Somalia).

The explorers who returned recorded their findings on the walls of her temple (El Deir El Bahari: modern name: the Northen Monastery, original "Djeser djeseru").

You can see amazing details of Red Sea fauna there, such as spiny lobster, squid and other creatures.

There are inscriptions of natives from Africa too in meticulous detail, as well as their dwellings (thatched huts). There is even an obese queen from Punt with some disfigurement.

You can see a replica of the inscriptions at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto (rather there was big room full of that when I was there a few years ago).

So, when Thutmosis III finally took over, he went through a campaign of removing her memory from history. Although being his aunt, she was also his step mother, and God knows what relationship they had when his father was alive.

Although other Pharoahs did this regularly, it was not targeted towards any particular one specifically, but rather an attempt to claim the monuments of predecessors as his own.

Her statues were toppled in wells (where they were discovered in the 19th century).

More detail here.

Hatshepsut is a very interesting historical figure.

She reigned during Egypt's New Kingdom, a little after Ahmose drove out the Asiatic Hyksos from the north, and unifying Egypt again under native rule, and bringing Egypt to it final age of glory in ancient times.

She was the Pharoah of Egypt, marrying her half brother, Thutmosis II (a common practice then), who had a son, Thutmosis III by a lesser wife, and co-ruled with her nephew.

She sent ships and explorers to the Land of Punt (thought to be Somalia).

The explorers who returned recorded their findings on the walls of her temple (El Deir El Bahari: modern name: the Northen Monastery, original "Djeser djeseru").

You can see amazing details of Red Sea fauna there, such as spiny lobster, squid and other creatures.

There are inscriptions of natives from Africa too in meticulous detail, as well as their dwellings (thatched huts). There is even an obese queen from Punt with some disfigurement.

You can see a replica of the inscriptions at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto (rather there was big room full of that when I was there a few years ago).

So, when Thutmosis III finally took over, he went through a campaign of removing her memory from history. Although being his aunt, she was also his step mother, and God knows what relationship they had when his father was alive.

Although other Pharoahs did this regularly, it was not targeted towards any particular one specifically, but rather an attempt to claim the monuments of predecessors as his own.

Her statues were toppled in wells (where they were discovered in the 19th century).

More detail here.

The Pyramids where not build by slaves but by payed workers. At least the majority of the workers where not slaves. Slaves, most of the time convicted criminals, worked in the quarries however. But also there lots of payed men worked.

See e.g. as reference (or sue google to find more): http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/slaves.htm

angel'o'sphere

A quick trip to Google Image search for Khufu tunnel.

discovery.com (website for discovery channel) notes in an article "The X-rays suggest Mag died in her 30s or 40s, which would have been a fairly long human lifespan for the time" at http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050117/catm ummy.html

Various tourism articles also point at lifespan indicators, such as touregypt.net at http://www.touregypt.net/magazine/mag11012000/magf 1.htm which states "Egyptian life span was short (average 40 years or so)"

However I'd like to note (and probably where your uncited proof comes from is that in every era we have evidence of the occassional person living well into their 90s) The best example is the commonly held belief that Ramses lived into his 90s "In Year 67 at around 92 years of age, Ramesses was called to join the gods.", which you can read at http://www.egyptologyonline.com/ramesses_the_great .htm but again on the same site you can read about how the person buried in KV55 only lived somewhere between 23-24 years of age" so it doesn't seem that kings were particularly prone to longevity either http://www.egyptologyonline.com/kv55_further_exami nations.htm

So no I wouldn't agree that persons living in ancient egypt were living on average to the same life span as we are today. Additionally I would try to not get too confused between the difference between an outlier and the average age. (We have people today living past 100 years of age, which is considered an outlier by today's lifespan average.)

Also for the record, Even though ancient egypt was around in times of 3100BC (all the way to 395AD), it only became a province of the roman empire in 30BC. So it's pretty weak to compare ancient egyptians to romans.

Actually it was 110.4kg (243lb) and varied in thickness from 2.5mm - 3mm.

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/tutcoffins .htm

$2.45M of solid fucking gold at today's prices.

Funny you should mention foil... it was solid gold, but "beaten from a heavy gold sheet".
So they apparently took a massive piece of foil, and hammered it into itself until it was solid fucking gold!
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/tutcoffins .htm

>>Our (human) pyramids are only 6000 years old, and their outer surface is gone
Actually, the reason that the outer surface is gone is not attributable to erosion but rather to human theft.
The Giza Pyramids, built during the Fourth Dynasty, were constructed of stone with polished limestone casings. The limestone blocks were later used to construct buildings in Cairo.
(http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/giza.htm)

Quite a shame.

Nubian means from Nubia. Nubia is the land historically between Egypt, which was considered to end at the first cataract on the Nile (waterfall making the river not navigable south of it), and the North part of what is now Sudan.

The kingdom of Napata eventually took over Egypt, and their kings became pharoahs. Their center was at Meroe, where there are pyramids today. The most famous "black pharoah" was Taharqa.

Read more here http://touregypt.net/historicalessays/nubia.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubia, and here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fifth_dynasty_ of_Egypt.

Outside of the Star Wars mythos of course ...

Is the technology itself just really underwhelming when it comes to below-ground imaging? I'd assume so, but then perhaps the valley itself is just too great an area to survey accurately.

Anyway.. I want more gold-filled tombs! Shiny!

I wonder if it cover canopic jars for burial?

This is obviously a Coptic slanted post that leaves a lot of context out intentionally to further the "Copts are persecuted" agenda.

First, Egypt was in decline for a long time. Egypt's last empire under the new Kingdom died more than a full millenium B.C. The priests took over and there was chaos and decay. During that time, most of the royal tombs were looted, either by priests recovering the riches of long gone by pharoahs to prepare the new ones, or by robbers looking for gold. Egypt came under successive rule from foreign powers, such as the Nubians, the Libyans, the Persians, and the Assyrians.

An interesting observation is that Egypt was never ruled by an Egyptian from the time of Nectanebo II, down to 1952 when Mohamed Naguib came to power! That is about 23 centuries or so!

Then after Alexander conquered Egypt, the era of Hellenism started, where Egypt was a Greek cultural center. Egypt saw a renaissance, but not an Egyptian one, but rather a Greek one. The cultural centers of old in the south never recovered their glory. The Egyptian language fell into disuse, apart from some priests and a dialect for the peasants.

When Christianity came to Egypt, Egypt was in decline, having came under the Roman rule, and later under Byzantium. Egyptians, like others in the area, never liked their Roman overlords. They loathed them.

Under Christianity, there was persecution against the pagans, such as the mob killing of the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, and the destruction of whatever remained from the Library of Alexandria.

There are many accounts in history that Egyptians invited Arabs to come to Egypt to overthrow the Byzantines. This was a recurring theme. Even for Iberia (Andalus) the same was true.

As for the loss of language, Arabs/Muslims never enforced Arabic on the population. The simple explanation is that Arabic, being a semitic language, was close to spoken Coptic, and other Semitic-derived languages. This is why areas where a semitic language was spoken (e.g. Nabatean, Syriac, Assyrian) were all easily supplanted by Arabic, while in areas where no semitic language was spoken (e.g. Persia) the native languages persisted.

Apart from brief bouts of oppression from cruel rulers (e.g. the mad Caliph, Al Hakim) which affected both Muslims and Copts alike, or periods of chaos (e.g. Napoleon's battles in Cairo), tolerance was the norm. The very existence of Copts in Egypt, Christians in Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon is proof that this is true. Unlike other places (e.g. Sicily, Spain, where Catholic Christianity exterminated Islam and Judaism systematically by expulsion, conversion, or genocide).

Muslims and Copts lived side by side for 14 century, and will continue to do so for a long time, despite the extremists on both sides.

Mike, please, for the sake of Egypt and Egyptians, please lose the "Copt-only" stance and unite your efforts with those working for change there. The problems there are common to all, and not specifically Copt. Mubarak and cronies have been detrimental to all, and not one faction or other. Let us all try to improve the situation for all, and not just one minority, playing to the West or whatever.

So Canopy didn't want to be canopic.

(Unfortunately many were damaged or destroyed when someone - most likely Thuthmose III - tried to erase her name and image from every monument that may have had her name.)

Though this seems a little drastic, there was obviously bitter feelings against Hatshepsut.

The traditional belief among historians is that Thutmose III was responsible; however, researchers such as Charles Nims? and Peter Dorman? have examined these erasures and found that those which can be dated were done after year 42 of Thutmose's reign. As with many detail about Hatshepsut, historians have opposing views on who defaced her monuments.

(Unfortunately many were damaged or destroyed when someone - most likely Thuthmose III - tried to erase her name and image from every monument that may have had her name.)

Though this seems a little drastic, there was obviously bitter feelings against Hatshepsut.

The traditional belief among historians is that Thutmose III was responsible; however, researchers such as Charles Nims? and Peter Dorman? have examined these erasures and found that those which can be dated were done after year 42 of Thutmose's reign. As with many detail about Hatshepsut, historians have opposing views on who defaced her monuments.

Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950.
That doesn't seam likely:
Clouds Written in 419 B.C.E, mentions an eclipse of the moon. The Moon in Ancient Egypt is often discussed. The moon is also mentioned many times in the Bible, eg. Psalms 8:
" When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; "
I imagine quite a few people will have access to a bible printed before 1950 and will be able to check that out. If you do check and find it missing - do post here - we may really be onto something!

His name was Imhotep

A good analogy here is the architechtural construction techniques of the Egyptian pharaohs. You can build quite big pyramids if you throw a fortune and an army of slaves at the job. But it doesn't scale, it doesn't advance the state of the art, and, crucially, it doesn't get any cheaper when you do it more often. It was the brick-and-mortar commercial construction industry that led via engineering advances to modern skyscraper construction.

I'm not sure you're on very solid ground there.

Back in the good old days, the pharoahs' tombs were low key affairs. Then along came Imhotep, the architect who designed Djoser's pyramid. Imhotep was the guy who really understood what could be done with stone. He realised that it was a really adaptable material with wonderful mechanical properties and a possibility for great aesthetics.

Imhotep undoubtedly advanced the state of the art in the creation of large-scale buildings, and in several other areas too. Ironically, it was the bricks and mortar construction industry that he killed off with his works in stone. Earlier mud-brick pyramids were not very impressive and most have long since crumbled away. The pyramid he designed for his pharaoh is still in reasonably good condition well over 4600 years later.

As for Imhotep, his reputation as a genius survived for well over 2500 years, certainly until the early Christian era. He seemed to be regarded by his successors much as we now look on with awe at Leonardo da Vinci's brilliance. He's known not only as an engineer and architect, but as a physician, poet, astrologer and high-ranking government official.

Here's a nice intro to Imhotep and here can be found more detail on the pyramid he designed.

Paul

As beer was part of their salary, you might even say the pyramid builders worked for beer.

In fact, the workers who built the pyramids took their love of beer to their graves.

"Many workers were also buried with jars of beer, Hawass adds, picking up one such rough red-clay pot lying on top of a nearby grave. 'They made a beer from barley, and that was their daily drink. They didn't want to be without it even in the afterlife, so they often put in one of these jars.'"

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/data/2001/ 11/01/html/ft_20011101.5.html

= 9J =

I am dissapointed that the Nature article made no mention of the Islamic origins of lustreware. The process of lustre glazing predates the referenced Umbrian work by centuries.

Muslim potters invented the lustre process, which eventually worked its way into Spanish pottery in via the Moors. Only then did the process find its way to the Italian potteries of Umbria.

A very short google search turned up these interesting links:
Early Muslim Wares at artsofislam.org
11th century Egyptian lustre plate

Here's a few more links to play with if the tripod account is crushed...


http://www.phoenixarises.com/phoenix/legends/bennu .htm

http://www.paralumun.com/bennu.htm

http://www.touregypt.net/bennu.htm

What you have to realize about Egypt, however, is the entire country prefered to be "buzzed" with beer to work, rather than the stimulants (mainly caffiene) that we use today. It is common for phrases in Middle Egyptian Litterature to refer to "happy" and "Hard-Working" men with similar phrases and iconograhs as "Drunk" men. For Example, "The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer."

Beer wasn't a "get f*cked up" beverage, it was THE beverage. The only other common options were water and wine. Wine was painfully expensive and mainly reserved for the non-working classes.

From Tour Egypt.net "Most likely, the beer was not very intoxicating, nutritious, sweet, without bubbles, and thick..."