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Undisturbed Tomb found in the Valley of the Kings
akahige writes "Hot on the heels of the recent news about the death of King Tut comes a new story about the discovery of an unlooted and previously unopened 18th Dynasty tomb in the Valley of the Kings. American archaeologists found five mummies resting in sarcophagi, funerary masks, and coptic storage jars. It is the first such discovery since Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922."
It's nice to know there are still undiscovered troves of rich history out there waiting to be found.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
...welcome our new linen-wrapped overlords.
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so the go'auld missed one, eh?
"Hot on the heels of the recent news about the death of King Tut"
??? What?
I must have missed it. King Tut died? When!?
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Oh just great. How much linen to open up THIS one?
Burn the land and boil the sea, you can't take the sky from me
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!
Don't Hate, Gestate
"an /unlooted/ ...18th Dynasty tomb"
Until now.
That's my great great great great great *breathe* great great great granddad. It's a sad day when grave robbing is a profession. You shall reap what you sow. There's a curse been put upon that dig, and whoever disturbs the bones shall have "Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats playing forever in his or her head until the end of days.
You have been warned.
--
BMO
A bit behind current news, aren't we? - this has been reported for two days now...
Does anyone else find the word "coptic" dirty?
Laugh It Off
Hot on the heels of the recent news about the death of King Tut...
Uhm, King Tut died a long time ago... A really, really long time ago...
My page.
I hope someone remembers to check those "coptic storage jars" for Gao'uld symbiotes.
In Soviet Russia, Nigel makes plans for you!
Previously undiscovered, unlooted tomb, discovered and looted! W00t!
'hey look, theres an ancient sacred site, never been opened, undisturbed by human hands for thousands of years!'
'wow, cool, whaddya wanna do?'
'open it and disturb it!'
This is a slashdot article with almost all the links are linking to wikipedia articles!
http://www.ieaa.org/~adrian/
seeing as how they had to put King Tut in there
In Soviet Russia, mummies discover your tomb in the Valley of Kings.
SCO claimed ownership of the tomb. They could not find any evidence in their own records but somewhere in the pharao's records must be a proof....
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
So when do we hear the news reports of five previously undisturbed mummies running amuck in downtown Cairo?
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...How much DOES an Egyptian Urn?
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
better than described. would raid again. A+++++++++++
Maybe some staff weapons and some Zat guns and stuff.... Coool
In Soviet Russia the Mummies Find YOU!
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
How would you build an Egyptian tomb with today's knowledge? There's still no shortage of thieves who would be willing to break in and steal any valuable items. I'd start with dumping a few kilos of weapons grade anthrax spores on the floor of the burial chamber.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Soviet Egypt?
the mere mention of safety dance has started a safety dance mp3 process in my head that seems to fork a new child when its finished. The worst part is I only know the homer simpson version
you can dance you can dance everybody look at your pants.
and the only way i know to stop those annoying stuck in your head songs is to eat 2 bacon sandwiches while walking up and down stairs.
dont laugh about the bacon sandwich and stairs thing it really works.
now taking bets on how soon the archeologists start dropping dead
"American archaeologists found five mummies resting in sarcophagi, funerary masks, and coptic storage jars..." and then they found a stargate and sent an elite commando team through the worm hole and they got lost.... *yAwn*
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
(This style of archaeology was common in Victorian times, when the only "important" things were trinkets and other artifacts. Bones - especially animal bones - were often just ignored as unimportant. In consequence, a lot of what is now considered "essential data" to an archaeologist is lost forever. Egyptology, from the sounds of it, is still back in those Victorian days.)
Other posters wondered why they didn't use X-Rays, etc. Ground penetrating radar is great and invaluable as a tool, but it's only good for a few feet at most. Where there's a lot of rubble sending back fractured images, it would be next to useless even for that small distance. The recent discoveries in Worcester Cathedral (such as the tomb of Edward the Confessor and several mysterious underground chambers) were done using GPR.
This certainly required excavation, but it was evidently done in a manner that was ham-fisted and incompetent. How do I know that? Because they're already in the chamber AND already drawing conclusions from pathetically little data.
A careful, thorough site study would have taken considerably longer, obtained much more data, caused far less disruption, need not have "robbed" anything (all you need is information, not objects - the objects are merely that which carries the information you're wanting), drawn far fewer conclusions yet - once fully analyzed - been vastly superior.
I don't agree that archaeology is "grave robbing" - we are quite capable of taking portable labs to the site to conduct all the analysis you could ever want, so the idea of actually taking objects is unnecessary. It has nothing to do with the studies or science in question.
I will make one exception. If you're using imaging techniques, like the ones used to get Archimedes writings off a palimset by using a particle accelerator and X-Ray fluorescence, you're not going to be able to lug a linear accelerator into these small chambers. By and large, though, that kind of work is unusual. Although there are many damaged ancient manuscripts, I know of no other read by this method.
By and large, you're doing routine work that involves precise measurement and precise imaging. For organic remains, you might want to use DNA testing. A pair of ultra-sterile tweezers and a 100% airtight, sterile, DNA-preserving sample tube should be sufficient.
I believe that much of the degredation recently noted for King Tut during his MRI scans was caused by exposure to modern contamination and slap-dash handling. I believe that was 100% avoidable.
I don't believe in avoiding damage out of respect for a person who died 3,000 years ago. They're past caring. Their civilization is past caring. This does NOT equate to having no respect at all - respect is important, but it is the person who deserves the respect, not organically-deposited lumps of calcium and phospherous. Likewise, true respect for an artifact comes from respecting the care, skill and artistic "personality" placed upon it, not from any copper, iron or gold atoms that may be attached.
Further, I do believe in avoiding damage out of respect for history. You've only got one history - you can't take it to WalMarts and get a replacement if you damage it. I also believe in avoiding damage out of respect of the future - they've a right to learn, too. We should not deprive them of that, out of greed or negligence.
Many monuments in England have been destroyed to make way for roads, or to be used as construction material. Laws in Greece requiring archaeological surveys before construction are routinely ignored, with untold masses of knowledge wantonly destroyed as a matter of course. Do I like that? No. Wanton destruction, in
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I always wondered about this..how long before digging up or "discovering" someone's grave before you're no longer a vandal of the worst kind, but a hero in the Indiana Jones mood?
An undisturbed tomb? Quick! Let's disturb it!
http://outcampaign.org/
Its not a rich treasure trove of history, its someone's grave. Leave it alone.
they get lost ?
erm... in that case... can we get Bush to lead this team ?
Heh, so much for "you'll get all the sleep you need when you're dead".
Damn! I wish i had found the tomb first... all those linen bandages really could have helped with the war effort!
...
MOD. PARENT. UP.
... a team from Memphis, Tennessee, finds a grave near Memphis, Egypt.
How many of these sorts of burial grounds have been found, surely there have to be many in Egypt after so many thousands of years of civilization? Some writers have speculated on what possible record stores exist on the Giza plateau, some even stating that record halls like large libraries were buried centuries ago. Even if this is not true perhaps (in agreement with previous posters) it is time to stop digging up these sites that in the process probably destroying much data that can't be processed as yet. For example sites excavated before carbon dating have been effectively destroyed so modern carbon dating techniques are ineffective due to contaminants such as the autobahn effect http://anthro.palomar.edu/time/time_5.htm>. Will our grandchildren look at us as heavy handed vandals who went around excavating out future generations heritage? Perhaps now is the time for a large scale subterranean scanning project to map out more possible underground sites while at the same time preserving them for a time when we might be able to treat them a little more gently?
either that or curses ??
Undisturbed Tomb found in the Valley of the Kings
By all means, lets rob...er.... study it then.
What's with some slashdotters criticizing the excavation of this tomb as 'graverobbing'?
/. counterpoint cabal bs...
What a dumb thing to criticize! Of course it's not grave robbing...whatever they find will be used for science/history, just like Tut's stuff.
it's not like this guy is going to auction off what he finds in the tomb...
just more
Thank you Dave Raggett
I think you're being overly harsh on the diggers.
They found the shaft last year, after they had found and dug the workmen's huts, and they haven't entered the tomb, they've opened a small space in the blocked door and looked inside.
But I only RTFA, what do I know.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
To think that after a lavish burial, a few thousand years later you'll be dug up for the rest of the world to gawk at. Your best bet is to be cremated, not that you'd care after your demise.
So far the only King that has been found and not dug up, if I recall correctly, is Qin Shi Huan of China. His grave is known, but it's filled with mercury so nobody's tried to excavate his remains yet.
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I'd do as the poor old Jews did: I'd concentrate on the immaterial content.
I'd write my heritage as a story, beef it with miracles, sex, violence, and colourful characters like Noah, Jakob and David.
Then I'd use some combination of populism, terrorism and charity. Get the stories spread as wide as possible, and also get them loved and hated, so people would remember them.
And bang, here are we still, knowing a lot of the early history of a nation, which couldn't afford that much at the time. Information is the winner, matter decays.
...they've been advertising the special on The Science Channel all week. Slashdot as usual on the cutting edge in science news.
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Here's some great discussion going on about this find, including a number of comments by Egyptologists working in the Valley of the Kings: http://www.glyphdoctors.com/mod/forum/discuss.php? d=495&username=guest
I imagine they got pretty blase about tossing mummies into the firebox.:
Aw shucks, this load is mostly skinny servants, we'll be lucky to get one MPM (mile per mummy) from these.
...obligatory YSH reference.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Coptic is the wrong term. The correct term is "Canopic jars".
Intact tombs are indeed rare, and I have posted the other day on why King Tut became famous in the last century despite him being a minor figure in history, and why undisturbed tombs are a rarity. You can read it at this Slashdot comment.
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With this in media, this would be a good time for the Egyptian government to asking the British museum to return the "borrowed" Egyptian relics.
...was definitely impressive for the time. I still wouldn't consider it to have been good, though. Damaging poor King Tut's head, by prizing the death mask off, though... That really wasn't subtle and certainly made it much harder for scientists to interpret the recent MRI scans.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Men Without Hats, Safety Dance... music MP3, music video MPG
Everyone please download those files to 50%, then cancel download, flush download cache, download again, repeat: ie no less than Slashdot.
Anyone that dances with midgets is no friend of meinen.
That, however, is as far as I'm willing to compromise. Archaeology is a field with too many slap-dash methods, sometimes caused by massive underfunding, sometimes caused by horrific time pressures, but usually caused by recklessness. It's often possible to identify which is the case. In the town I grew up in, which is now 12,000 years older than previously thought, the problem is funding. The area of interest is about 9 square miles, but they can't afford to hire more than three archaeologists for more than three months at a time, of which less than 1 month is usable for actual digging. Over the course of 9 years, they've managed to do little more than one person's back yard.
(Hey, the quality of work is amazing. The finds are staggering. But if they plan on doing a full study of the site before another 12,000 years have passed, they're going to need between a hundred to a thousand times the manpower, vastly superior surveying techniques, and a small army of researchers to cross-reference finds with information from other sites in the UK.)
Sea-Henge was an example of a disaster caused by time pressure. The site was in extreme danger, because the wooden remains had risen above ground level and because it was attracting too many visitors. The archaeologists cut corners in their excavations, causing an uncertain amount of damage. They cut corners on the legal and local issues, causing considerable and unnecessary problems. They made no backups of field notes, so when their warehouse (which was poorly maintained) burned to the ground after an electrical fire, they lost virtually everything. All they had left were some 3,000 year old lumps of wood.
The Rose Theatre is another example of time pressure. Damage there is unclear, but when you have to excavate a huge Elizabethan site (it was a playhouse very closely linked to Shakespere personally) because a hotel wants to build over it... Gnnnn! The hotel, as I recall, opted to build "around" the archaeological site - preserving it to some degree - which was better than many had feared. Even so, the sheer rush will undoubtably have resulted in the loss of much that could have been learned.
A third example of time-pressure has to have been a magnificent valley of cave paintings - I believe in Portugal, ranging in date from some of the earliest ever recorded, through to very late on in Stone Age times. Many miles of them were found. Shortly before the valley was dammed up to be turned into a reservoir. There is absolutely no way that all of the paintings could have been recorded, and there was certainly neither time nor money nor resources for any kind of excavation in the area to learn more of the painters. The site is now totally destroyed for all time, the paintings will almost certainly have perished within moments of the valley being flooded, and perhaps the most important ancient site in Europe was obliterated. All for the sake of local politics.
So it is by no means entirely the fault of archaeologists. Nonetheless, those cases they are at fault on, they should say so and admit fault. They will never improve if they never admit a need to do so. They should also work considerably harder than they are on raising awareness of what has been knowingly lost forever - as much in recent times as any other - and what that really means for our understanding. What DOES it really mean, for society to lose a few hundred thousand cave paintings? What IS the best way of preserving our awareness of the past, without interfering overmuch with the present or future?
I don't know all the answers. So what? Nobody can even begin to work on answers until we know what the questions are, and I do feel that I've made progress understanding those.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Let's say you find a tomb with artifacts and a body, from a few thousand years ago. Ok, you photograph and blueprint the artifacts, you do all kinds of material science analysis and ultrasonic tests for detecting imperfections, you run elaborate tests on the body (X-Ray, MRI, DNA analysis, dental studies, forensic analysis, blood typing, anything you care to think of). You're now in a position to produce museum-quality replicas (which should be used anyway, to deter theft and prevent vandalism or accidental damage), you've all that really matters when it comes to understanding the history, and if there's anything you've missed out, you've been non-destructive enough that there's an excellent chance future generations will be able to fill in the pieces.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that many sites are in extreme danger of vandalism, despoiling, etc, and that it is essential to protect what you can. In cases where protection is best done by removal, hey, that's fair, but even in those cases it helps nobody to have the originals on display (and therefore exposed to risk of damage and risk of theft, whilst also being unavailable for any kind of actual study).
The Paul Getty museum is believed to have more than a few stolen artifacts (probably innocently on their part, though one can never be certain of that) and that's just one part of a massive, roaring trade in such stuff. That's another reason to produce replicas, though - produce enough and make it the norm for display purposes (where Joe Q Public doesn't care if they're seeing a 2000 BC original or a 2000 AD copy, so long as it looks identical) it could cripple the prices and therefore potentially cripple the thefts.
History is so important that turning it into a commodity is a perilous thing. How do you market something that exists only once and will never happen again?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
OH,Those Tombs....ha,ha.Anyway, If you look closely at reported "ALABASTER" pots, filled with Meat, gift to take ith ones souls journey OR PERHAPS ORGANS FROM DEAD, you will notice that they are not marble at all, just simple red clay fired with white GLAZE. Also I read that this, like Churhes of today, Was storage area where prestadigitations could be effected,in this case. so living would not be "truly" buried with dead, only these prepared "volunteers", ready to go.Storehouse of BEARERS for King.http://www.geocities.com/tsvondrashekmd/tut_g allery4_thumb.jpgSigned:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRSHEK M.D.
WINDOWS XP Service Pack -X- 396 mb. http://www.geocities.com/tsvondrashekmd/WASHINGTO
... there are likely more. This is a revolutionary discovery. Most have been searching with hope against hope for more information, and here it is.
It all balances out.
I sometimes wonder how well it really does work out. I mean, outside of those who always metamoderate down redundants, how often do people really give dissenting opinions? I wouldn't be surprised if most of the data comes from people who just go down the list clicking agreeals (I suspect just leaving everything in the middle tells the system not to count your votes) to gain the increased moderation capacity without actually reading the comments they're metamoderating.
Personally, I metamoderate partly because I feel it adds some new feedback and partly because I get turned on to comments and discussions I hadn't noticed when they came in the first time.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.