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Thieves Find Cemetery of Pharaoh's Dentists
junglee_iitk writes with news of an important archaeological find from Egypt. Grave robbers located a tomb and were arrested while digging; what they found turns out to be the graves of three dentists who took care of a Pharaoh's teeth. The graves are located in the shadow of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, said to be Egypt's oldest, and are around 4,000 years old. From the article: "Although archaeologists have been exploring Egypt's ruins intensively for more than 150 years, [a senior archaeologist] believes only 30 percent of what lies hidden beneath the sands has been uncovered." Yahoo has a few pictures of the dig.
Its also amazing how grave robbers seem to find all the good stuff before the archeologists.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Did they find her?
If you do not support saving these remains, you must be some sort of anti-dentite.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Dr. Zahi Hawass is just so damn cool. And he has the coolest title too (Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities). I strongly recommend checking out his website (broken English warning here).
"It's easier to go through a lot of sites if you can use a bulldozer instead of a toothbrush (figuratively)"
If I hear someone saying that through the office door in the waiting room at the dentist's, I'm out of there.
Where were you when the voynix came?
The graves of George Washington's crack dental team are probably safe.
Except that the egg came from a modern woman, so I doubt we'd be able to learn a lot.
It's not stealing, it's lost property - The original claimants are dead and no records of heredity exist to tie modern individuals to them. While the country claims that these are artifacts that belong to the people, ordinary things that are buried by people who later die are fair game.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That led archaeologists to the three tombs, one of which included an inscription warning that anyone who violated the sanctity of the grave would be eaten by a crocodile and a snake...
So let me get this straight... First the crocodile eats you and then is the crocodile eaten by the snake? Or does the crocodile spit you out first?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
So let me get this straight... First the crocodile eats you and then is the crocodile eaten by the snake? Or does the crocodile spit you out first?
Close...replace "spit" with a very similar word...
Reduce, reuse, cycle
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Still hasn't paid.
Yet Native American remnants - while not specifically tied to any particular individual - are accepted as cultural heritage and thus belong to the respective tribes. Why is this any different? Just because they are older remains does not mean that they don't belong to Egypt as a nation. I'm not trying to be difficult, just to raise a contextualizing situation.
"Tu fui, ego eris" - Virgil
The croc bites you up and takes all the big parts and the snake gets to finish up all your juicy bite-sized nuggets.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
Probably just the sheer number of (semi) important people who would have died over the time period of the pyramids and merited a fancy burial.
Back in February they found a new tomb which is literally something like 45 feet from the tomb of Tut -- the first undisturbed find since Tut's tomb. I was watching a show last night on Discovery about the recovery/perservation efforts. They seem to think it was either his mother or his wife based on the evidence.
I don't know how they arrive at 30%, but it's probably based on the number of tombs they would expect vs the number that have been documented as having been found.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"Yet Native American remnants - while not specifically tied to any particular individual - are accepted as cultural heritage and thus belong to the respective tribes. Why is this any different?"
In the US if you own the land, you own the sub-terranean rights (within limits). e.g. If you find a gold mine under your home, the gold is yours. As for the Native American artifacs - that's a special provision like gambling on their reserves. So as not to add insult to injury, there have been attempts made to "do the right thing" now that we've already chased them off land that was once theirs. Many Native American can trace their ancestery back to a particular tribe and it's a much more clear picture that they, as a group, should inherit tribal property.
As for Ancient Egypt - Even their enemies are long gone... The thousands of years in between do make a difference. The citizens of modern day Egypt are neither cultural hiers nor literal hiers ancient Egypt more so than any other people in the region.
While Egypt, as a sovereign nation, is certainly free to make reasonable propery laws and enforce them, and they should be followed by their citizens and guests in their country... I can see why others would consider it finders-keepers.
--Aaron Greenberg
Why would a jar with some semen in it be any more likely to contain DNA than all the other remains? In fact, if sperm were somehow miraculously well preserved in and of itself, you could probably recover some from the appropriate organs in the mummified remains (unless they had the testicle jar, but I never heard of that one). Anyway, non-gamete DNA for cloning would hypothetically be more interesting anyway than fertilizing a modern egg with half DNA from 4 millenia go. If you're going to make something like that, why only care about half the old DNA when you could have the whole thing? Even without cloning analysis can be done on the DNA versus today for a bulk of the scientific interest anyway, well, comparison for some of what we know today, archival for studies later when more is understood.
DNA may very well already have been extracted and studied, I have no idea, but sperm/semen is much more boring than a full set of chromosomes in a single package.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
As if the stack of old Highlights magazines in the entryway were not clue enough...
Zahi Hawass; either he's omnipresent, or is a media hound, because it seems any documentary or photo shoot about Egyptian archeology has him in it. Maybe he just likes fame as much as archeology.
g ypttombs//im:/061022/481/d9433cbb7dc24106bdf87f124 dd60323
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/sc/102206e
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
So, I have a question. Not an archaeologist, nor a seismologist, nor anything else. Layman here.
But don't they have the means now to map things which lie below the surface? I believe I've heard or read that they have satellites that can do that to some extent now. Also, I saw a show on the Discovery Channel where they planted small charges in a grid pattern in some Greek island while looking for the origin of the Atlantis myth, detonated them, and then created an image based on how well sound propagated through subsoil strata.
If that's so, then why can't they do something like that in the Nile river valley? Surely it's gotta be cheaper and faster and safer to uncover the past that way than to dig randomly or wait for a bunch of grave-robbing turkeys to make finds first.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Pharohs' Dentists Found in Egyptian Cavity :)
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
If you take something out of a tomb, whether to
sell it, or display it in a museum, it's still
grave robbery.
My Heart Is A Flower
"But it belongs to (country)! Why should (some other country) keep it?" In the end, none of this "belongs" to a country. History cuurered everywhere at the same time. (Duh!) For the most part, the political boundaries that marked these countries no longer exist, the political entities have vanished into oblivion, no living direct descendents who could claim even a moral ownership are known to survive, so for the most part the only meaningful designation is "world heritage" (which I believe to not be used nearly enough and most definitely not recognized nearly enough).
So, if object X is being, or would very likely be, damaged by being in country Y, I believe country Y has lost all right to the ownership of object X. I don't like the fact that Britain has the Elgin Marbles, but I like even less the fact that they'd be destroyed by pollution if they were ever returned. The Greece of back then no longer exists, any more than the Egypt of the Pharaohes exists today. In some cases, there simply isn't a country in which an object is truly safe. In that case, you document every last facet like crazy and hope. (You can't move the Great Pyramid and you certainly can't hide it, though reducing pollution might cut down on the deterioration.)
But what makes something "world heritage"? The object itself? Usually no. Except in some rare cases, the object has no value in and of itself. For inorganic objects, it is the information the object posesses - from the chemical structure through to any symbols or writings on it, and the information associated with it - where it was made, when, how and why, where it was found, the nature of the site, other items found there and their respective characteristics and associations, and so on. These are the things that have any lasting meaning. Once you know the object - totally - you can always make another using exactly the same materials, tools and methods.
For organic objects, it's tougher. If a bone is damaged or destroyed, there is next to nothing you can do. And time is rarely kind to anything of organic nature. Tutankamun is in very bad shape now and the remains will probably not survive a whole lot longer. Part of that is due to Carter's team, but part is due to Egypt having very high levels of acidic pollution and acid rain. You can't expect much to survive under such brutal conditions.
The other problem with organics is that there's much less information you can obtain. With luck, you can extract mtDNA, maybe even use modelling to produce an impression of what the person looked like. Bodies found in peat bogs and ice fields give slightly more information, perhaps yielding clues of fashion, food and culture that artifacts alone can't. We learned a lot from "Pete Marsh" and the iron-age traveller murdered in the alps, but such finds are almost never in any kind of context, so there is very little you can do to connect them with what was happening at that time. "Pete Marsh" - Lindow Man - might date anywhere from prior to the Roman invasion to a hundred years after the Boudicca Rebellion, making it very hard to know what sort of context is involved.
Getting back to thieves vs. archaeologists - IMHO, it's not a binary thing. I would argue that the "absolute" thief is one who destroys information in search of money, even if that involves destroying the thing they're trying to find. (When archaeologists started paying money per fragment of Dead Sea Scroll recovered, some of the locals cut fragments up so that they could get more money.) I would argue that the "absolute" archaeologist obtains all information, even if that means never reaching the object. (We now have GPR scans of Edward the Confessor's tomb, but reaching it would destroy countless artifacts and could potentia
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)