Month: December 2015

Tomb of Tutankhamun’s wet nurse, maybe sister, opens

Ancient

The tomb of Pharoah Tutankhamun’s wet nurse Maia was opened to journalists Sunday for the first time since it was discovered in 1996. It will be opened to the public next month. The rock-cut tomb is in the necropolis of Saqqara, about 13 miles south of Cairo, and was discovered by French archaeologist Alain Zivie in 1996.

The tomb consists of the cult chambers with three decorated rooms and the underground, mostly undecorated, burial chambers. The first room of the cult chapel of her tomb is dedicated to the life of Maia.

She was the wet nurse of the king, educator of the god’s body and the great one of the hareem. Nothing is known about her parents. Tutankhamun is depicted on one of the tomb’s reliefs featuring the boy king sitting on Maia’s lap and the king is mentioned several times in the tomb’s inscriptions.

There is also a badly damaged scene showing Maia in front of the king. The second room is dedicated to the burial rites associated with Maia. Maia is shown in front of offering bearers. She is depicted as a mummy in relation to the opening of the mouth ritual and she is standing before the underworld god Osiris.

This large and elaborately decorated tomb could be an indication that Maia was not just an important figure because she nourished the young king, but because she herself was a member of the royal family. Recently an ostracon was found in the tomb that titles Maia “Mistress of Women,” a significantly higher title than wet nurse, even when the nursee is a future pharaoh. Zivie believes the depictions of Maia on the reliefs share “the same chin, the eyes, the family traits” of Tutankhamun. The tomb of Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s father, in Tel el-Amarna has a wall carving showing the burial of Maketaten, second daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, which is attended by a woman breast-feeding a baby. She is identified as Meritaten, the eldest daughter of Akhenaten, and the baby’s she’s feeding may be Tutankhamun. If true, that would make Tutankhamun’s wet-nurse his sister or half-sister.

The necropolis was extensively reused starting in the 7th century B.C. as a cemetery for mummified animals. Between the 30th Dynasty (380-343 B.C.) and the Roman period, Saqqara was a major center of animal cult worship and networks of galleries were carved out of the rock of the plateau to house the mummified remains of huge numbers of cats, dogs, bulls, ibises, baboons and more. In 2011, archaeologists discovered an incredible eight million animal mummies, mostly dogs but some cats and mongooses as well, in a catacomb near the temple of Anubis just to the east of the Bubasteion.

The area where Maia’s tomb was found is known as the Bubasteion, identified in Papyrus documents from the Late Period as the sanctuary of the cat goddess Bastet. Unlike the massive dog catacomb which was dug in the Late Period, the Bubasteion recycled the New Kingdom rock-cut tombs. Alain Zivie, then part of the French Archaeological Mission of Saqqara (FAMS), now director and founder of the French Archaeological Mission of the Bubasteion (MAFB) which has been excavating the necropolis since 1986, was the first to recognize in 1976 that the rock-cut tombs were originally created not for animals, but for important courtiers and high-ranking officials of 18th and 19th Dynasty Egypt.

The MAFB team has cleared more than a dozen tombs that were filled with debris and sand and whose original walls were obscured by Ptolemaic-era walls and pillars erected to support the rock ceilings which by then were in danger of imminent collapse. The new walls and pillars added in the conversion of the tombs to cat mummy catacombs helped preserve the original wall decorations — reliefs and paintings — and even hid some of the original burial gifts behind them. Maia’s tomb was full to the ceiling with sand, rubble and Ptolemaic modifications, which is why it has taken close to 20 years to fully excavate, clean and shore up the structure to make it safe for visitors.

A look inside a crocodile mummy

Ancient, Museums

The British Museum has performed a new study of a 2,500-year old crocodile mummy which is now on display for the first time in 75 years. Scanning Sobek: Mummy of the Crocodile God, is one of The Asahi Shimbun Displays, a series of short exhibitions that explore objects in a new light. In this case, visitors will get to see the crocodile itself and the new information about the creature’s life and death revealed in the study.

The mummy is a Nile crocodile that dates from 650 – 550 B.C. and is four meters (13 feet) long. It was mummified after death, dried in natron and then coated in beeswax and pitch before being wrapped in linen bandages. The mummy was a representation of the god Sobek, the crocodile-headed deity which symbolized the power of the pharaoh, fertility, military strength and protection from harm. Crocodiles, which lay as many as 80 eggs in one clutch and which ferociously protect their young, carrying hatchlings on their backs or even in their mouths, were seen as great generators and guardians, powers that took godly form in Sobek and the pharaoh. The British Museum mummy has more than 25 mummified hatchlings on its back, representing that combination of generative and protective power evinced by the Nile crocodile.

It was one of about 300 crocodile mummies discovered in the Per-Sobek temple in Kom Ombo, a site about 30 miles north of Aswan in southern Egypt, and in the neighboring animal necropolis of el-Shatb. The Kom Ombo temple was the largest and most important center of worship of Sobek in Egypt during the Ptolemaic and Roman eras. Built in the 2nd century by Ptolemy VI Philometor on the site of an earlier temple to Sobek by 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Thutmose III (r. 1479–1425 B.C.), the unique symmetrical double temple had two sections, the southern one dedicated to Sobek, the northern to falcon god Horus the Elder. The necropolis, with hundreds of crocodile graves cut into the hard rock, was in continuous use from the Middle Kingdom through the Greco-Roman period.

The temple bred sacred crocodiles, the mummified eggs and juveniles used as votive offerings to the god. Sacred crocodiles bred at the temple were treated with kid gloves, adorned with jewels and hand-fed. Worshipped as the incarnation of the god himself, they lived out their natural lives and were mummified after death. They were probably as tame as fearsome Nile crocodiles could get. In Book XVII of his Geography, Strabo describes priests feeding a sacred crocodile in Crocodilopolis, modern-day Faiyum, the largest center of cult worship for Sobek.

[T]here is a sacred one there which is kept and fed by itself in a lake, and is tame to the priests. It is called Suchus; and it is fed on grain and pieces of meat and on wine, which are always being fed to it by the foreigners who go to see it. At any rate, our host, one of the officials, who was introducing us into the mysteries there, went with us to the lake, carrying from the dinner a kind of cooky and some roasted meat and a pitcher of wine mixed with honey. We found the animal lying on the edge of the lake; and when the priests went up to it, some of them opened its mouth and another put in the cake, and again the meat, and then poured down the honey mixture. The animal then leaped into the lake and rushed across to the far side; but when another foreigner arrived, likewise carrying an offering of first-fruits, the priests took it, went around the lake in a run, took hold of the animal, and in the same manner fed it what had been brought.

The Kom Ombo temple was in ruins from Nile flooding, earthquakes and centuries of stone quarrying for building projects when it was cleaned, restored and rebuilt as much as possible by French engineer and archaeologist Jacques de Morgan in 1893, then acting Director of Egyptian Antiquities. A selection of the surviving crocodile mummies from Kom Ombo are on display in the new Crocodile Museum near the temple that opened in 2012. The British Museum’s crocodile mummy was discovered during Jacques de Morgan’s work on the site and donated to the museum in 1895.

The mummy was scanned at the Royal Veterinary College using high-resolution computer tomography. The scans were used to create a 3D model displaying the details of the crocodile’s insides and the contents of his stomach confirms at least part of Strabo’s account.

Not all organs were removed by the embalmers and the stomach contents – the remains of the crocodile’s last meal – are still present. The crocodile appears to have been fed select cuts of meat prior to death, including a cow’s shoulder bone and parts of a forelimb.

Exact replicas of these bones – 3D printed from the scan data – are displayed next to a four-metre CT scan visualisation of the crocodile. The bones were found inside the stomach along with numerous small irregular-shaped stones, which the crocodile swallowed for ballast and to assist digestion, as well as several unidentified small metal objects.

Hitler really did only have one ball

Modern(ish)

The popular World War II song deriding the testicular constitution of top Nazi officials appears to have hit at least one nail on the head: Hitler really did only have one ball. The song, believed to have been written by a clever propagandist for the British Council in 1939, sung to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March originally put Goering in the first line with the one ball, but soon the two switched places in the verses and the song became a runaway success as a marching song for Allied troops and among school children on bus trips ever since.

The new evidence comes from a recently surfaced medical certificate issued in 1924 by Dr. Josef Brinsteiner, the staff physician of Landsberg Prison in Bavaria where Hitler spent a few happy months after being convicted of treason. On the night of November 8th, 1923, Hitler, his Nazi Party cronies and 600 Sturmabteilung (SA) militia staged an armed takeover of a political rally in a Munich beer hall and attempted to overthrow the government of Bavaria with the overthrow of the Weimar government in Berlin as the ultimate target. Hitler was inspired by Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome which had successfully installed Fascist rule in Italy, but the putsch was disorganized and came to a swift end when the Bavarian police fired on the marchers at the Munich Odeonsplatz on November 9th. Sixteen people, including four policemen, died.

Hitler was arrested on November 11th and tried three months later for high treason. He was convicted by sympathetic judges and sentenced to five years of the mildest type of imprisonment (no hard labour, long visiting hours, comfy cell) in Landsberg Prison, with the possibility of parole after six months. He was busted smuggling uncensored letters out of the prison, so his parole was slightly delayed. Hitler ended up serving 264 days of that sentence, a productive and apparently fun-filled nine months during which he dictated Mein Kampf to his fellow convict and future Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess.

The doctor’s report was part of a bundle of about 500 records from Landsberg Prison that were sold at auction on July 2nd, 2010, in Fürth, Bavaria. The seller’s father had acquired them in the 1970s at a flea market in Nuremberg. It seems they were stolen from Landsberg by the then-head of the prison in the 1960s. After his death, his estate was sold off at the flea market. There are no doubts as to documents’ authenticity.

They describe an imprisonment virtually indistinguishable from a vacation at a nice B&B with bars on the windows. Every time Hitler had a visitor, the prison kept a record of the visit on a card. There are 330 cards, which means Hitler had quite the busy social schedule for the 264 days he spent at Landsberg. His close friend and supporter Ernst Hanfstaengl (who was half American, btw, and eventually turned coat and informed on his former bestie to Roosevelt) described his visits to Hitler in Landsberg as looking like he had “walked into a delicatessen. There was fruit and there were flowers, wine and other alcoholic beverages, ham, sausage, cake, boxes of chocolates and much more.”

The estimate sale price for the Landsberg records was 25,000 euros ($27,000) but sale was blocked and the papers seized by the Bavarian government after they were quickly classified as nationally valuable archives. They’ve been in the State Archives in Munich ever since, and now Peter Fleischmann, the Head of the Nuremberg State Archives, has published an annotated edition of the papers after five years of study.

Dr. Brinsteiner examined prisoner No. 45 (Hitler, Adolf) on November 12th, 1923, the day after his arrest. He noted in the “Record book for protective custody” that Hitler suffered from “right-sided cryptorchidism,” meaning his right testicle had never descended. Other than that, he was “healthy, strong” and weighed 78 kilograms. There’s no reason to think the good doctor was lying as he, like much of the rest of the prison staff, was a nationalist and Nazi sympathizer.

Hitler’s testicles have been the subject of much speculation over the years. As early as 1943 Dr. Eduard Bloch, Hitler’s Jewish childhood physician who fled to America in 1940, was asked by the US military about the Führer nads. He assured them they were “completely normal.” In 1968, a Russian journalist published a book that included the report of an autopsy done on Hitler’s body by Soviet doctors in the bunker after the fall of Berlin. They claimed his left testicle had not only not descended, but was nowhere to be found up in there. That autopsy report had other errors, however, and the Soviets first insisted that Hitler had escaped with his life so the source is less than reliable.

In 2008, Polish priest and amateur historian Franciszek Pawlar claimed that he had heard from a German army medic that Hitler had lost a testicle from a shrapnel wound suffered at the Battle of the Somme. The Somme rumor had been floating around for years by then, one guy’s hearsay confirmation of it wasn’t exactly a slam dunk. The Landberg medical report, on the other hand, isn’t obscured by time, propaganda, mythology or gossip. It makes no comment on any resemblance to Himmler’s, the size of Goering’s and presence or absence of Goebbels’.

Site of first multi-year European settlement in the U.S. found

Modern(ish)

Archaeologists from the University of West Florida have identified the site of the first multi-year settlement in the United States in Pensacola, Florida. The settlement of Santa Maria de Ochuse was established by Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano in August of 1559, six years before Pedro Menéndez founded the St. Augustine colony in and 48 years before the first permanent English colony was founded in Jamestown, Virginia. Luna set sail from Veracruz, Mexico, with 1,500 people — 550 Spanish soldiers, about 200 Aztecs, colonists and African slaves — in 11 ships. The would-be colony was devastated one month after its arrival by a hurricane that sank six ships carrying their much-needed supplies.

Without a significant Native American population in the area able or willing to provide them with food and with the next relief ship coming months later in December, the colonists had to eke out a meager existence as best they could. Documentary research suggests they moved inland to Alabama for six months only to return when what food they were able to accumulate was taken by local Native Americans, but archaeological evidence of the Luna expedition in Alabama has yet to be found. The colony was never able to thrive and only lasted two years. In 1561 the surviving colonists were picked up by Spanish ships and went back to Mexico.

Archaeologists are keeping mum on the exact location of the site to protect it from interference. All they’ll say is that it’s a downtown neighborhood within view of two Pensacola Bay shipwrecks thought to have been part of the Luna expedition. Local historian Tom Garner found the first evidence of the settlement — 16th century Spanish artifacts — on October 2nd of this year. He was driving through the neighborhood in an area that scholars have suspected for decades may have been the site of the Luna settlement when he noticed disturbed ground on a privately owned lot where a house had recently been bulldozed. He stopped to check the spot for any artifacts and immediately noticed a fragment from the rim of a Spanish colonial olive jar and several other pottery fragments. The style of the olive jar, known as middle style, was produced for a range of time including the mid-16th century. Garner alerted University of West Florida Archaeology Institute to his find and they contacted the property owners to arrange further exploration.

On October 23rd, Garner returned to the site and saw the jar rim was still there. He decided to collect all the artifacts he could find on the surface before they were damaged or removed. During this collection he found a fragment of Columbia Plain majolica pottery which cleanly dates to the mid-16th century. Again he alerted the UWF Archaeology Institute to the find and then returned to the site three times over the course of the next week. Garner’s surface collection returned dozens of artifacts, mostly pottery sherds, which he brought to the University of West Florida archaeology lab on October 30th.

The artifacts so impressed UWF archaeology professor Dr. John Worth that he and his team quickly arranged a formal excavation with the permission of property owners. They were given five days, November 6th through 10th, to excavate the half-acre plot before construction of a new house began. The team did 69 shovel tests of the site.

UWF archaeologists recovered numerous sherds of broken 16th century Spanish ceramics found undisturbed beneath the ground surface. They are believed to be pieces of assorted cookware and tableware, including liquid storage containers called olive jars. Small personal and household items were also among the findings – a lead fishing line weight, a copper lacing aglet and wrought iron nail and spike fragments. Additionally, the team recovered beads known to have been traded with Native Americans. These items are consistent with materials previously identified in the shipwrecks offshore in Pensacola Bay.

The discovery of the artifacts is additional evidence that the two Emanuel Point shipwrecks were in fact from Luna’s expedition, anchored offshore and destroyed in that devastating hurricane. The second shipwreck, discovered in 2006, is currently being excavated by UWF archaeologists.

“The shipwrecks have provided a tremendous insight into the nature of the machinery that brought Spain to the New World and how they operated this entire vast empire,” explained Worth. “In terms of understanding who they were after coming to the New World, this kind of archaeology at the terrestrial site will provide us that window.”

Archaeologists hope to continue to explore the neighborhood in the hopes of determining the full extent of the settlement. Its exact size is unknown. Worth believes it will cover multiple city blocks and since it’s in a residential neighborhood, further exploration relies on the permission and goodwill of the residents. UWF archaeologists had a meeting Wednesday with about 100 homeowners to explain the find and its historical significance. They were enthusiastically received and multiple residents have agreed to allow archaeologists access to their property.

If sufficient numbers grant the UWF team access, Worth plans to do a few small-scale investigations in the spring before settling in for a more extensive excavation during the university’s 10-week archaeological field school this summer. If all goes well, he hopes to return every summer for the forseeable future.

Tutankhamun’s restored gold mask back on display

Ancient, Museums

The gold funerary mask of Tutankhamun has gone back on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo after two months of restoration to repair a botched reattachment of its false beard. The beard fell off last summer when the mask was returned to the display case after workers replaced a burned out light bulb. Anxious to get the mask back on display as quickly as possible, museum staff hastily reattached the beard with a sloppy thick application of epoxy that hardened into an unsightly layer.

When the news got out a few months later, at first museum officials denied any damage had happened before admitting that someone had blundered. They brought in a team of German and Egyptian restorers led by Christian Eckmann and secured a donation of 50,000 euros from the German Foreign Ministry to fund the restoration. After months of analysis and preparation, work began on the mask this October.

Researchers took the opportunity to study the mask thoroughly. It was 3D scanned and examined inside and out with a microscope in the hope that it might answer some questions about its composition, like what materials and techniques were used to put it together, and whether there is any evidence supporting the theory most recently proposed by British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves that the mask was first made for Queen Nefertiti and then hastily modified for Tutankhamun after his unexpected death at age 19.

The biggest challenge was determining how best to remove the epoxy layer to liberate the false beard from its clumpy prison. Restorers wound up sticking with simple tools that would have been available to the original makers in 1,324 B.C.: wooden tools and heat. The adhesive was slightly warmed to soften it and then removed by careful scraping with the wooden sticks, spatulas and other tools which are soft enough they won’t scratch the gold. It took two weeks to remove the beard and another six to figure out how best to reattach it in a responsible, reversible way.

Egypt’s Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty said the reattachment came after studies explored the best materials to use for the work.

“We indeed found them to be the natural materials which the ancient Egyptian used; they are still the best tools: beeswax,” el-Damaty told reporters in Cairo on Wednesday. “It was prepared well and the beard was attached very successfully.”

The false beard wasn’t really attached when Howard Carter discovered the tomb in 1922. It looked like it was in place, but the support had broken in antiquity so when Carter moved the mask it was in two pieces. The mask and beard were displayed separately until 1946 when for the first time he beard was glued in place. That wasn’t the only time glue was used. Restorers found multiple thin layers underneath the epoxy one. The restoration team will publish a full report of the analysis, study and restoration of the mask and beard.