Free Republic

Archaeologists unearth 3,300-year-old coffin at Tel Shadud thought to hold Canaanite official in service of Egyptian pharaoh :snip: Found alongside the new sarcophagus was a scarab seal ring encased in gold, carved with the name of Pharaoh Seti I, who ruled ancient Egypt in the 13th century BC. Seti I conquered the region of today's Israel in the first year of his reign in order to secure Egyptian trade routes and collect taxes for Egypt, said Ron Beeri, an archaeologist who participated in the dig. The man buried in the sarcophagus might have been a tax collector for the pharaoh,...

Part of one of the inscriptions found at Kom Ombo, a temple in southern Egypt. The image at the top of the inscription appears to show the king Seti I with the gods Horus and Sobek.A giant stone engraving that fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, found in a temple in southern Egypt, may reveal new information about a pharaoh named Seti I, who launched a series of military campaigns in North Africa and the Middle East after he became pharaoh in about 1289 or 1288 B.C., several Egyptologists told Live Science. The engraving has both drawings and hieroglyphs...

Tutankhamun died at a young age with a feminine physique. His closest relatives, including his father Akhenaten, his uncle or brother Smenkhkare and preceding 18th dynasty pharaohs Amenhotep III and Tuthmosis IV, all shared similar features and fates. While scholars tend to relate the deaths of these pharaohs to separate circumstances, Hutan Ashrafian suggests that the royal family may have had an inherited disorder: temporal lobe epilepsy. Temporal lobe epilepsy is known to affect the release of hormones and sexual development. Tutankhamun was depicted with a feminine physique. Due to his short life, his representations are far less common than...

Mysterious Collapse of a Great Ancient Empire. From his capital, Hattusa, in central Anatolia, the last-known Hittite king, Suppiluliuma II (1207 B.C.-?), ruled over a people who had once built a great empire—one of the superpowers (along with Egypt, Mittani, Babylon and Assyria) of the Late Bronze Age. The Kingdom of the Hittites, called Hatti, had stretched across the face of Anatolia and northern Syria, from the Aegean in the west to the Euphrates in the east. But now those days were gone, and the royal capital was about to be destroyed forever by invasion and fire.

It has been said that the period between 760 BCE to 656 BCE in Egypt was the 'age of the black pharaohs'. It was during this time that ancient Egypt was ruled by a dynasty or succession of kings from Nubia, the Kingdom of Kush, a rival African kingdom just to its south in what is today northern Sudan. Beginning with king Kashta's successful invasion of Upper Egypt, what became known as the 25th Dynasty achieved the reunification of Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt, and also Kush (Nubia), the largest Egyptian empire since the New Kingdom. They introduced new Kushite cultural...

Israeli archaeologists have unearthed a rare sarcophagus featuring a slender face and a scarab ring inscribed with the name of an Egyptian pharaoh, Israel's Antiquities Authority said Wednesday. The mystery man whose skeleton was found inside the sarcophagus was most likely a local Canaanite official in the service of ancient Egypt, Israeli archaeologists believe, shining a light on a period when pharaohs governed the region. "This is a really beautiful face, very serene," said Edwin van den Brink, an Egyptologist and archaeologist with Israel's government antiquities authority. "It's very appealing." Van den Brink said archaeologists dug at Tel Shadud, an...

[T]he exclusively masculine epithets referring to this individual in the same tomb and on a now-vanished block at Memphis, confirm that we are dealing with a man - as distinct from the pharaoh-queen Ankh(et)kheperure Neferneferuaten... Contrary to Ancient Egyptian custom, Smenkhkare is not presented under a coronation name and a birth name in his two cartouches, but under two coronation names. The explanation for this curious fact seems to me clear: both his royal names were composed on the occasion of his coronation. He therefore must have had another name beforehand... The absence of a birth name, the lack of...