Free Republic

CAIRO, Egypt - An American-Italian team of archaeologists has found the remains of 4,000-year-old ships that used to carry cargo between Pharaonic Egypt and the mysterious, exotic land of Punt, the Supreme Council of Antiquities has announced. The ships' remains were found during a five-year excavation of five caves south of the Red Sea port of Safaga, about 300 miles southeast of Cairo, the chairman of the supreme council, Zahi Hawass, said in a statement late Thursday. The archaeologists, who came from Boston and East Naples universities, found Pharaonic seals from the era of Sankhkare Mentuhotep III, one of seven...

Ancient furnace sparks archaeological interest A UNIQUE site in the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean and expected to shed more light on ancient copper mining has been uncovered in the Mathiatis area, about 20km south of Nicosia. It consists of the base of a copper smelting furnace with its last charge of slag still in place. The discovery was made by students participating in an educational research programme in cooperation with Inter Community School Cyprus Project 2005, under the direction of Dr Walter Fasnacht. The participants from the staff of the Department of Antiquities were G. Georgiou, archaeologist, and E...

Yet for years Hollywood and pop culture too often reduced one of the world's great civilizations to stereotypes of Boris Karloff's mummy, King Tut's curse and The Rock's "Scorpion King." ...Like the earliest travelers to the kingdom on the Nile, visitors will see the Great Sphinx sprawling across the sands, Queen Nefertiti in her palace and Bedouin crossing the desert.

When a woman in Canada refused to return a valuable statue to the Cairo Museum, Dr Zahi Hawass, who was handling the negotiation, casually mentioned a curse said to be associated with the artifact. The next day the statue duly arrived at the Egyptian embassy in Canada. The fear of the Pharaohs’ curse has long been the stuff of fiction and films. It is a subject that has stirred public imagination. There are those who believe that the pharaohs placed a curse on whoever disturbed their place of eternal rest. When Lord Carnavon died on 5 April 1923, barely six...

Beyond Egypt’s political demonstrations and suicide bombings lies a country where history lives outside classrooms. A country that draws inspiration — and money — from its past to fuel its present.And while tourism is good for the economy, too many tourists can destroy the very monuments they flock to see, warns Dr Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s top archaeologist and the person who led the CT scan on King Tutankhamun’s mummy. “Egypt’s monuments can finish in a 100 years if we don’t control the tourists now, and I mean NOW. Think, no more pyramids, no more sphinx, no more temples. All our...

CAIRO, Egypt - Egypt's antiquities chief on Thursday revealed a 2,500-year-old hidden tomb under the shadow of one of Giza's three giant pyramids, containing 400 pinkie-finger-sized statues and six coffin-sized niches carved into granite rock. Zahi Hawass, the director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said archaeologists had been working for three months to clear sand from a granite shaft found between the pyramid of Khafre — also known by its Greek name of Chephren — Giza's second-largest tomb of a pharaoh, and the Sphinx. Under blaring sun Thursday, Hawass said Giza's latest ancient discovery came to light after archaeologists...

<p>BROOKVILLE, New York (AP) -- When a severed human hand arrived in his mailbox, Bob Brier wasn't horrified or shocked. He thought it might be something cool to bring to work.</p> <p>Brier is a professor of Egyptology and a renowned mummy expert, and the hand was a gift from a woman whose father had purchased it in 1926 in Egypt from locals touting it as an ancient mummified hand.</p>

The boy King died young and was buried in haste. Now a pair of U.S. gumshoes, armed with modern forensics, is trying to crack an ancient case The tomb of the boy King Tutankhamen created a sensation from the moment it was uncovered in 1922. One of the few royal burial chambers that survived the centuries relatively intact, it was by far the richest — filled with gold, ivory and carved wooden treasures, including what may be the world's most famous funerary mask. But there was also something troubling about the way King Tut was buried — hints and omissions...

A New Chronology Synopsis of David Rohl's book "A Test of Time" by John Fulton The concept of time for us today is taken to be an absolute unchangeable system. We measure time from the fixed point of Christ's birth so that this is the one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seventh year since he was born. The ancients, however, could not look forward to Christ's birth; instead, they worked on a regnal dating system where events happened in the Nth year of the reign of a particular king. For most of the Old Testament, we can find a good...

Ancient history as taught today is a disaster area. The chronology of the first and second millennium BCE is badly wrong. The history of ancient history revisionism offered here is drawn largely from the pages of SIS publications over the last 25 years. The Revision of Ancient History - A Perspective By P John Crowe. An edited and extended version of a paper presented to the SIS Jubilee Conference, Easthampstead Park, Sept. 17-19th 1999 [1] Internet Paper Revision no.1 March 2001 Contents Introduction An Outline History of Revising Ancient History - Up to 1952. 2.1 Exaggerating Antiquity. 2.2 The Early...