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In a secluded stretch of desert about 300 kilometres south of Cairo, hundreds of bodies lie buried in the sand. Wrapped in linen and rolled up in stiff mats made of sticks... their ornate plaited hair styles and simple personal possessions help to reveal details about the individuals in each grave. The bodies date from... when the Pharaoh Akhenaten... moved his capital to remote Amarna, to worship... the Sun disc Aten... Barry Kemp, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and director of the Amarna Project, has been working with his colleagues to excavate the skeletons, and says that...

The British Egyptologist Howard Carter (employed by Lord Carnarvon) discovered Tutankhamun's tomb (since designated KV62) in The Valley of The Kings on November 4, 1922 near the entrance to the tomb of Ramses VI, thereby setting off a renewed interest in all things Egyptian in the modern world. Carter contacted his patron, and on November 26 that year both men became the first people to enter Tutankhamun's tomb in over 3000 years. After many weeks of careful excavation, on February 16, 1923 Carter opened the inner chamber and first saw the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun. Lord Carnarvon financed Carter's search...

The layout of Tell el-Amarna, ancient Egypt's capital during the reign of pharaoh Akhenaten (1353B.C-1336B.C), has been reveled through remote sensing techniques, the Antiquities Ministry stated Wednesday. The discovery is attributed to a spatial high resolution satellite imagery system that was carried out by the archaeology mission of Belgian University of Leuven, currently excavating at Amarna on the east bank of Upper Egypt's governorate of Minya, said Antiquities Minister Mamdouh al-Damaty. "The team captured and analyzed images from satellites orbiting 450 kilometers above the earth, equipped with advanced cameras," Damaty said in the statement, adding that the images showed "the...

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Weeks relates that in 1902 Howard Carter found an ostracon in debris somewhere near the entrance to KV5 which mentions several tombs:From tr(t)yt [Kate: willow tree] to the general in chief 30 cubits; (and to) the tomb of the Greatest of Seers, Meryatum, 25 cubits. From Tr(t)yt (and? to?) tomb of the oils to my Greatest of Seers, 40 cubits. Downstream on the northern path where the old tomb is, 30 cubits to the general-in-chief.And on the other side:(From?) tomb of Isisnofret to the tomb of my Greatest of Seers, Meryatum, 200 cubits. From the end of the Water of...

Tutankhamen was the most famous of all the Egyptian Pharaohs, but it's always been a bit of a mystery how he died. He passed at only 19, and he seemed to have pretty bad injuries at his death, but there was no record of an assassination. Thanks to Science, we now know it was probably due to a chariot accident. King Tut is best known because when his tomb was found in 1922, it was in relatively good condition compared to other, more ransacked pharaonic resting places. The sarcophagus and mummy were still there, which is always a good sign,...

The mummified body of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun burst into flames inside his sarcophagus after a botched attempt to embalm him, according to scientists in a new documentary. After his death in 1323 BC, Tutankhamun was rapidly embalmed and buried, but fire investigators believe a chemical reaction caused by embalming oils used on his mummy sparked the blaze. A fragment of flesh from the boy pharaoh, whose tomb was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon, was tested by researchers who confirmed his body was burnt while sealed in his coffin. Tut has long fired the public imagination....

Up to 70 percent of British men and half of all Western European men are related to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, geneticists in Switzerland said. Scientists at Zurich-based DNA genealogy centre, iGENEA, reconstructed the DNA profile of the boy Pharaoh, who ascended the throne at the age of nine, his father Akhenaten and grandfather Amenhotep III, based on a film that was made for the Discovery Channel. The results showed that King Tut belonged to a genetic profile group, known as haplogroup R1b1a2, to which more than 50 percent of all men in Western Europe belong, indicating that they share...

BREAKING - Looters who raided Egypt's famed museum during the unrest that toppled Hosni Mubarak have hauled off a trove of ancient treasures, including a statue of King Tutankhamun, officials said. The plundered artefacts include a gilded wooden statue showing the boy pharaoh being carried by a goddess, and parts of another statue of him harpooning fish, the minister of state for antiquities, Zahi Hawass, said. Looters broke into the museum in Cairo's Tahrir Square on January 28 when anti-Mubarak protesters drove his despised police from the streets in a series of clashes and torched the adjacent ruling party headquarters....

One possibility that Dr. Harer ruled out is that of a chariot accident. "If he fell from a speeding chariot going at top speed you would have what we call a tumbling injury -- he'd go head over heels. He would break his neck. His back. His arms, legs. It wouldn't gouge a chunk out of his chest." Instead, at his Toronto lecture, Harer brought up another, more exotic possibility -- that Tut was killed by a hippo. It's not as far out an idea as it sounds, hippos are aggressive, quick and territorial animals, and there is an artefact...

King Tutankhamun, the pharaoh who ruled Egypt more than 3,300 years ago, rode full speed over the desert dunes on a Formula One-like chariot, according to new investigations into the technical features of the boy king's vehicle collection. Discovered in pieces by British archaeologist Howard Carter when he entered King Tut's treasure-packed tomb in 1922, the collection consisted of two large ceremonial chariots, a smaller highly decorated one, and three others that were lighter and made for daily use. "They were the Ferrari of antiquity. They boasted an elegant design and an extremely sophisticated and astonishingly modern technology," Alberto Rovetta,...

King Tutankhamun's mummy was wrapped in custom-made bandages similar to modern first aid gauzes, an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals. Running in length from 4.70 meters to 39 cm (15.4 feet to 15.3 inches), the narrow bandages consist of 50 linen pieces especially woven for the boy king. For a century, the narrow linen bandages were contained in a rather overlooked cache of large ceramic jars at the museum's Department of Egyptian Art. The collection was recovered from the Valley of the Kings between 1907-08, more than a decade before Howard Carter discovered King Tut's treasure-packed...

Dr. Zahi Hawass, the secretary general for Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities told a press conference Wednesday that hosting the Tutankhamun's tomb at the Discover Time Square Exposition cheapened the exhibition. "This priceless artifact should be at the Met, not at this hole," Hawass said. In an embarassing preview for the exhibition, Hawass called Arts and Exhibitions International President John Norman to the stage and demanded he "answer the question. Why is King Tut not at the Met?" Norman responded by saying then when plans to bring Tut back to New York began over five years ago, he met with...

Lord Carnarvon, the man who funded the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun and died five months later in mysterious circumstances before he could actually see the mummy's face, was a superstitious man who wore the same lucky bow tie all his life. > The end of the exhibition also represents the end of the story for Lord Carnarvon: on display the razor which he used in 1923. He cut a mosquito bite while shaving and the wound turned septic. He died of pneumonia brought on by blood poisoning on April 5, 1923, in the "hour of his triumph," as...

Archaeologists have discovered a small ancient statue of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen in Kurdish Northern Iraq. The discovery was made by a team led by noted Iraqi archaeologist Mr Hassan Ahmad in an area known as Dohuq Valley in a place referred to by locals as 'Pharaoh's Palace'. Experts have estimated the age of the statue at around 3500 years old, dating from around 1400 BC. The statue confirms historical data that the ancient Egyptians, during the 'New Kingdom' period, enjoyed warm relations with the Hittite Mitanni Kingdom and often travelled into their territory many hundreds of miles from the...

LUXOR, Egypt - The face of King Tut was unshrouded in public for the first time on Sunday — 85 years after the 3,000-year-old boy pharaoh's golden enshrined tomb and mummy were discovered in Luxor's famed Valley of the Kings. Archeologists removed the mummy from his stone sarcophagus in his underground tomb, momentarily pulling aside a white linen covering to reveal a shriveled leathery black face and body. The mummy of the 19-year-old pharaoh, whose life and death has captivated people for nearly a century, was placed in a climate-controlled glass box in the tomb, with only the face and...

Tutankhamun's true face to be revealed By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent Last Updated: 2:55am BST 22/10/2007 The true face of Tutankhamun, the boy king who ruled Egypt 3,500 years ago, is to be revealed to the public for the first time. Only a handful of experts have ever seen Tutankhamun's true likeness To coincide with the opening of the exhibition of the treasures of Tutankhamun in London next month, Egyptian archaeologists are to put his mummified body on display in Luxor. Only a handful of experts have ever seen the 19-year-old pharaoh's true likeness. Though not the most important of...

Egyptian antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass insisted Tuesday that Tutankhamun was not black despite calls by US black activists to recognise the boy king's dark skin colour. "Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilisation as black has no element of truth to it," Hawass told reporters. "Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt is in Africa," he said, quoted by the official MENA news agency. Hawass said he was responding to several demonstrations in Philadelphia after a lecture he gave there on September 6 where he defended his theory. Protestors also...

Researchers studying Tut hit by huge storm, CT malfunction Scientists who recently conducted a high-tech examination of King Tut's mummy insist they don't believe in the "Curse of the Pharaohs." Still, some awfully strange things happened when the team X-rayed the boy king's body with a medical CT scanning machine. On the way to the Egyptian site, one researcher's vehicle nearly hit a child. Then a huge storm hit. The CT machine, usually reliable, wouldn't work at first. And when researchers finally began the CT scan, one scientist came down with such a violent coughing attack he had to leave....

CHICAGO - You can kick back with a King Tuttini cocktail, learn to decipher hieroglyphs or indulge in an "Egyptian Golden Body Wrap" complete with exfoliating Dead Sea salts and a dusting of golden powder. Yes, King Tut is back, and Chicago is fired up for the pharaoh. The traveling exhibit "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" has opened at The Field Museum, attracting a line of ticket buyers. Organizers believe the show, which opened Friday, could draw 1 million visitors before it closes here on Jan. 1, 2007, and businesses, restaurants and universities are lining up special...