Free Republic

Earlier this month, an ancient Egyptian bracelet was stolen from a restoration lab in Cairo's Egyptian Museum. Dating back 3,000 years, the gold artifact had belonged to Amenemope, a pharaoh who ruled during Egypt's Third Intermediate Period.Now, investigators have discovered the artifact's whereabouts: They say a museum employee stole the bracelet and sold it for less than $4,000. The buyer melted it down...Museum staffers discovered the bracelet was missing when they were itemizing artifacts for shipment abroad last week, reports the London Times' Magdy Samaan... the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities... found that the artifact had passed from a museum...

Montet's discovery on the eve of the Second World War was that of a tomb of a relatively obscure pharaoh of the 21st Dynasty of ancient Egypt by the name of Psusennes I. Psusennes was the third ruler of his dynasty, which ascended to power at the onset of the Third Intermediate Period, a time of political turmoil in Egypt.During this era, the country's kingship was fragmented, and the country was divided between Upper and Lower Egypt. While the pharaohs of the 21st Dynasty governed from Tanis, their influence was primarily confined to the Lower Egypt delta region. Meanwhile, Thebes...

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, an entire complex of royal tombs was found intact at Tanis, yielding four gold masks, solid silver coffins, and spectacular jewelry... The treasures are one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time... And while everyone knows Howard Carter's name, that of the excavator of Tanis is Egyptological trivia. It's Pierre Montet... Today, as Tutankhamun once again begins a royal procession through the United States, it is good to remember Tanis and its discoverer, Pierre Montet. The treasure of Tutankhamun may be more extensive, but Montet found three intact royal burials, an achievement...

On exami[ni]ng hair samples of mummies in the scanning electron microscope we found a piece of tissue between the curls which had the characteristic appearance of silk. To show that the specimen was silk, we performed infrared studies using multiple internal reflection, allowing nondestructive identification of the material. The spectra clearly identified silk.We performed amino-acid anaylsis of the sample according to the method in ref. 2 and obtained the typical spectrum of hydrolysed silk, with high glycine, serine and alanine peaks as originally described by Shimura. To exclude the possibility that the silk specimen could have been added later to...