Free Republic

During the 19th Dynasty (ca. 1295–1186 b.c.), the village of Deir el-Medina, on the Nile's west bank in Upper, or southern, Egypt, was home to a community of civil servants and artisans who built and decorated the royal tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. Scholars are on unusually familiar terms with these people. "As expert scribes and draftsmen, they left quite a lot of writing," says Egyptologist Rob Demarée of Leiden University. At the site, archaeologists have excavated tens of thousands of texts written on papyrus and ostracons -- discarded pieces of pottery or stone used like scrap...

La Brújula Verde reports that the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities completed a two-year excavation and preservation project of an ancient mining camp at Jabal Sukari near the Red Sea. Archaeologists were under pressure to complete the project as the site is currently endangered by modern mining activities. The Egyptian team uncovered a vast gold processing complex that dates back 3,000 years, as well as a settlement inhabited by those who worked at the mine. The mining facility included specialized factories for extracting the gold from quartz veins, which has provided new information about ancient methods of obtaining and...

Scientists found evidence of tattoos while studying female mummies from the Egyptian town of Deir el-Medina...One of the mummies came from a looted tomb and had already been unwrapped. Examining the mummified skin, the researchers came across the first tattoo on the lower back, which appeared to show a bowl, a purification ritual, and the Egyptian god Bes. This god was known for protecting women and children, with a particular focus on childbirth.Because the second mummy was still wrapped, researchers analyzed it via infrared photography... The mummy turned out to be of a middle-aged woman and featured a different tattoo...

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...

We might think of state supported health care as an innovation of the 20th century, but it's a much older tradition than that. In fact, texts from a village dating back to Egypt's New Kingdom period, about 3,100-3,600 years ago, suggest that in ancient Egypt there was a state-supported health care network designed to ensure that workers making the king's tomb were productive. Paintings on the walls of King Merneptah’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Workers living in Deir el-Medina would have worked on tombs like this. Credit: Asmaa Waguih/Reuters Health care boosted productivity on the royal tombs...

In many bodies Austin saw evidence of stress from the hard climb – today it's a thousand stone steps – from Deir el-Medina to the Valley of the Kings and back again. As Austin found, incidence of arthritis in the knees and ankles of the men at Deir el-Medina was significantly higher than for working populations from other Egyptian cemeteries. The bones also revealed clues that corroborate other scholars' findings that severely disabled Egyptians were well cared for. "I found the remains of a man who died at the age of 19 or 20 and was born without a useful...