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In 1983 a sponge diver found funny metal biscuits with ears at the ocean floor. That is how the excavation got started, Hirschfeld said. The ship carried ten tons of copper ingots, which after being analyzed, were determined to be from Cyprus. Each ingot weighs approximately 60 pounds, she said. She and her team also excavated glass ingots, tons of tin, and three Italian swords that were not part of the cargo of the ship. Among the 130 Canaanite jars they found, there were traces of wine in the jars and one was full of glass beads. The team also...

BALTIMORE - Akhenaten wasn't the most manly pharaoh, even though he fathered at least a half-dozen children. In fact, his form was quite feminine. And he was a bit of an egghead. So concludes a Yale University physician who analyzed images of Akhenaten for an annual conference Friday at the University of Maryland School of Medicine on the deaths of historic figures. The female form was due to a genetic mutation that caused the pharaoh's body to convert more male hormones to female hormones than needed, Dr. Irwin Braverman believes. And Akhenaten's head was misshapen because of a condition in...

Grim secrets of Pharaoh's city By John Hayes-Fisher BBC Timewatch Bones reveal the darker side to building Ancient Egypt Evidence of the brutal lives endured by some ancient Egyptians to build the monuments of the Pharaohs has been uncovered by archaeologists. Skeletal remains from a lost city in the middle of Egypt suggest many ordinary people died in their teenage years and lived a punishing lifestyle. Many suffered from spinal injuries, poor nutrition and stunted growth. The remains were found at Amarna, a new capital built on the orders of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, 3,500 years ago. Hieroglyphs written at the...

Contact: Aeron Haworth aeron.haworth@manchester.ac.uk 44-771-788-1563 University of Manchester Manchester University helps with pharaoh DNA analysisPreliminary results support positive identification of Egyptian queen Preliminary results from DNA tests carried out on a mummy believed to be Queen Hatshepsut is expected to support the claim by Egyptian authorities that the remains are indeed those of Egypt’s most powerful female ruler. Egyptologists in Cairo announced last month that a tooth found in a wooden box associated with Hatshepsut exactly fitted the jaw socket and broken root of the unidentified mummy. Now, Dr Angelique Corthals, a biomedical Egyptologist at The University of Manchester, says...

CAIRO (Reuters) - Dutch archaeologists have discovered the tomb of the Pharaoh Akhenaten's seal bearer, decorated with paintings including scenes of monkeys picking and eating fruit, Egyptian antiquities officials said on Wednesday. The tomb belonged to the official named Ptahemwi and was discovered during a Dutch team's excavation in the Sakkara area, the burial ground for the city of Memphis, the state news agency MENA said, quoting chief antiquities official Zahi Hawass. Akhenaten, the 18th-dynasty pharaoh who ruled Egypt from 1379 to 1362 BC, abandoned most of the old gods and tried to imposed a monotheistic religion based on worship...

Archaeologists have discovered an intact, ancient Egyptian tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the first since King Tutankhamun's was found in 1922. A University of Memphis-led team found the previously unknown tomb complete with sarcophagi and five mummies. The archaeologists have not yet been able to identify them. But Egypt's chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass says they "might be royals or nobles" moved from "original graves to protect them from grave robbers". "We don't really know what kind of people are inside but I do believe they look royal. Maybe they are kings or queens or nobles," he told Reuters...

Teasing The Sun September 05 2004 at 08:02PM By David Leafe An erotic striptease to arouse the sun god was part of Queen Nefertiti's daily routine. With the early morning sun glinting off her golden bracelets and great clouds of aromatic incense billowing all around her, Queen Nefertiti of Egypt began her elaborate dance of seduction. Music was provided by a choir of blind men - chosen because they could see nothing of this most erotic of royal rituals - who clapped and sang as she moved towards the altar. Nefertiti's religious striptease was an important part of her daily...

June 08, 2003 Found: Queen Nefertiti’s mummy Jack Grimston BRITISH archeologists believe they may have identified the body of one of the most legendary beauties of the ancient world. They are confident a tattered mummy found in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings is probably Queen Nefertiti, stepmother of the boy king Tutankhamun and one of the most powerful women in ancient Egypt. The conclusion has been made after 12 years of research, using clues such as fragments of a wig and the piercing of the mummy’s ears. The breakthrough came after the Egyptian authorities allowed the 3,500-year-old...

This week, the Ministry of Antiquities will start the second phase of a study aimed at uncovering the mystery behind an unidentified sarcophagus found in 1906 inside tomb KV55 at the Valley of the Kings on Luxor’s west bank. The study is being operated with a grant of $28,500 from the American Research Centre in Egypt (ARCE) Endowment Fund. This tomb was thought to hold the body of the monotheistic king Akhenaten, though no definitive evidence has been presented to back up this speculation. Elham Salah, head of the ministry’s Museums Department, told Ahram Online that the study is being...

[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...

If we identify the KV55 mummy as Smenkhare and assume that Akhenaten remains missing, we can add Akhenaten and Nefertiti into the family tree, while retaining KV55 (Smenkhare) as the father of Tutankhamun as shown by the Hawass team. It's tempting to consider that KV21B and the Younger Lady are also daughters of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. While not essential for my revised theory, this would neatly fit historical facts. In considering whether the DNA data would fit the revised family tree, it seems appropriate to consider that KV21B and the Younger Lady may also have been daughters of Akhenaten and...

CAIRO, Feb. 17 (Xinhua) -- A DNA study shows Egypt's famed King Tutankhamun who suffered from a club foot died of malaria and that his father was the "heretic" king Akhenaten, Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Wednesday. Speaking at a press conference, Hawass said two years of DNA testing and CT scans on Tutankhamun's 3,300-year-old mummy and mummies either known or believed to be members of his immdiate family are helping reveal many of the myths surrounding the boy king's lineage and cause of death. Tutankhamun's father was the "heretic" king, Akhenaten, whose body is now almost certainly...

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Mystery of Tut's Father: New Clues on Unidentified Mummy Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News July 10, 2007 Egyptologists have uncovered new evidence that bolsters the controversial theory that a mysterious mummy is the corpse of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, husband of Nefertiti and, some experts believe, the father of King Tut. (Photos: Who Was Tut's Father?) The mummy's identity has generated fierce debate ever since its discovery in 1907 in tomb KV 55, located less than 100 feet (30 meters) from King Tutankhamun's then hidden burial chamber. So an international team of researchers led by Zahi Hawass, head of...

AN American archaeological mission discovered a tomb in Luxor's Valley of the Kings next to the burial place of King Tut, Egyptian antiquities authorities have announced. An excavation team from the University of Memphis made the find five metres from Tutankhamun's tomb, while the mission was doing routine excavation work, said Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. Some three metres beneath the ground, the tomb contained five human mummies with coloured funerary masks enclosed in sarcophagi and several large storage jars. The mummies date to the 18th dynasty (circa 1539-1292 BC).