Free Republic

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...

CAIRO, Egypt -- For the past 36 years journalist and author Desmond Zwar has shared a great secret: that it was not archaeologist Howard Carter who was responsible for the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb, but a humble British corporal whose very presence on the site had to be kept confidential; who in the last days of the dig took a photograph that changed history. Richard Adamson was a 23-year-old spy. He had infiltrated the Wafdist Party -- dedicated to overthrowing British rule in Egypt -- and as a result 28 Egyptians were arrested in Cairo, four of them sentenced to...

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...

Howard Carter, the British explorer who opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, will forever be associated with the greatest trove of artifacts from ancient Egypt. But was he also a thief? Dawn was breaking as Howard Carter took up a crowbar to pry open the sealed tomb door in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. With shaking hands, he held a candle to the fissure, now wafting out 3,300-year-old air. What did he see, those behind him wanted to know. The archaeologist could do no more than stammer, "Wonderful things!" This scene from Thebes in November, 1922, is considered archaeology's...

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...

The first ever facial reconstructions based on CT scans of King Tutankhamun's mummy have produced images strikingly similar to the boy pharaoh's ancient portraits, Egypt's top archaeologist said Tuesday. One of the models shows a baby-faced young man with chubby cheeks and a round chin — with a resemblance to the famous gold mask of King Tut found in his tomb in 1922 by British excavation Howard Carter. Three teams of forensic artists and scientists — from France, the United States and Egypt — built models of the boy pharaoh's face based on some 1,700 high-resolution photos from CT...