Free Republic

For the past 100 years, Egyptologists thought that when the powerful female pharaoh Hatshepsut died, her nephew and successor went on a vendetta against her, purposefully smashing all her statues to erase her from public memory.Now, a new study finds that's not quite the case. Although many statues of Hatshepsut were intentionally broken, the reason behind their destruction has nothing to do with her gender or even blotting out her existence, an Egyptologist says. Rather, Hatshepsut's statues were broken to "deactivate" them and eliminate their supposed supernatural powers...After Hatshepsut died, many of her statues were intentionally broken, including at the...

A bone arrowhead found in the ancient Philistine city of Gath may have been fired off by the city's defenders as part of a last stand described in the Bible. According to the Hebrew Bible, a king named Hazael), who ruled the kingdom of Aram from around 842 B.C. to 800 B.C., conquered Gath (also known as Tell es-Safi) before marching on Jerusalem.

Ancient embalmers likely placed the tongue-shaped, gold foil amulet in the deceased’s mouth to ensure they could speak in the afterlifeArchaeologists conducting excavations at the temple of Taposiris Magna in western Alexandria, Egypt, have unearthed a 2,000-year-old mummy with a gold tongue. As Nihal Samir reports for Daily News Egypt, researchers from a dual Egyptian-Dominican mission discovered the golden-tongued mummy while surveying 16 poorly preserved burials encased in rock-cut crypts—a popular form of interment during Egypt’s Greco-Roman period. Crafted out of gold foil, the tongue-shaped amulet was likely placed in the deceased’s mouth to ensure they’d be able to speak...