Egyptological!

[egypt-museum]

Stele of Sobekhotep and his wife

Middle Kingdom, 12th Dynasty, ca. 1963-1862 BC. Now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. CG 20124

[mistyrxse]

Statue of Horus, copper alloy

Third Intermediate Period (1069 - 664 BC)

Louvre museum. E 7703

[egypt-museum]

Osiris presented with a bowl of burning tapers

The rear wall of the innermost burial chamber shows the god Osiris-Onnophris, the ruler of the kingdom of the dead, on his throne with the mountain of the West behind him.

Osiris wears a nemes-headdress and holds a flail and scepter. A seated god before him presents a bowl with burning tapers.

The inscription written in columns of black hieroglyphs contains spell for “lighting a lamp for Osiris”. Behind the throne of Osiris a small figure of Pashedu is depicted kneeling.

Tomb of Pashedu (TT3), Deir el-Medina, West Thebes.

Photo: kairoinfo4u

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Pharaoh: Archaeologists may have found second Thutmose II tomb

The potential find comes just days after the announcement of the discovery of King Thutmose II's tomb.

You wait a century for a royal tomb and then two come along at once.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

#and maybe #just maybe we wont steal all the shit in there this time

I mean this with all the love in the world, but if you're going to put that in the tags on an Egyptologist's post there's going to be a strongly worded 'no, that's misinformation and I won't stand for it' response incoming.

I hate this narrative. It's reductive, it doesn't help anyone (except making the commenter feel morally superior for dunking on the archaeologists), and it's kinda just...wrong.

Firstly, the narrative that 'everything was stolen' is just flat out wrong. Most people love to use the BM as an example of 'place that steals shit' and I'm gonna let you in on a secret: the BM never had a dig team (it has archaeologists now, but it didn't back when most people conceive of this happening). The BM is where people bequeathed stuff on their death, not the ones going out there to get it. Then you have the ways in which things were acquired by those who did go out there. Most of these are ‘bought it from a local seller who’d been in the tombs themselves and had a stall to make money from tourists’, archaeologists who worked with the Egyptian government and were subject to ‘partition agreements’ whereby they were allowed to keep half of what they found (the Egyptian government got first pick), authorised removal of items by the Pasha Muhammad Ali as gifts for helping Egypt (see: Giovanni Belzoni), traded items that ended up in people’s possession, and colonial spoils (most of which were taken from the French who were doing a colonialism before that. Y’know…Napoleon. That guy.).

Secondly, the narrative that archaeologists are stealing is also wrong. It’s anti-intellectual and is one of the things those who think that learning about the past is a waste of money use to cut our funding and try to shut us down. Archaeologists are bound by the 1970 UNESCO Convention which prohibits the illegal removal, export, or transference of cultural property from a country without that country’s explicit permission. Archaeologists do not ‘steal shit’ because a) that’s immoral and b) unless those archaeologists are from the country those objects originate in, they have no jurisdiction. Egypt specifically has had control over their antiquities (aside from those being looted on the black market) since at least the late 1800s. Howard Carter got short shifted in the 1920s because he upset the Egyptian government and they chose not to let him work on Tutankhamun’s tomb anymore. You cannot dig in Egypt without the Egyptian government’s permission and all the artefacts there belong to them once they’re out of the ground. I’m sure we don’t want to go around suggesting that they’re just letting people steal from them, do we?

Finally, and most importantly: 99% of all tombs in Egypt were robbed in antiquity by the Ancient Egyptians themselves. That’s why finding an intact tomb is so rare and important. My doctoral thesis was on the Egyptian investigations (c.1090 BCE) into these tomb robberies in the Valley of the Kings/Queens. Do you know what they show? That tomb robbing, even outside the socio-economic issues of the Late New Kingdom, was a common occurrence. They would enter tombs by boring holes into the side through another tunnel, get in there, rip off the linen coverings or set them alight, watch them burn, and then collect the jewels and amulets from the bodies to barter with. That description is from Papyrus Leopold II Amherst, which has translations readily available online. All in all, the Tribunal were only interested in the robberies of the Royal tombs, and thus when someone admitted to robbing the tomb of a noble or someone else, they simply didn’t care. Those weren’t important.

Tutankhamun’s tomb was so important because it was the only one that hadn’t been robbed in antiquity, not that it hadn’t been robbed by English colonialists (tbf there are many other countries that did colonialism here but you guys are never interested in them). There’s the Deir el Bahri cache where the Egyptians, around the same time as their tomb robbery investigations, moved all the mummies they still had of their kings into one place. They didn’t even do this carefully because all the mummies are in the wrong coffins, and some of the coffins have the wrong lids/bases (i.e. it’s Amenhotep II’s mummy, with the lid of Ramesses II and the base of Thutmose III). These were mummies of royal tombs that had already been robbed and had been robbed a long, long time ago, even for the Egyptians.

I’m not sure if you read the article at all, and from the comment it seems like you didn’t, but Thutmose II’s tomb was massively water damaged. The ceiling has caved in and it’s pretty dangerous to be inside. What they suspect might be where he’s buried now is close by and covered by man-made rubble. This is a hastily constructed second tomb, if indeed that’s what it is (I don’t wanna wait a month to find out but I might get rumblings of news earlier if it is). It doesn’t guarantee that any grave goods exist within it except perhaps his mummy. It could have been robbed thousands of years ago and all we’re going to find are remnants of what used to be. We only know the other tomb is his based small fragments that still exist of the starred ceiling (reserved for royal tombs) and a smashed offering from Hatshepsut for his kA. It would be frankly amazing if he still had all his burial goods with him, but realistically, knowing Egyptian history as I do, the best-case scenario (realistically) is a few grave goods and his mummy.

In summary, archaeologists don’t steal things and most of the tombs in Egypt were looted by the Egyptians themselves thousands of years before European colonialism ever set foot in them.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

#as an anthropologist and museum worker: modern archaeologists do not steal things #egyptologists usually do not #but as someone who works in repatriation: the field of archaeology is based on salvage anthropology and theft #like ALL early anthropology #saying “archaeologists dont steal things” is INCREDIBLY reductive. #because most of what anthropology museums repatriate actually IS stolen in some capacity #whether by a 19th or 20th century archaeologist or by somebody else #and returning those stolen goods is important work

I don't disagree with you. However, the reason I said 'archaeologists don't steal things' is because there is a wide perception in the general public (that I'm trying to tackle with scicomm) that current archaeologists behave the same way as the archaeologists from the 19th and early 20th centuries. I see it all the time, and it was what I was addressing when I responded to the previous tags. People have got it into their heads that nothing has changed, and they continue to spout the 'all you do is steal things' when that's simply not true.

Archaeology and Anthropology have a complex history. No one is denying this, least of all me. But when I do scicomm, I've very much learnt that if I try to caveat the whole thing as 'well the early ones did, but we don't anymore and haven't for a while' people don't read beyond 'they used to' and thus extrapolate 'they still do now' even though that's not what was said. Thus when I say 'archaeologists don't steal things' I a) mean modern archaeologists, and b) am trying to break the link in people's minds to automatically associate us with colonial activities. Once that link is broken I can then explain the nuance because we're coming at it from the right angle and people will listen. But if I do that wrong, I've failed to communicate anything meaningful and no one goes away with anything.

But that seemed a little much for what was essentially a sum up comment in TL;DR.

[egypt-museum]

The Goddess Ma'at hovers over the entrance of the burial chamber of Nefertari.

Tomb of Nefertari (QV66), Valley of the Queens, Thebes.

[egypt-museum]

Stele of Maya

In the upper portion, Maya and his wife Tamit pay homage to Osiris and Hathor, the gods of the necropolis.

In the lower register is a similar, corresponding scene in which Maya and his wife receive food offerings, in their turn, from their many children, in keeping with a principle of reciprocity that is often found in Egyptian religious thought.

The funerary stele of Maya, the “scribe off the outlines”, arrived in Turin with the Drovetti collection in 1824. It was possibly discovered near the funerary chapel where Ernesto Schiaparelli was to excavate roughly 80 years later.

New Kingdom, late 18th Dynasty, ca. 1353-1292 BC. Tomb Chapel of Maya (TT338), Deir el-Medina, Thebes. Now in the Egyptian Museum of Turin. S. 7910

[theuserformerlyknownas778]

Cat in Doorway of Philae Temple, Aswan Egypt by AdamCohn https://flic.kr/p/2okakdL

[egypt-museum]

Cat feasting on a fish under the seat of Tawy, wife of Nakht

New Kingdom, 18th dynasty, c. 1401-1391 B.C. Tomb of Nakht (TT52). Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, West Thebes. Now in the Ashmolean Museum.

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[jeannepompadour]

Necklace of Princess Khenmet, an Ancient Egyptian king’s daughter of the Twelfth Dynasty, around 1800 BC.

[memories-of-ancients]

Gold and emerald necklace, Ptolemaic Egypt, 200-30 BC

from The Yale University Art Museum

[nobrashfestivity]

Unknown, Sacred Cat of Bast, between 7th and 6th century BCE

[high-quality-tiktoks]

The Tomb of Sennefer is one of the most preserved and beautifully decorated tombs ever found in Egypt. Known as The Tomb of the Vineyards, it’s covered in colors and stories, and is buried deep in the mountain below 42 very steep steps.

[lankybrunettepartdeux]

Cats at the Temple of Philae, Egypt

Source: CatsWithJobs Reddit

[deltawebsistem]

Image of the Milky Way over the Temple of Karnak in Egypt.

[m1male2]

The goddess of the sky, Nut, inside the sarcophagus of King Merneptah, (XIX dynasty, 1273-1202 BC) This celestial goddess covered with stars, arches covering the Earth.

[slytherverse]

many years ago me and best friend were traipsing around the local history museum . the museum had a long overlooked mummy room on the third floor

the sarcophagus on display was open, the elaborate lid hanging a foot above the casket to barely reveal the mummy inside, like;

and bestfriend said, Sometimes they wrote messages under the lid for the Dead to read ,

and she laid down on the dirty museum carpet next to the glass case , patting the ground next to her for me to follow suit . sure enough, the underside of the casket lid was covered in inked characters , a brochure of directions to the afterlife in case they woke up all organless and confused

someone else wandered in to the little mummy room and asked if we were ok. she said, Come check this out. so he laid down on the other side.

i crossed my arms over my chest , and so did they . four bodies , seeing a message intended for one; we love you, we miss you, we hope you find your way

[adnauseum11]

There was a mummy exhibition that came through the Museum of Civilization in my hometown years ago. I went and spent most of the day there. The thing I was most struck by was that these were just people. The jewelry they prized looked exactly like stuff that was being sold a few blocks over in local merchant stores. The grave portraits looked like relatives of the people wandering around in the exhibit. Across thousands of years we still liked the same stuff and looked the same and were scared of the same things (death, the unknown). The human experience really is universal and there is something so touching and beautiful about that.

[amntenofre]

detail of one of the statues of the Goddess Sekhmet (lioness-headed) dedicated by King Amenhotep III in the Precinct of the Goddess Mut at ‘Uaset’-Thebes; the Goddess wears a modius ringed by Uraei