“ La momie de la reine Hatchepsout retrouvée? / The mummy of queen Hatschepsut found at last?  ”  

Grâce à une molaire brisée et un scanner en 3-D, la preuve serait apportée que la momie royale serait celle d'un corps embaumé retrouvé à même le sol il y a un siècle dans une tombe, la KV60, de la vallée des Rois, à Louxor. Dans la tombe KV 60 se trouvaient les momies de deux femmes, la première dans un sarcophage attribué à Sat-ra, la nourrice d'Hatchepsout qui fut transférée au musée du Caire et l'autre reposant simplement sur le sol, et qui y fut laissé.
C'est cette dernière momie qui serait la reine Hatchepsout. C'est ce que tendent à confirmer les moyens modernes déployés par le Dr Zahi Hawass. Celui ci pourtant ne croyait pas à cette hypothèse qu'avait émise avec prudence Elizabeth Thomas, égyptologue américaine décédée. L'équipe de Hawass a eu recours au CT-scan, une technique d'imagerie qui permet une recomposition du corps en trois dimensions pour rapprocher les traits de la momie d'Hatchepsout avec d'autres de sa famille. "Preuve finale" selon la chaîne Discovery, qui annonce la nouvelle avec le SCA : la partie manquante d'une molaire de la momie, a été trouvée à l'intérieur d'un vase funéraire frappé du nom d'Hatchepsout et qui se trouvait dans une des caches royales découvertes en 1881.
La confusion règne par contre sur la réalisation d'un test génétique, qui aurait pour objectif la comparaison de l'ADN mitochondrial de la reine avec celui de sa grand-mère Ahmes-Nerfertari, puisqu'il a été démontré que la momie attribuée jusqu'à présent au père d'Hatchepsout, Thoutmosis I, n'était pas la sienne.
Les arguments avancés pour l'identification ne convainquent cependant pas totalement l'ensemble de la communauté scientifique.

Has the mummy of ancient Egypt's best-known queen been identified at last?
Egyptian archeologists say they have definitively identified the mummy of queen Hatshepsut. The mummy was discovered more than a century ago in a humble tomb in the famed Valley of the Kings, but suspicion that it was the female pharaoh was hard to prove because of the lack of evidence directly linking it to Hatshepsut.
The decisive evidence was a molar in a wooden box inscribed with the queen's name, found in 1881 in a cache of royal mummies. The tooth, Zahi Hawass said, "fits exactly" into the jaw socket and broken root of the mummy of an obese woman originally found in Tomb 60. "This is the most important discovery in the Valley of the Kings since the discovery of King Tutankhamen, and one of the greatest adventures of my life," said Hawass, who is expected to detail the study at a news conference in Cairo today. "I think it is very cool," said archeologist Donald Ryan of Pacific Lutheran University who rediscovered the mummy in 1989 but was not involved in the current study. The evidence "is very persuasive," he said.
DNA bone samples taken from the mummy's pelvic bone and femur are being compared to the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut's grandmother, Ahmose Nefertari, said Egyptian molecular geneticist Yehia Zakaria Gad, who was part of Hawass' team. Preliminary results are said to be "very encouraging."
One Egyptologist, who asked not to be named, said not all archaeologists were confident the identification was watertight. "It's an interesting piece of scientific deduction which might point to the truth," the archaeologist said.

  Scholars Race to Recover a Lost Kingdom on the Nile 

Les restes archéologiques de l'ancien royaume de Koush, au Soudan, vont bientôt disparaître en grande partie sous les eaux d'un grand lac articiel, comparable au lac Nasser plus au Nord. Le grand barrage de Méroé, lorsqu'il va être mis en eau, va en effet recouvrir cette région, et entraîner le déplacement de 50 000 personnes et engloutir 2500 sites archéologiques.
Par ailleurs, un grand centre de production d'or a été découvert très au Sud par les équipes de l'Oriental Institute de Chicago, suggérant que l'influence du royaume s'étendait bien au delà de ce qui était habituellement admis.

The present Kush archaeological digs take place far from major cities or towns. The area, including this desert near the al-Widay site, is scheduled to be flooded by a 1,000-megawatt Nile River dam that is under construction.
Teams from six countries are working with the Sudanese antiquities service to salvage what they can before the waters rise, probably in late 2008. More than 2,500 archaeological sites will be lost to the dam's 108-mile-long (173-kilometer-long) reservoir. The land of the Kush became one of the main gold-producing areas of the ancient world, its craftsmen working the metal into jewellery and other artefacts and adorning temples and statues with gold leaf. Exports brought the Kush tremendous wealth, together with political influence in Egypt.
Excavations at Hosh el-Geruf, 360 km north of Khartoum in Sudan, unearthed grinding stones made of a granite-like rock called gneiss. They closely resemble similar stones found in the Egyptian desert, where they were used to crush the ore and recover flakes of gold. The ground ore was probably washed in water nearby to separate the gold flakes, which shows that the site was a centre for organised gold production. The team of the Chicago Institute also excavated a cemetery where they uncovered burials with artifacts that suggest the region was part of the Kingdom of Kush, which would have ruled an area much larger than previously believed. Such discoveries show that the kingdom, the first in sub-Saharan Africa to control a territory as much as 750 miles in length. .

 “ Lascaux on the Nile  ”  

Des centaines de représentation d'art rupestre paléolithique ont été retrouvés sur des rochers près de Kom Ombo. L'équipe Belge à l'origine de la découverte a eu de grande difficultés pour en faire les relevés et a dû utiliser un système compliqué d'échaffaudages.

The discovery of huge rocks decorated with Palaeolithic illustrations at the village of Qurta on the northern edge of Kom Ombo has caused excitement among the scientific community. The art was found by a team of Belgian archaeologists and restorers and features groups of cattle similar to those drawn on the walls of the French Lascaux caves. They are drawn and painted in a naturalistic style which is quite different from those shown in cattle representations of the well-known classical, pre-dynastic iconography of the fourth millennium BC. Illustrations of hippopotami, fish, birds and human figures can also be seen on the surface of some of the rocks.

 “ Papyrus médical égyptien du Nouvel Empire  ”  

C'est une oeuvre exceptionnelle qui rejoint aujourd'hui les collections du Louvre grâce au mécénat du groupe Ipsen. Inconnu jusqu'à son classement comme trésor national en 2005, le document s'avère un remarquable « manuel de médecine », d'une rare longueur, recelant des textes inédits. Il a été écrit par deux scribes différents à 150 ans de distance. Le premier scribe-médecin a rédigé son texte entre les règnes de Thoutmosis III et d'Amenhotep II, son collègue , sous les Ramessides. Les textes traitent essentiellement de pathologie cutanée infectieuse (abcès, pustules...).
Le papyrus est exposé jusqu'au 6 août au Louvre, puis fera l'objet d'une étude et d'une restauration qui devraient durer trois ans.

LOUVRE EXHIBITS SEVEN-METRE-LONG EGYPTIAN PAPYRUS
A new medical papyrus is now in the Louvre Museum, thanks to the donation of the pharmaceutical group Ipsen. It is 7 m long and consists of 8 leaves, making it second to papyrus Ebers. It is written on both sides by two different scribes. The first physician wrote his text to the time of Thutmosis III or Amenhotep II, the second some 150 years later, under the Ramessides. The second physician wrote a longer description of some dermatological diseases and in addition some magic texts without parallels.

 “ Polish archaeologists have discovered a richly furnished Egyptian tomb dating back 5,000 years  ”  

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EEF NEWS
Sur le site de Tell el Farcha, dans le Delta, une équipe Polonaise continue la fouille d'un important complexe, encore mal caractérisé, qui a déja fourni un matériel conséquent. A noter par exemple un modèle de cuillère en pierre a manche représentant un crocodile.
Une nouvelle brasserie a aussi été retrouvée. La plus ancienne connue en Égypte l'avait déjà été sur ce site.
L'an passé, la même équipe avait fait une découverte exceptionnelle de figurines votives en ivoire plaquées d'or.

The site of Tell el Farcha is located on the remains of a settlement dating back to the fourth millennium B.C. – the very beginning of the kingdom of the pharaohs. This year finds include more bone figures and interesting objects such as a stone spoon with a handle in the shape of a crocodile. The archaeologists aren’t sure, but they suspect that these were offerings made to a god or to the ruler. They also found another brewery. Up to now, the oldest brewery in Egypt was also found in Tell el-Farcha.
Last year the mission discovered at the site two spectacular gold statues and a deposit of votive ivory figurines.

 “ This mask belongs to Egypt  ”  

Ce long et intéressant texte fait le point sur les découvertes qui ont été faites sur le plateau de Guiza concernant la ville et les cimetières des ouvriers et leur fonctionnement. Le Dr Zahi Hawass et le Pr Mark Lehner ont été les premiers à s'intéresser à ce qui constitue maintenant une recherche à part entière. Celle ci montre l'extraordinaire degré d'organisation que l'État Égyptien était capable de mettre en oeuvre pour ce gigantesque chantier.

Where were the tens of thousands of workers who built the monumental structures at Giza housed? A massive ancient gateway, which came to be known by early travellers as the Wall of the Crow, drew the attention of two figures instrumental in research on the Giza plateau. These were Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and former director of the Giza Plateau who, in 1989-90, discovered the cemetery of the pyramid-builders, and Mark Lehner, director of the Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP).
Lehner's team excavated a street that linked the workers' town to the pyramid complex and what was labelled the "eastern town with a huge royal building for storage and administration. From an early stage in the work, it seemed certain that it was all part of a vast ancient settlement site with streets, galleries, bakeries and industrial areas, and that it included barracks which could shelter and feed up to 2,000 rotating labourers who worked in shifts following the well-established Egyptian pattern whereby local town and village leaders sent teams from their provinces all over the country to share in great national projects. Bearing in mind that the Old Kingdom settlement continues under Nezlet Al-Siman, and, considered alongside other parts of the settlement not yet excavated, the whole area might have contained as many as 20,000 labourers (an Egyptologist's estimate), many of whom would have been in support industries like pottery and cloth manufacture.