Archive for the ‘Ancient Egypt’ Category
By: The Scribe on November, 2007
In 2007,
Archaeology magazine reported that a team digging at the ancient Egyptian city of Hierakonpolis – about 400 miles south of Cairo – had discovered something in the site’s ‘elite cemetery’ that validated the city’s role in the development of the Egyptian state around the time of the First Dynasty.
The name Hierakonpolis translates as “the city of the falcon”, and what was found there was the earliest depiction of a falcon ever discovered – something which meant a lot to the Egyptian people throughout the Dynastic period. However, before that in the Predynastic period, the falcon was one of the clearest surviving examples of a symbolic image or motif that would carry on from those early centuries into the Dynastic period.
Once the Dynastic period arrived in Egypt, the image of a falcon symbolized the king or Pharaoh, who was supposed to represent the embodiment of the god Horus – the falcon-headed deity of Egyptian religion. Horus was the patron god of kingship, and therefore the discovery of this falcon-shaped figurine at Hierakonpolis actually pushes back the association of falcons with royalty to nearly half a millennium earlier than previously thought.
The team that found the figurine was headed by archaeologist Renee Friedman, and the piece was actually located inside of one of the city’s structures that surrounded the largest known early Predynastic tomb in Egypt. Unique finds weren’t unusual for this tomb – previously, the tomb yielded an ivory carving of several hippos as well as a buried African elephant – suggesting that whoever was buried in the tomb was extremely important, and likely a very powerful ruler. With the discovery of a falcon carving, due to its association with royalty, there can be little doubt that it was a very important king who owned this tomb.
The falcon figurine is about 2.4 inches large, measuring from the tip to its tail, and appears to have been the work of a very skilled craftsman – and while the profile and shape of the figurine are similar to later falcon representations, the major difference is that the wings for this piece were carved free from the body and left attached only by a small, singular point. The falcon was carved out of a piece of malachite-veined basalt, which is what gives it the multi-colored appearance.
The city of Hierakonpolis may be familiar to some as the home of the legendary king Narmer, who Egyptologists used to credit as the founding father of Egypt – he was cited as the man who single-handedly unified the entire country and established the First Dynasty around 3100 BC. However, the discovery of a falcon figurine here in association with a royal burial – and according to the excavators, a number of other ‘falcon wings’ were found in the same area, though they had originally been mistaken for ears from human sculptures – presents some fairly compelling evidence for the leading role of Hierakonpolis in the birth of the Egyptian state, which apparently took much longer to develop than anyone had previously suspected.
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Tomorrow: Wall Paintings at an Ancient Peruvian Fire Temple
By: The Scribe on October, 2007
Ever wonder how the Egyptians managed to build their large monuments, let alone get them where they needed to be? After all, even if the shapes of statues were carved out once the stone was in place, the stone needed to get to its destination somehow – and there weren’t simply giant limestone stores in the city, either. People had to quarry the stone that to be used, and then transport it to the site where the temple or monument was being built – sometimes hundreds of miles away.
The standing suspicion was that the Egyptians moved their massive stone artifacts from one place to another via waterways – there are plenty of paintings and carvings from Egyptian tombs that show people using large boats and barges to move things like statues and obelisks, and it is not hard to see that both the Luxor Temple and the pyramids at Giza have ancient canals that lead up to their “front door”, as it were.
The only problem was, nearly all the known obelisks from ancient Egypt came from a granite quarry in Aswan – and until now, there was no known canal route to get them from the quarry all the way up the Nile to other cities, except by dragging the monument across the ground on a land journey. That clearly would not have been an ideal situation for these artifacts, considering that some of the larger obelisks can weight upwards of 50 tons. One of the unfinished obelisks in the Aswan quarry is estimated at over 1,100 tons – and was abandoned by the ancient workers only because of the appearance of latent cracks, and not because of its weight.
However, recent discoveries have revealed that there may have been a canal in Aswan after all, hidden from historians for centuries by modern roadwork. This canal would have made transporting obelisks a nearly effortless endeavor, as compared to moving them by land: the canal linked the Aswan quarry with the Nile, which meant that the obelisks could have been moved from the quarry to the Nile, and then sailed down the Nile to their final destination.
The only downside to this method was that the timing had to be perfect – in ancient Egypt, the Nile flooded several times annually, and it was the floodwater that would have filled up the quarry’s canal. So, in order to take advantage of the floodwaters and actually use the canal, workers would have needed to finish their obelisks on time, move the monuments onto rafts and into the canal at a point below the floodwater levels, and wait for the water to come – then the monuments could easily float once the flood came.
As a side-note, the archaeologists who found the Aswan quarry also discovered graffiti drawings left behind by quarry workers thousands of years ago, as well as grid markings that would have helped with measurements for the obelisks. Some of the graffiti includes images of ostriches and dolphins, but as water levels rise in the area, Egyptologists fear that the graffiti will be lost or washed away forever.
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Tomorrow: What the Hellespont are ‘the Dardanelles’?
By: The Scribe on October, 2007
The fort of
Tjaru, also called Tharo, was an ancient Egyptian fortress along the major road from Egypt to Canaan. Known as ‘the way of Horus’, the road was extremely important for both travel and trade – and in times of war, whoever controlled the road essentially controlled the territory. Previously known only through descriptions and images, archaeologists have finally uncovered the
fort itself – and it turns out that this fort was one of the largest fortresses to have existed during the Pharonic era in ancient Egypt.
The walls of the fort were made with mud brick and were 13 meters thick! Twenty-four watchtowers were built above the parapets on the walls, and a deep moat was dug around the entire perimeter of the city – and this was only one fortress in a chain of 11 that spanned all the way from the Suez to the current Egyptian-Palestinian border.
Inside the fortress, workers discovered graves containing horses and soldiers buried together, attesting to the severity of the battles in this area during the Egyptian struggle against invaders known as the Hyksos. In the 17th century BC, the Hyksos had invaded Egypt and eventually took control of the country, ruling the entire Nile during a time known as the “Second Intermediate Period”. They managed to hold the country for approximately 100 years before the Egyptians took back control of their land – and in order to secure themselves against future Hyksos invasions, giant fortresses were built along the river.
Although clear evidence of this specific fortress had not been found until now, a depiction of Tjaru could be seen on the walls of Karnak Temple in Luxor – depicting everything from the moat around the fortress to the large, wooden beams that spanned areas of its construction. Tjaru was also mentioned under the name ‘Silu’ in one of the Amarna letters, which were a series of correspondences between the Egyptian rulers and their representatives – ie. diplomats – residing in Canaan during the 15th century BC.
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Tomorrow: More Ancient Standard
By: The Scribe on October, 2007
Before Alexander the Great made his way to the Nile delta and established his own city in 331 B.C., the northern coast of Egypt was home to a city called Rhakotis. Although Rhakotis is mentioned in several ancient history texts, until recently, the actual existence of the city had never been proven – but now, it seems as though Alexander the Great was more of a renovator than a city builder.
Teams of underwater archaeologists were diving in Alexandria’s bay, searching for Greek and Roman ruins, when they stumbled across some signs of building construction that appeared to be 700 years older than Alexander the Great’s arrival in the area. In order to substantiate the evidence, researchers took soil sample cores from the Mediterranean ocean’s floor – some as large as 20 feet long – and dated them with radiocarbon technology.
The cores revealed that the ocean floor held lead and human waste that was over 3,000 years old, confirming that there was indeed human habitation along these shores long before Alexander ever arrived; the cores also contained pieces of stone building materials that would have come from southern and central Egypt. By looking at historical documents that have survived the centuries, all evidence pointed to the true, historic existence of the Egyptian city of Rhakotis.
The lead from the cores was dated to around 1000 to 800 BC, with some portions suspected to date back even further to Egypt’s Old Kingdom – if this is true, it means that people were living here over 2000 years before Alexander arrived! Lead was a very important substance for humans in the ancient world, and in large cities, it was not unusual for lead to be used in everything from fishing, building, ship construction, and plumbing, to more artistic activities like glass making.
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Tomorrow: Urban conflict in Ancient Syria
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