EGYPT: JOURNEY TO IMMORTALITY An exhibition telling the story of the journey to the afterlife through 110 masterpieces from the Egyptian Museum of Florence (National Museum of Archaeology). Highlights include the mummy and sarcophagus of Padimut, a ‘pseudo-mummy’ of a…
Andrew Fulton begins a new series exploring specific vignettes from Ani’s Book of the Dead.
Dr Campbell Price describes a small cleansing basin and ewer set from the Musée du Louvre.
Simone Petacchi visits the galleries of the Museum of Mediterranean Archaeology (MAM), which houses the second largest collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts in France.
Sixty-three burials dating to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty have been discovered by the Egyptian mission working at Tell el-Deir cemetery in New Damietta. Inside the simple graves and mud-brick tombs, the team found fragments of gold, amulets, and shabtis, as well…
Previously overlooked fragments dramatically change our knowledge of foreign contacts in the Middle Kingdom.
REVIEW BY SG The Pharos lighthouse was a feat of ancient engineering. For 16 centuries, its light guided ships through the hazardous rocks safely into Alexandria’s harbour, before finally toppling after a series of earthquakes in the early 14th century…
What and where is this Christian monument? If you know, email the Editor (peter@ancientegyptmagazine.com) before 31 December with your answer, giving your full name, address and contact number. As this is the Christmas issue, we will pick two lucky readers…
REVIEW BY SARAH GRIFFITHS This new British Museum publication explores the lives of the ancient Egyptians through objects held in the museum’s extensive Egyptology collection. Having first explained the basics (geography, the dynasty system, historical evidence, and the role of…
REVIEW BY ANNA GARNETT Following a publishing trend of making classic and out-of-print texts available to a wide general audience, this latest reprint was first published in 2006 but is now available in paperback for the first time. There are…
REVIEW BY ROGER FORSHAW In ancient Egypt, death was not regarded as the end of human existence, but rather as a transition to a new state of being in the afterlife. This scholarly but readable volume explores the evolution over…
•A 98-line papyrus text discovered at Gerza (ancient Philadelphia) in the Fayum has been deciphered by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder, and found to contain fragments of two lost tragedies written by the Greek playwright Euripides. •A poorly…
The mummy of a woman with a screaming facial expression (below) has attracted a great deal of press attention recently, with headlines suggesting she died in agony. However, in spite of a recent examination using advanced scanning techniques, the cause…
Another news item that has had widespread coverage is the claim that the Step Pyramid of Djoser was built using a hydraulic lift. Research by a privately owned French institute specialising in hydrology, archaeology, and geotechnics suggests that the ancient…
Two Roman Period rock-cut catacombs have been discovered by an Egyptian mission excavating at the site of Zawyet Umm el-Rakham, west of Marsa Matruh (about 300 km west of Alexandria). The tombs are approached through a stairway leading to a…
A French-Egyptian team has begun documenting rock carvings and inscriptions south of Aswan that were submerged when the area was flooded to create the Aswan High Dam in the 1970s. Working in the area between the dam and the reservoir,…
A structure, dating to the 6th century BC, discovered three years ago by an Egyptian mission at the Temple of Buto (in modern-day Tell el-Faraeen) is now thought to be Egypt’s first and largest astronomical observatory, where priests could monitor…
A handful of tiny paper items discovered at Sutton House in Hackney offer a unique insight into the interests of the girls who were educated there in the 17th century. Carly Hilts spoke to Nathalie Cohen, Isabella Rosner, Kate Simpson, and Abigail Winslow to find out more.
Peter Wade-Martins has visited all 649 of Norfolk’s surviving medieval churches to study the stone types used in their construction. As a result, he has identified the use of conglomerate – along with grey quartzite, millstone grit, and tile, much of it reused from ruinous Roman buildings – as important indicators of the churches constructed in the 11th and 12th centuries, before the ready availability of limestone. Chris Catling reports.
A recent experimental archaeology project has seen three Bronze Age-style logboats constructed and launched at Stanwick Lakes in Northamptonshire. Carly Hilts visited the project’s grand finale to learn more about the excavated evidence that had fed into the design of the dug-outs, and the rich heritage of the site itself.
In the early part of the 19th century, there began a gradual move away from antiquarian ways of simply describing archaeological features and sites towards a more analytical approach of enquiry into the past. Stephen Upex takes up the story of Edmund Artis, one of the pioneers of this progress who, he argues, should be considered among the founding figures of modern British archaeology.
Vitrified forts I was interested to read (in CA 415) that one version of Tinnis fort [underlying Tinnis Castle, which is shown in its medieval prime BELOW] had been set alight and vitrified. It is remarked that this is not…
Recent excavations at Bodicote, just south of Banbury, have revealed the remains of an Iron Age farmstead where ten storage pits had been repurposed as graves. This was not an uncommon practice for the period – but other aspects of the inhumations were rather more unusual, as Rebecca Trow, Milena Grzybowska, Roger Doonan, and Robin Holgate report.
Two hundred years ago, George Smith was granted the first licence to distil whisky legally in the Glenlivet area of Speyside, in the Scottish Highlands. Now archaeological fieldwork by the National Trust for Scotland, in partnership with The Glenlivet, has shed new light on how the whisky-making process was industrialised in the 19th century, as Derek Alexander and Daniel Rhodes report.
My final geographically themed review focuses on London. I touched on some sites there in my reviews of Roman archaeology and the Thames (CA 330 and CA 343), so these columns will look more widely across modern-day Greater London. There…
Stylised dolphins and fish, in contrasting hues of red, blue, and yellow, swim across a sea of white tesserae. This striking mosaic was uncovered during excavations at Wroxeter Roman City (ancient Viroconium) in a collaborative effort by the University of…
On Saturday 4 May 1471 the ‘Wars of the Roses’ came to a head at Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. The Yorkist army commanded by Edward IV and his brother, the future Richard III, chased down and defeated the Lancastrian army of Queen…
Sherds has recently been working on a response to the Welsh Government’s consultation on its draft Culture Strategy. This has been an opportunity for the arts, heritage, and culture sector to reflect on questions that are not just relevant to Wales.
The latest on acquisitions, exhibitions, and key decisions.
A new museum, created and funded by the local community, has opened in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire. Leon Corneille-Cowell explains how the space came to be, and highlights some of its latest work and upcoming projects.
There are lots of great opportunities to get stuck into history and archaeology this autumn, whether you’re looking for conferences and lectures or new exhibitions and museum attractions.
If you would rather get involved at home, though, there is a wide variety of resources on offer online, from digital collections and virtual heritage site tours to new podcasts, TV shows, and more. Amy Brunskill has put together a selection of some of the options available.
REVIEW BY CH The earliest surviving written reference to Edinburgh is found in a charter of 17 July 1124 – and, to celebrate the city’s 900th ‘birthday’, Alistair Moffat has written an engaging biography of the Scottish capital. He begins…
REVIEW BY WILL FLETCHER This is a charming book. It features the conservation of a fine Grade II*-listed English vernacular building, situated in rural Norfolk. In total, the 13 chapters and appendices describe the building, its history, the former occupants,…
REVIEW BY AB In AD 793, Scandinavian raiders launched an attack on the island of Lindisfarne that would go down in history, and thus the Viking Age began. Or did it? In this new book, Alex Harvey takes a wider…
REVIEW BY JAMES O’DRISCOLL The passage-tomb complex of Knowth is often relegated to the status of smaller sibling to the better known Newgrange, despite it being of international importance in its own right. This book summarises over 60 years of…
REVIEW BY ADAM DAUBNEY This volume sets out the results of excavations and survey along a 5km stretch of the A160/A180 in north-east Lincolnshire. Excavations were carried out within an archaeologically important landscape of drained former marshland near the Humber…