Cairo - A grave believed to belong to courtiers or servants of King Aha, the first king of ancient Egypt's first dynasty, was uncovered by an American excavation mission in Abydos in Upper Egypt, a culture ministry statement said on Sunday.
The enclosure found in Abydos contains "a very well-preserved chapel surrounded with six subsidiary graves belonging to courtiers servants intended to serve the king in the afterlife".
The enclosure lies about 1,5km away from the tomb of King Aha, discovered in 1900 by British archaeologist Flinders Petrie.
King Tut liked red wine
Ancient Egyptians believed in properly equipping a body for the afterlife, and not just through mummification. A new study reveals that King Tutankhamun eased his arduous journey with a stash of red wine.
Spanish scientists have developed the first technique that can determine the color of wine used in ancient jars. They analyzed residues from a jar found in the tomb of King Tut and found that it contained wine made with red grapes.
This is the only extensive chemical analysis that has been done on a jar from King Tut's tomb, and it is the first time scientists have provided evidence of the color of wine in an archaeological sample. The report appears in the March 15 edition of Analytical Chemistry, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.
dirty-fingernailed parvenus???The relocation of Paris
French archaeologists pulled quite a stunt last month by declaring that, contrary to popular belief, Paris wasn't always Paris -- before Roman times, Paris was Nanterre, a rather dull city also located on the Seine.
Let me explain, for the confusion lies as much in the nomenclature as in the results of the dig. It appears that the ancient capital of Gaul, called Lutetia by the Romans, is not buried under modern-day Paris after all but under its unremarkable downstream neighbor, Nanterre.
It's an unprecedented attack on the French national identity and the greater glory of Paris by a group of dirty-fingernailed parvenus. (I must evoke a certain indignation on behalf my adopted city, mustn't I?)
Excavating Marana's Hohokam mound: Dig offers glimpse of ancient culture
MARANA - An archaeological dig here is reaffirming previous knowledge about the ancient Hohokam and giving new insights into the community that once thrived here.
The dig shows that some of the folks who used to live here apparently were of the upper crust; looked down on their neighbors, physically and perhaps figuratively; used the "good china" when dining; and ate better than those in the surrounding area.
They looked down on their neighbors from their homes in a walled enclosure atop a man-made, earthen platform mound that rose about 7 1/2 feet above the desert floor. They were leaders of the Hohokam community of about 900 that flourished between about 1200 and 1300.
A universe of Mogul royalty portrayed in miniature
This jubilant image of musicians playing away while perched atop an elephant hardly looks like an excerpt from an official document. Most official documents are less lively and colorful, and aren't so sharply observed.
In fact, this is a tiny detail from one of 44 illustrations in a book, a Mogul document known as "The Padshahnama," or the emperor's chronicle. This manuscript records major events in the first decade of the reign (1628-58) of Shah-Jahan of the Mogul empire on the Indian subcontinent. It celebrates his military prowess and extravagant court occasions, ceremonies, processions (in this case a prince's wedding), hunts, and significant arrivals and departures.
Ides of March Marked Murder of Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar's bloody assassination on March 15, 44 B.C., forever marked March 15, or the Ides of March, as a day of infamy. It has fascinated scholars and writers ever since.
For ancient Romans living before that event, however, an ides was merely one of several common calendar terms (see sidebar) used to mark monthly lunar events. The ides simply marked the appearance of the full moon.
But the Ides of March assumed a whole new identity after the events of 44 B.C. The phrase came to represent a specific day of abrupt change that set off a ripple of repercussions throughout Roman society and beyond.
Next major find: Steve McQueen's baseball glove 'Dick', the third tunnel from the Great Escape, is rediscovered 60 years on
The attempt to tunnel out of Stalag-Luft 3 was one of the most audacious episodes of the Second World War, immortalised in the movie The Great Escape. Seventy Allied prisoners toiled for months to get out of the German camp, but only three made it to freedom and 50 were executed as punishment for trying.
Now the only remaining tunnel of the three they dug, codenamed Dick, has been found and excavated by archaeologists after lying undisturbed for six decades.
The other two routes, Harry - through which the actual escape took place - and Tom, were collapsed when discovered by the German Luftwaffe who ran the camp.
Dick, which was abandoned before completion, remained untouched.
Researchers scour Cuban records for clues to Calusa
After years of belief to the contrary, the once mighty Calusa Indians, who lived centuries ago in Southwest Florida, may not be extinct after all.
Nicknamed "The Fierce Ones," the Calusa Indians lived in Southwest Florida from around A.D. 100 to the early 1700s, when they were believed to have been killed off by invading Native American tribes, Spanish soldiers and foreign diseases such as smallpox. Their largest settlement in Florida was on Pine Island at Pineland, now the site of the Randell Research Center, which is conducting archaeological research on the settlement.
Anthropologist John Worth, Randell Research Center director, said that scholars long have believed that the Calusa were pushed east and south by invaders, and that no descendants of the Calusa live in Florida — nor anywhere else — today. But new information shows that a small band of between 60 to 70 Calusa refugees took to their boats and fled to Cuba in the 1760s, and others may have fled earlier.
Archaeologist recounts 1979 discovery of tomb that held oldest fragments of the Bible
NEW ORLEANS -- As often happens in other fields, the find of Gabriel Barkay's career as a biblical archaeologist rose at the intersection of careful calculation and happy accident -- provided in his case by a bored 12-year-old helper who whacked the stone floor of an Israelite burial vault with a heavy hammer.
His name was Nathan. Too scattered and mischievous to be of much help, he had been dispatched to clean a worked-over corner of Barkay's dig just outside the old city of Jerusalem, a largely overlooked archaeological site that Barkay thought might yield material for his dissertation.
What preservation!
