News from the EEF
Press report: "Hand writing center follows unique line"
http://www.sis.gov.eg/online/html12/o170325y.htm
"The Handwriting Centre, affiliated to Bibliotheca Alexandrina, is the first centre of its kind to take an interest in all types of hand writings through all ages from pre-historic until modern times. The
center's short plan includes an exhibition for writing in Egypt throughout ages."
Press report: "AEARC's valuable work"
http://www.sis.gov.eg/online/html12/o170325x.htm
About the Ancient Egyptian Art Revival Centre, affiliated with the SCA, that aims at producing replicas and drawings of ancient art.
Press report: "Students mummify birds. Class helps explain Egyptian practice".
http://snipurl.com/dmyo
"Melissa Saad's sixth-grade classes at Mariner Middle School got up-close and personal with the ancient Egyptian practice of mummification this year. As part of their social studies class, students mummified chickens." [Lets hope the Curses of King Cluck and Queen Chickapatra will not go haunt the school's soccer field...;)]
Melissa Terras, "Towards a Reading of the Vindolanda Stylus Tablets - Engineering Science and the Papyrologist", in: Human IT 2-3/2000. In HTML.
http://www.hb.se/bhs/ith/23-00/mt.htm#kap4
About "a collaborative project between the Department of Engineering Science and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents at the University of Oxford regarding the analysis and reading of the Vindolanda Stylus
Tablets. We sketch the imaging and image processing techniques used to digitally capture and analyse the tablets, the development of the image analysis tools to aid papyrologists in the transcription of the texts, and
lessons that can be learned so far from such an inter-disciplinary project."
Online version of: M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Ian Barnes, Matthew J. Collins, Colin Smith, Julie Eklund, Jaap Goudsmit, Hendrik Poinar, Alan Cooper, Long-Term Survival of Ancient DNA in Egypt: Response to Zink and Nerlich (2003), in: American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 126 (2005), article online in advance of print - 5 pp., pdf-file: 70 KB
http://snipurl.com/dmyw
"We ... wish to reassert the premise that in most, if not all, ancient Egyptian remains, aDNA does not survive to a level that is currently retrievable."
See also the thesis of M. Thomas P. Gilbert, An Assessment of the Use of Human Samples in Ancient DNA Studies, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, 2003 with a chapter "The long-term survival of ancient DNA in
Egypt", pp. 237-248 - (12), 327 pp., pdf-file: 9.3 MB http://eebweb.arizona.edu/PostDocs/Gilbert/tom_web/papers/Gilbert_thesis.pdf
"This thesis addresses gaps that exist in the theory and knowledge of ancient DNA (aDNA). Much of the underlying basis of the field has been neglected in the excitement that followed the first aDNA studies. Therefore the results of many studies have been based on untested assumptions about the nature of post mortem DNA damage, sample preservation, contamination, and the efficacy of sample decontamination techniques. The validity of such results is questionable if the assumptions prove false."
Online version of: Albert R. Zink, Andreas G. Nerlich, Long-Term Survival of Ancient DNA in Egypt: Reply to Gilbert et al., in: American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 126 (2005), article online in advance of print - 4 pp., pdf-file: 60 KB
http://eebweb.arizona.edu/PostDocs/Gilbert/tom_web/papers/Zink_Nerlich05.pdf
"On a theoretical basis, they [Marota et al.] had calculated an upper limit for aDNA preservation in ancient Egyptian biomaterial of about 700-800 years. They suggested that any molecular research on ancient Egyptian DNA
would be meaningless, as no retrievable aDNA can be expected. In our comment on that paper, we identified several points that indicated a significantly better preservation of Egyptian aDNA than had been assumed by Marota et al."
End of EEF news