Monday, June 20, 2005

Last week's EEF news

Press report: "Them bones: is Alexander the Great buried in Venice?"
http://www.zoomata.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1093
"If a British historian is right, Italians in Venice have spent the last 400 years or so praying to conqueror Alexander the Great instead of city patron St. Mark."
(Note Andrew Chugg has a website dedicated to his theories about the tomb and body of Alexander; it makes the Egypt-connection clear (a mummy that was smuggled from Alexandria to Venice in AD828):
http://www.alexanderstomb.com/ )

Press report: "Roman walls unearthed in Luxor"
http://www.sis.gov.eg/online/html12/o160625u.htm
"Segments of Roman walls surrounding Luxor and Karnak temples have been discovered."

Press report: "SCA implements projects to treat subterranean water"
http://www.algomhuria.net.eg/gazette/4/1.asp
"The rise of subterranean water is a source of chronic headache for archaeologists in Egypt. With most sites across the country endangered by rising water levels, officials were forced to work out plans to reduce the already gathered water or, in the worst cases, to dismantle the monument and reconstruct it on higher ground."

(Saaaaay, here's what appears to be a truly fascinating bit of research)
[Submitted by Michael Tilgner]
* Online version of: Anthony J. Cagle, The Spatial Structure of Kom el-Hisn: An Old Kingdom Town in the Western Nile Delta, Egypt, Dissertation, University of Washington, 2001
http://www.acagle.net/dissertation/disspage.html
"Since very few Old Kingdom settlements have been excavated in any detail, especially in the Delta, Kom el-Hisn presents a unique opportunity to obtain a statistically valid sample of artifacts in association with intact architecture. The data for this study is based on excavations from two seasons, 1986 and 1988, which employed randomly placed 2-meter test pits and larger areas cleared and excavated room-by-room. The deposits used in this study were described and interpreted based on strict sedimentological principles rather than the inferred histories of the artifacts contained therein. This allowed spatial variation due to depositional processes to be controlled and differentiated from spatial variation due to functional or other factors. In addition, I have paid special attention to the artifact classes used in the analysis to ensure that the variation they exhibit is functional."

Online version of: Michael G. Hasel, The Structure of the Final Hymnic-Poetic Unit on the Merenptah Stela, in: ZAW, vol. 116, pp. 75-81 (2004) - pdf-file: 153 KB
http://www.degruyter.de/journals/zaw/2004/pdf/116_75.pdf
"The structure of the final hymnic-poetic unit on the Merenptah stela has been crucial in the current discussion over the origin of Israel. This study appraises the latest suggestion by J.K. Hoffmeier (1997) and seeks to combine the grammatical interpretation with terminological, geographical, and conceptual considerations. Rather than contradicting earlier proposals these latest grammatical observations enhance and even bolster the
interpretation that Israel was located within the region Canaan/Hurru and that it was an entity powerful enough to be mentioned alongside the major cities of Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yenoam."

Online version of: Timothy S. Gegg-Harrison, Ancient Egyptian Numbers: A CS-Complete Example, in: J. Gersting, R. McCauley (eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Charlotte, North Carolina, pp. 268-272, February 2001 (= ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 268-272 (2001) - pdf-file: 210 KB
http://cs.winona.edu/tgeggharrison/publications/sigcse01.pdf
"Approximately 4000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians used a numbering system that serves as a prototype CS-complete example. In this paper, we outline the use of the Egyptian numbering system as an example that naturally extends through CS1, CS2, and Discrete Mathematics."

Chris Peterson, Why is Archaeoastronomy Underrepresented in Egyptian Studies?, Lecture at the 2004 annual conference of the American Research Center in Egypt in Tucson, April 17, 2004
html: http://www.cloudbait.com/archaeo/arce2004.html
pdf (40 KB): http://www.cloudbait.com/archaeo/arce2004.pdf
"Astronomical knowledge forms a valuable component of the assembled body of knowledge for many ancient, stable, socially stratified civilizations ... However, aside from a few narrowly defined areas, the subject is largely ignored by the majority of researchers in Ancient Egyptian studies."

Matthew Joel Adams, Proposed Investigation of Flooded Archaeological Remains Beneath Lake Nasser, Paper presented at the 2nd MIT Conference on Technology, Archaeology, and the Deep Sea, April 26-28, 2002 - 7 pp., pdf-file: 22 KB
http://web.mit.edu/deeparch/www/events/2002conference/papers/Adams.pdf
"... I would like to focus this presentation specifically on opportunities that Lake Nasser has to offer for archaeological investigation ..."

Online version of: N. M. Swerdlow, O. E. Neugebauer (May 26, 1899 - February 19, 1990), in: Biographical Memoirs, vol. 75, 1998, pp. 214-239 html:
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/oneugebauer.html
pdf (150 KB):
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/oneugebauer.pdf
"Otto Neugebauer was the most original and productive scholar of the history of the exact sciences, perhaps of the history of science, of our age. He began as a mathematician, turned first to Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics, and then took up the history of mathematical astronomy, to which he afterward devoted the greatest part of his attention. In a career of sixty-five years, he to a great extent created our understanding of mathematical astronomy from Babylon and Egypt, through Greco-Roman antiquity, to India, Islam, and Europe of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Through his colleagues, students, and many readers, his influence on the study of the history of the exact sciences remains profound, even definitive."

Phillip Ashencraft, Excavating the World's First Business School, in: The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 13, No.1 February 2003 [?] - pdf-file: 95 KB
http://snipurl.com/fluc
"In discovering the pristine burial chamber of the master royal scribe Nar-Mer Hatshepsut in Karnak (circa 2600 B.C.), my colleagues and I have opened a truly unique window on our pedagogical past." - Humor.

End of EEF news.