Egyptian History

Dozens of Egyptian Tombs Will Be Unearthed at Saqqara Necropolis

Archaeologists found the entrance to the unexplored burial shaft earlier this week.

The unexplored tomb is one of 52 burial shafts clustered near the much older pyramid of the Pharaoh Teti. Workers at the site found the entrance to the latest shaft earlier this week as they were preparing to announce a slew of other finds at the site, including the tombs of military leaders and high-ranking courtiers, a copy of the Book of the Dead, and ancient board games. Also among the discoveries is the name of the owner of an elaborate mortuary temple near Teti’s pyramid: Narat or Naert, the pharaoh’s queen.
“I’d never heard of this queen before. Therefore we add an important piece of Egyptian history about this queen,” archaeologist and former Egyptian minister of antiquities Zahi Hawass told CBS News. Archaeologists first unearthed the stone temple in 2010, but it wasn’t clear who the grand structure had been built for. At mortuary temples like this one, priests and supplicants could make offerings to the dead queen to keep her comfortable in the afterlife—and ask her to help them out in this world.

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These pharaohs' private letters expose how politics worked 3,300 years ago

The Amarna Letters preserve an inside look at Egyptian diplomacy, revealing how power brokers maneuvered, alliances were forged, and pharaohs were flattered

SOMETIMES, ARCHAEOLOGISTS STUMBLE on not just one, or a few, but an entire cache of documents that utterly transforms their understanding of an ancient period, and whose fascinating details bring that distant time into sharp focus. The trove that transformed Egyptology is undoubtedly that of the Amarna Letters, 382 clay tablets considered the oldest documents of diplomacy ever found.
Written in the 14th century B.C., they consist of correspondence between the pharaohs and their rival kings, the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and Mitanni, as well as letters from puppet kings under Egyptian rule. Beginning in the reign of Amenhotep III (1390-1353 B.C.), Egypt’s great builder king, the archive also tracks the reign of his son, Akhenaten (1353-1336 B.C.), whose religious revolution convulsed ancient Egypt for a generation. The letters open a window into 18th-dynasty Egypt and give a detailed snapshot of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East in the Late Bronze Age, just as Egypt was consolidating its greatness and the new power of Assyria was beginning to flourish.
Revealing the writers’ flattery, arrogance, jealousy, and groveling, the letters also provide an insight into the developing complexity of international diplomacy. The growth of large empires jostling for supremacy had created the need for a system of rules, and the Amarna communiqués give historians unparalleled insights into how these early rules worked.

Museum of the Bible Returns Artifacts to Egypt

Egypt had asserted that the items were ferreted out amid the Arab Spring. The antiquities are among those at the museum lacking proper paperwork.

The Museum of the Bible in Washington, which has been bedeviled since its inception in 2017 by claims that it acquired thousands of biblical artifacts on the black market, has quietly repatriated 5,000 manuscripts and bits of papyrus to Egypt, which has long asserted the items were ferreted from the country in 2011 amid the upheavals of the Arab Spring.
Steve Green, chairman of the Bible Museum and a co-founder of the multibillion-dollar Hobby Lobby chain, had hinted at the return in March when he said that “several thousand items that likely originated from Iraq and Egypt, but for which there was insufficient reliable provenance information, would be returned to their countries of origin.”

The return is one of several instances in which the museum, under legal pressure, has been forced to repatriate antiquities lacking proper paperwork. Some 450 cuneiform tablets and 3,000 ancient seals known as bullae were sent back to Iraq in 2017, and Hobby Lobby paid $3 million in a settlement with the U.S. government.

In 2018, the museum announced that experts had concludes that five of 16 fragments said to have been part of the Dead Sea Scrolls were forgeries and removed them from display. (In 2020, the museum’s entire collection of scrolls was found to be fake.) The U.S. government has also seized an item known as the “Gilgamesh Dream Tablet,” which contains part of the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and was on loan to the museum. The government says the item, which the Hobby Lobby bought at Christie’s in 2014 for $1.6 million, was taken illegally from Iraq.