It has been reported that 150 ancient artifacts will be displayed in a major exhibition commemorating the centenary of the discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb. The largest collection of the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s treasures to ever travel out of Egypt will be displayed at the Saatchi Gallery in London later this year. Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh (2 November 2019-3 May 2020) will commemorate the centenary of the discovery of the ancient-Egyptian ruler’s tomb with original 150 artifacts to go on display, 60 of which have never travelled outside of Egypt.

The show started by opening in March 2018 at the California Science Centre in Los Angeles before travelling to La Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris (1 March-31 September). The exhibition will tour 10 cities in total. Among the exhibited works will be a golden canopic coffinette used to house Tuttenkhamun’s mummified stomach, and a 5cm-tall golden statue (1336-1326BC) which contemporary scholars now believe to be a likeness for Tutanhkhamun rather than his grandfather as was originally thought.

These ancient artifacts, which were housed in the nearly-intact tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun, were discovered in 1922 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter. Previous exhibitions in London have drawn record crowds of over one million visitors each in both 1972 and 2007. Both these shows contained less than 55 artifacts from the tomb, roughly a third of the number of works which will be displayed in this exhibition.

The proceeds from this exhibition will help support the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo which is expected to open in 2020. Upon the show’s conclusion, Tutankhamun’s artifacts will return to Egypt and be permanently displayed in the museum.

A New exhibition presents documents that creates the foundations for reconstruction of the city of Aleppo and other sites ruined by civil war in Syria. The efforts behind this exhibition actually started a while back by a Syrian archeologist who left Aleppo in September 2012. This was weeks before the all flights from the airport were suspended. Rami Alafandi spent the next five years in Malaysia working on a doctorate focused on the ornately decorated Ottoman-era wood panelling in 12 stately Aleppo houses. From there he went to Berlin, where his research could support preparations for the reconstruction of his homeland’s heritage.

Alafandi had taken hundreds of photographs and video footage of the Aleppine houses between 2006 and 2010. His pre-war photographs of buildings such as Beit Ghazaleh, a 17th-century house that was restored in 2009-10, actually suffered major during the war. Alafandi is now working with a team working on an initiative called Aleppo Built Heritage Documentation, a sub-division of the Syrian Heritage Archive Project, led by Berlin’s Museum of Islamic Art and the German Archaeological Institute as reported by several news outlets. An exhibition opening on 28 February, 2019 at Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum will be a major showcase for the Syrian Heritage Archive Project’s work.

The exhibition will present some of these documents, photographs along with films and interactive screens. In particular, the exhibition will be “a virtual voyage of discovery” through Syrian heritage, concentrating on the cities of Damascus and Aleppo, Palmyra, Raqqa and the so-called “dead cities”, a group of around 700 abandoned settlements in the north west.

The project which is the first of its kind is funded by the German foreign office, the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This project is the largest repository of information on Syrian heritage outside the country with more than 200,000 photographs, as well as archaeological reports, maps, plans, drawings and oral testimonies according to Stefan Weber, the director of the Museum of Islamic Art and actually a former resident of Damascus. The project which is also crowdsourced includes documents which come from researchers such as Alafandi and private and public historic archives, as well as Syrian residents and refugees. Weber says that ultimately, the Syrian Heritage Archive Project seeks to “provide a foundation for rebuilding in the future” as reported by The Art Newspaper.

At this time, the project has 15 full-time employees, nine of whom are Syrian and two half-Syrian. The team has sent data packages on heritage sites to UNESCO, including a report on the missing wooden panels at Beit Ghazaleh. The team believes that the wooden panels were removed to be sold in the international black market for heritage artifacts. This has been given to Interpol and the International Council of Museums in the hope that the panels resurface on the art market and can be returned.

The hope is that this project could be a conduit for rebuilding many Syrian sites and cities including Palmyra and Aleppo. Aleppo is in need of urgent reconstruction priority as the population and economic life return according to Stefan Weber. Aleppo which has been a World Heritage site since 1986, the city has been inhabited continually for more than 5,000 years, and was a hub on many key trade routes from the second millennium BC. Researchers believe that in the 16th century, the city was the same size as London.

In January 2018, the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums surveyed 170 buildings and reported for UNESCO, 9% were completely destroyed and a further 24% were mainly destroyed. Weber actually compared Aleppo with Berlin after the Second World War: “It is not as bad as Berlin was in 1945, but there have been heavy losses”.

Since the European Union has established sanctions against Assad’s regime, no funding from EU has so far been allocated to the project. But some projects financed by other sources have started: the Chechen government is funding the rebuilding of the partially damaged Umayyad Mosque, one of Aleppo’s oldest and largest mosques. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), which maintained a limited presence in the city during the war, is helping to restore the Al-Saqatiyya souk.

• The Cultural Landscape of Syria: Preservation and Archiving in Times of War, Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, 28 February-26 May

Archeologists reported recently that hundreds of stone structures dating back thousands of years have been discovered in the Western Sahara. The structures are in all sizes and shapes, and archaeologists aren’t sure what they were used for or when they were created. As reported in several news outlets, between 2002 and 2009, archaeologists worked in the field surveying the landscape and doing some excavation in the part of Western Sahara that is controlled by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. The result of their excavations and surveys has been published in a book “The Archaeology of Western Sahara: A Synthesis of Fieldwork, 2002 to 2009” (Oxbow Books, 2018).
About 75 percent of the Western Saharan territory, including most of the coastline, is controlled by Morocco, while 25 percent is controlled by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and this territory in Africa has been little explored in the past as before 1991, the two governments were in a state of war.
The archeologist state that the archaeological map of Western Sahara remains almost blank as there has been very limited amount of work done in that area. The editors of the book, Joanne Clarke, a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia, and Nick Brooks, an independent researcher state that people living in the area know of the stone structures, and some work has been done by Spanish researchers on rock art in Western Sahara.
The stone structures are designed in a wide variety of ways. Some are shaped like crescents, others form circles, some are in straight lines, some in rectangular shapes that look like a platform; some structures consist of rocks that have been piled up into a heap. And some of the structures use a combination of these designs. For instance, one structure has a mix of straight lines, stone circles, a platform and rock piles that altogether form a complex about 2,066 feet (630 meters) long, the archaeologists noted in the book.
Though the archaeologists are unsure of the purpose of many of the structures, they said some of them may mark the location of graves. Little excavation has been done on the structures, and archaeologists have found few artifacts that can be dated using a radiocarbon method. Among the few excavated sites are two “tumuli” (heaps of rock) that contain human burials dating back around 1,500 years as reported in Live Science.
Researchers suggest that Western Sahara was once a wetter place that could sustain more animal life than it does today. Archaeologists documented rock art showing images of cattle, giraffe, oryx and Barbary sheep while environmental researchers found evidence for lakes and other water sources that dried up thousands of years ago.
Currently, there are security problems in the region and as a result fieldwork cannot go in uninterrupted and at this point has stopped. In 2013, the terrorist group al-Qaeda which operates in the desert regions near Western Sahara, kidnapped two Spanish aid workers at a refugee camp in Tindouf, Algeria, just across the border from Western Sahara. While the Sahrawi people and Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic strongly oppose the terrorist group, it’s extremely difficult for authorities to effectively patrol the desert areas where the stone structures are located.

In the first of 2019 archeological find a joint mission between the Research Centre for Archaeological Studies of Minya University and other Egyptian archeologists unearthed a Pharaonic tomb at Tuna el-Gebel site.

The team of archaeologists uncovered a Pharaonic tomb containing 50 mummies dating back to the Ptolemaic era (323-30BC) about 2000 years ago , in Minya, south of Cairo. The mummies, 12 of which were of children, were discovered inside four, nine-metre-deep burial chambers in the Tuna el-Gebel archaeological site. The team is still trying to decipher what the identities of the mummies were, however they stated that from the mummification method they believe that the individuals whose remains were found had to some extent held important or prestigious positions.

The Guardian newspaper which first reported on this finding also reports that visitors, including ambassadors from several countries, gathered at the discovery site where 40 of the mummies were exhibited during the announcement ceremony. Some of the mummies were found wrapped in linen while others were placed in stone coffins or wooden sarcophagi.

The researchers – who are with the University of Witwatersrand – have been studying the site in the Suikerbosrand National Park for decades.

But it was not until cutting-edge laser technology known as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) became available in recent years that they were able to study the ruins in detail from above, and discovered that what they thought was only a scattering of ancient stone huts, turned out to be a veritable city.

“LiDAR data is enabling us to do, actually to map and track what was happening in these towns, because there is no written record of them. So we’re basically rediscovering and rediscovering the use, and what this means is filling a huge historical gap especially for Southern Africa, because you know pre-colonial history of Southern Africa has no written record, so now we starting to fill in the gaps using this LiDAR technology,” said Fern Imbali Sixwanha, a PhD candidate who is part of the team studying Kweneng.

Professor Karim Sadr has been exploring the area for 30 years but says the vegetation was too thick so he commissioned a LiDAR aerial survey to get a better look.

LiDAR essentially employs lasers to measure distances to the earth’s surface which is especially useful when surveying areas with thick ground cover.

“Scanning machine that sends out laser light and basically bombards the landscape, I mean billions and billions of pulses of laser lights something like four or five hundred per square meter, just all time coming out, and as soon as each pulse hits an object, any solid object, a bird or a leaf or a tree or the ground, it reflects straight back to the machine and then the machine can figure it out where that interception took place in three dimensions. So when the plane collects all of this data, masses of it, and it comes down to ground, download the data, then they can project that data,” said Karim Sadr, professor at the School of Geography, Archaeology, and Environmental Studies at the University of Witwatersrand.

Studies now reveal that Kweneng, which spanned about 20 square kilometres, was at its prime between the 15th and 19th century.

LiDAR has also enabled archaeologists to create digital images of the 800 homesteads and other structures that housed the city’s estimated population of 10,000 Tswana-speaking people.

“If you create a game and kids can play around with the context of knowing that is the heritage and having a sense of what was been there and the sort of the housing structure and architecture which was there,” said Witness Mudzamatira, one of the researchers.

“One of the most enlightening things is, as I’ve been able to understand what we were doing in our past you know, it gives us more broader idea of the people of southern Africa who they were and the types of activities that they did because you can now rediscover that activity line and just general interaction within the society,” added Sixwanha.

Kweneng – like other Tswana city-states – is believed to have gone into decline after civil conflict.

http://www.africanews.com