The site of Topdara near Charikar in Parwan province, was built around the 4th century AD. Since 2016 the Afghan Cultural Heritage Consulting Organization (ACHCO) has been restoring the sites massive stupa (a holy structure from the Buddhist era.) This stupa at Topdara has a diameter of 23 meters and would have originally been covered in white plaster. With support from the United States Embassy, ACHCO and the Archaeological Institute of Afghanistan will continue their valuable work to restore this important heritage site for Afghanistan and to continue archaeological excavations to better understand the site’s significance for Asia.

An ancient Egyptian tomb hidden away from public eyes for more than 80 years has opened near Giza, the home of the ancient pyramids. Archeologists believe that the 4,000-year-old Tomb of Mehu belonged to a high-ranking official. The team states that the colorful wall decorations shed light on how Egyptians lived more than a thousand years before the pyramids were constructed.

The tomb is one of the most beautiful in the Saqqara necropolis, an ancient burial ground south of Cairo, and in fact it was originally discovered back in 1940 by Egyptologist Zaki Saad, but was closed to the public until the recent completion of restoration work.

The tomb is the final resting place of Mehu, an offical who lived during the time of King Titi in the Sixth dynasty. The chambers also house Mery Re Ankh, Mehu’s son, and his grandson Hetep Kha II. Mehu’s tomb is notable for its colorful walls, adorned with vibrant drawings and inscriptions chronicling ancient Egyptian life. The Ministry of Antiquities notes the scenes include hunting, fishing, cooking and dancing. The tomb consists of long narrow corridor with six chambers.

The tomb is one of many ancient attractions in the Saqqara burial ground. The area has numerous other tombs and small pyramids, which Egyptian authorities are continuing to open up.

While Egypt’s tourism has suffered greatly over the last few years from the aftermath of the political upheaval and terrorism incidences, the latest UN’s Tourism Report in August 2018 highlighted Egypt as the fastest growing tourist destination in 2017, with a 55.1% growth in 2017 international arrivals.

Egypt archaeologists have discovered a “massive” ancient building in the town of Mit Rahina, 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, south of Cairo.

The Antiquities Ministry says Tuesday archaeologists also uncovered an attached building that includes a large Roman bath and a chamber likely for religious rituals.

Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, says the building is likely part of the residential block of the area, which was the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis.

Memphis, founded around 3,100 B.C., was home to Menes, the king who united Upper and Lower Egypt.

Egypt hopes such discoveries will spur tourism, partially driven by antiquities sightseeing, which was hit hard by political turmoil following the 2011 uprising.

Reporting by Muharrem Cin:Writing by Can Erozden

Turkish archeologists have found an eye cream jar in a 2,200-year-old tomb during their excavation works in an antique city of Aizanoi in country’s west.

Located in western Turkish province of Kutahya, the Aizanoi ancient city was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2012. The ancient city is also hosting the Temple of Zeus, the main sanctuary of Aizanoi.

Chief of the excavation works in Aizanoi, Prof. Dr. Elif Ozer told Anadolu Agency on Wednesday that they had important findings about funerary practices during their works in the ancient city’s “Necropolis” (cemetery).

Ozer said that they were digging the ancient city to find out the funerary practice of people living in Aizanoi during ancient times.

“We understood that people living in the second and first century Before Christ in Aizanoi were buried after getting cremated. These tombs are nearly 2,200 years old.”, she said.

Ozer stated that they found an eye cream jar named ‘lykion’ in a tomb. The eye cream was used for “Xerophthalmia” (eye dryness).

“We know this jar was used for keeping eye cream in Ancient Rome era,” she said, adding that the raw plant which was used for therapeutic purpose for eye dryness until the end of 18th century could be found in Lycia — in southern coast of Turkey — and India.

“When we read the texts of the writers from the ancient times, we can determine that this jar was used by soldiers,” Ozer said.

“Ancient sources say that Roman soldiers in Egypt used eye cream for eye dryness. We found this jar in a male’s tomb believed to be a soldier,” she added.

According to a belief in the ancient times, life continues after death, Ozer said and added that perhaps the relatives of this deceased put this jar into his grave considering he might need it after death.

She said the jar is now displayed in Kutahya Archaeology Museum.

A total of 55 people, including archaeology students, academics and workers are contributing in the excavation works, she added.

A stone cemetery was found roughly 300 meters northeast of the pyramid of King Senusert I, the Egyptian Antiquities Ministry announced on Wednesday.

It was discovered by an Egyptian archaeological excavation mission working in the Lisht, the site of the Middle Kingdom’s royal and elite burials.

Adel Okasha, director of the Central Department of Antiquities of Cairo and Giza, reported that the cemetery is carved on the rocky edge of a mountain, and consists of two areas.

The first is an open yard, leading to a vaulted corridor with some hieroglyphic inscriptions, and a cross-sectional hall. On its western side is a small compartment, decorated with traces of inscriptions.

The Department of Fine Restoration is now in the process of strengthening and repairing that part of the cemetery, according to Okasha.

The second area is a burial crypt, located in the open yard in front of the cemetery, with an area of 100 x 80 centimeters and at a depth of about 3 meters. Its western side has a passage leading to the first burial chamber.

According to Director of Dahshur and Lisht Antiquities Mohamed al-Daly, the southern side of the crypt contains an entrance which leads to chambers that will be uncovered in the mission’s next season of excavations.

The Antiquities Ministry states that the owner of the cemetery has not yet been identified, despite checks of inscriptions – but more work may enable the team to eventually name its owner.

Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm

Analyzing carbonate deposits from a second century AD Roman watermill site – thought to be one of the first industrial complexes in human history – has revealed characteristics of the mill, including its non-use for several months of the year. These findings suggest that the Barbegal mill site was not the Roman city of Arelate’s main flour supplier as hypothesized, but rather it was likely used to produce non-perishable “ship’s bread” for the many ancient ships that visited the major ports of Arles during certain times of the year. These findings shed light on the variable uses of ancient mills, as well as on their maintenance and on the destruction of the related sites, information that has otherwise been hard to decipher for these ancient formations. Over the past decades, the unearthing of Roman mill sites has offered proof of notable innovation during the Roman times, especially in the field of hydraulics. A key example of such a watermill is located at Barbegal, in southern France. However, since its discovery in 1937, little has been revealed about its unique history. Gül Sürmelihindi and colleagues sought to discern more about the mill’s use by analyzing 142 carbonate deposits from the complex. Formed on the now decayed wooden parts of the watermill that had been in contact with karst springs, these carbonates can preserve information of the environment of the complex. The fragment samples can be split into two groups: large carbonate slabs that formed in water channels that turned the wheel (millrun flumes) and deposits that had formed on the wooden part of the wheel. Stable isotope analyses of oxygen and carbon showed a distinct, cyclical pattern in the deposits, suggesting interruptions of the water flow during the late summer and autumn, a pattern of activity in accordance with Roman shipping activities, the authors say. Roman shipping usually halted in late autumn, meaning flour production to support shipping could have subsided then, too. Thus, they propose that the mill’s main use was not for widely consumed flour but specifically to produce non-perishable ship’s bread.

Read more: Daily News

By PATRICIA COHEN

Ralph Ellison wrote for 40 years without finishing his novel “Juneteenth.” Antoni Gaudí labored 43 years on the Sagrada Família basilica in Barcelona, but construction continues today. And in the annals of grand quixotica, Ehsan Yarshater also deserves a prominent chapter.

At 53, he embarked on his magnum opus, a definitive encyclopedia of Iranian history and culture. At 75, he started looking for a successor. He didn’t find one so he kept going himself. Now he’s 91. He’s up to “K.”

“My mission is to finish the encyclopedia,” he said recently from his office at Columbia University’s Center for Iranian Studies. He knows he won’t be able to do it personally, especially since the task keeps expanding as progress is made. There are topics to be added and entries to be updated. So Mr. Yarshater has tried to make sure the work will continue by establishing a private foundation with a $12 million endowment and finally choosing three scholars to replace him as general editor.

The sheer ambition of Mr. Yarshater’s vision is daunting. With money from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has worked to create the most comprehensive account of several millenniums of Iranian history, language and culture in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia.

“There is nothing like it” in scope or quality, said Ali Banuazizi, a professor at Boston College and a former president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.

Unlike a conventional encyclopedia, which briefly summarizes existing knowledge, Mr. Yarshater’s work, Encyclopedia Iranica, is producing original scholarship. “Most of the articles require research,” said Mr. Banuazizi, because they are topics no one has studied in much depth.

Mr. Yarshater has raised the bar further. “Our aim is that for each subject,” he said, “we should find the best person in the entire world.” With that in mind, he has been searching two and a half years for an expert to write about Sirjan and Rafsanjan, townships in the south of Iran.

Mr. Yarshater has not been back to Iran in 32 years, ever since the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran and established an Islamic republic in 1979. “The encyclopedia’s impartiality does not please the current Persian government,” Mr. Yarshater said in a low, breathy voice. A troublesome tremor that started in his hand several years ago has moved to his knees and vocal cords, slowing him down and compelling him to use an assistant. But otherwise he feels healthy. “My immune system is excellent,” he boasted.

For years Mr. Yarshater’s routine was to work late into the night, coming home only when his wife walked down the hallway from their apartment to the Iranian center to fetch him. “I don’t know many wives who would tolerate that,” he said appreciatively. (She died in 1999; the couple had no children.)

“I’ve seen him work 12 hours without a break,” said Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, director of the Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, who has known Mr. Yarshater for more than 40 years. He remembers a visit when Mr. Yarshater stayed up until 3 a.m. editing. Three hours later, he was in the shower, getting ready to return to work.

Mr. Yarshater expects others to have equal enthusiasm for the task. It took him 17 years to choose his replacements, rejecting one potential successor when he concluded that the man was “too concerned about the number of holidays he could take and the number of hours he would work.”

Now Mr. Yarshater works only until 9 p.m., staying long after his colleagues have turned off their lights. When he returns home, he indulges in his latest hobby: learning Russian.

The 1,480 contributors from around the world who, so far, have composed 6,500 entries are familiar with Mr. Yarshater’s relentlessness. “By hook or by crook, he gets you to do what he wants you to do,” Mr. Karimi-Hakkak said. (Eight hundred entries out of alphabetical order are posted in an online version.)

The managing editor, Ahmad Ashraf, said he spent a year working on an entry on social class. He received a $1,000 honorarium for his effort. “We are working here on half salary,” he said. “This is just a love of the work.”

Editing can be brutal. Until recently Mr. Yarshater meticulously checked and revised every entry. “Maybe I’m a faultfinder,” he conceded. He tries to praise colleagues and assistants, but said “it is not in my nature.”

Because the encyclopedia is primarily a scholarly reference tool, every fact must have multiple sources. “He wanted me to write several hundred entries,” said Roy Mottahedeh, a professor at Harvard. “I wrote one.”

As Mr. Mottahedeh noted, Mr. Yarshater is the last of a generation of scholars who believed it possible to master the grand sweep of human history, along with several languages.

Before Mr. Yarshater embarked on the encyclopedia, he traveled throughout Iran, studying obscure dialects, and wrote a groundbreaking work in linguistics. In the 1950s he took Western classics to his countrymen by establishing a translation and publishing institute.

“I remember growing up in Iran and reading these books,” Mr. Banuazizi said.

In 1961 Mr. Yarshater was appointed to teach Iranian studies at Columbia, the first full-time professor of Persian at an American university since World War II. He is known for a series of immense undertakings: He was the general editor of a 40-volume translation of al-Tabari’s 10th-century history of the world; editor of some of the Cambridge History of Iran; and the founding editor of a classic multivolume series on Persian history and language. In the mid-1990s he was troubled that Persian poetry — in his view, his people’s greatest cultural contribution — was being ignored. Most English speakers are familiar with Omar Khayyam, but they do not know about the 13th-century Rumi or the 10th-century Ferdowsi, who wrote “Shahnameh,” a national epic of 50,000 couplets.

So he embarked on a new 20-volume collection of Persian literature. “That was when I realized I was suffering from a kind of disease,” he said with a smile. “If something is to be done, I have a feeling that I should start doing it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/books/ehsan-yarshaters-encyclopedia-of-iranian-history.html