By Owen Jarus

A new virtual reality experience may help save an ancient Egyptian tomb built for Queen Nefertari whose paintings are so beautiful that it has been compared to Italy’s Sistine Chapel.

Built around 3,250 years ago for the favorite wife of pharaoh Ramesses II (who reigned from 1279 B.C. to 1213 B.C.), the Tomb of Nefertari is located in the Valley of the Queens, near Luxor. The tomb is open to just small groups of visitors, because the increase in humidity that comes when people enter can damage its paintings.

At present small groups of tourists are allowed into the tomb, each tourist paying an entrance fee of 1000 Egyptian pounds (about $56) said Zahi Hawass, an archaeologist and former Minister of State for Antiquities. [In Photos: The Mummy of Queen Nefertari of Egypt]

Between 1986 and 1992 the Getty Institute, working with Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities, restored the tomb, which has suffered damage from salt incrustations, bacteria and fungi. Rising humidity can lead to increases in bacteria and fungi, researchers have found. “When I started the project with the Getty, we all agreed that we cannot open the tomb to the public. But we can open it to groups who would pay a high fee,” Hawass told Live Science, adding that each person pays 1,000 Egyptian pounds (about $56) to enter.

“A virtual tour will save the tomb,” Hawass said.

Capturing the tomb

To create the virtual reality experience, Experius VR teamed up with Curiosity Stream, a streaming service for documentaries.  

Viewers will be able to virtually walk through Nefertari’s tomb in ancient Egypt.

Credit: Curiosity Stream

Three people from Experius VR spent two days in the Nefertari tomb, 3D-scanning it and taking thousands of overlapping high-resolution images, said Elliott Mizroch, the CEO and co-founder of ExperiusVR. The team then spent two months in post-production, turning the 3D scan and photographs into a virtual reality experience.

The finished tour can now be downloaded for free on Steam and on Viveport and Curiosity Stream VR although currently you need the Vive headset to view it, said Emma Tiernon, a spokesperson for Curiosity Stream, adding that the team hopes to configure the tour so that it can be viewed on other headsets.

In this VR tour, the viewer moves around the tomb by wearing the 3D headset and using controls. If the viewer wants more information on a work of art, for instance, they can virtually touch the painting and a narrator will provide information. 

Growing trend

Nefertari’s tomb is one of a growing number of historical sites that are being saved in the virtual world. In April, Google announced it was partnering with a company called Cyark to scan historical monuments.

While the virtual reality tour of Nefertari’s tomb shows the tomb as it appears today, some try to recreate a site as it looked thousands of years ago, such as a virtual tour of ancient Jerusalem released in 2017 by a company called Lithodomos VR.

While it still takes a lot of time to create a vivid virtual reality tour of an historical site — the tour of Nefertari’s tomb took two months — the process is expected to become faster as virtual reality and holography technologies improve, Tiernon said, adding that Curiosity Stream plans to help create more virtual tours of historical sites. 

“As virtual reality continues to improve and become more readily available, these tools will have the power to transcend today’s production capabilities and transport audiences to places that we once thought unimaginable,” said Jorge Franzini, executive producer of Curiosity Stream.

Originally published on Live Science.

The Ministry of Antiquities is set to announce the discovery of a number of mummies and embalming equipment at the Saqqara necropolis on Saturday.
The ministry told Ahram Online that the discovery includes a collection of inscribed mummification vessel measuring cups.
A communal burial shaft was also discovered where a large number of mummies were buried.
The mummies were buried in both wooden coffins and large sarcophagi, and amulets, gemstones and precious metal objects were found.
A golden mask that was discovered will be displayed along with other objects during a press conference held by the ministry on Saturday.
The discovery was made in collaboration with a German archaeological mission, close to the Pyramid of Unas.

Excavation work at a Bronze Age burial site in southeast Turkey has unearthed the graves of several youth, in what archeologists believe may be the earliest child sacrifice site in the region.

Haluk Sağlamtimur of Turkey’s Ege Unversity and Brenna Hassett of the Natural History Museum in London oversaw the excavation of the 5,000-year-old site called Başur Höyük, in Turkey’s southeastern Siirt province.

In large, coffin-like tombs, the researchers identified the remains of 11 male and females ranging from age 11 to 20, including two 12-year-olds, and a young adult whose remains may have come from an earlier burial.

Sağlamtimur and Hassett believe the young people may have been sacrificed, due to evidence of sharp force trauma by stabbing or cutting on several skeletons and the horde of riches buried along with them. Textiles, beads, ceramics and hundreds of bronze spearheads were found in and around the tomb.

The sacrifices may have been “retainers,” people chosen to accompany and serve the dead in the afterlife.

“The burials are remarkable because of the youth of the individuals, the number that were buried and the large wealth of objects that were buried with them,” Hassett said. “Women and children in Mesopotamia were occasionally buried with grave goods, but they were normally personal belongings.”

“It is unlikely that these children and young people were killed in a massacre or conflict. The careful positioning of the bodies and the evidence of violent death suggest that these burials fit the same pattern of human sacrifice seen at other sites in the region,” Hassett said.

However, due to poor preservation of the burial chamber, Hassett and Sağlamtimur could only surmise the cause of death. They guessed some of the dead may have been killed by wounds to the fleshy parts of the body, which would not leave lasting marks on remains.

“As a grim example, stab wounds are normally aimed at the soft parts of the body, which do not preserve,” Hassett said.

Başur Höyük contains the remains of people buried between 3100 and 2800 BCE. The site is believed to be 500 years older than the Royal Cemetery of Ur, the elaborate tombs where Mesopotamian rulers were laid to rest.

“Previously, the most well-known example of human sacrifice from this area is the monumental discovery of the Royal Cemetery of Ur, where hundreds of burials were identified as sacrifices,” Hassett said, adding that the child graves at Başur Höyük resemble those of sacrifice sites at Ur.

Historians believe child sacrifice was used as a means of population control as ancient societies grew larger and more complex.

“It has been suggested that practicing human sacrifice was one of the ways that complex civilizations like the one that rose up in Mesopotamia consolidated their power,” she explained.

“This discovery moves the investigation 500 years earlier and more than 500 miles to the north,” Hassett added.

The excavation also unearthed a mysterious mass grave containing at least 50 bodies.

The history of the Near East region – including modern-day Iraq, parts of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Kuwait – begins from about 4,000 B.C. It is considered the cradle of western society.

https://www.dailysabah.com/history

Archaeologists disagree on when the first humans arrived in America, but we all pretty much agree that the Clovis culture represents the earliest large-scale occupation of North America. The culture is named for Clovis, New Mexico, where the highly distinctive Clovis spear point was first found in direct association with the bones of the extinct mammoth.

More than 1,000 Clovis points have been recorded in Ohio, many more than most other states, so this must have been a paradise for Ice Age hunters. Most of Ohio’s Clovis points are made of Upper Mercer flint, which can be found in abundance in Coshocton County, so it’s not surprising that more Clovis points have been found there than in any other Ohio county.

The Welling site, located along the Walhonding River about 12 miles west of Coshocton, was studied by the late Olaf Prufer of Kent State University back in the 1960s. From this single site, he documented 54 Clovis points in various stages of manufacture, along with numerous other flint tools.

Prufer believed that Welling was a workshop where small groups of Clovis people would periodically come to make flint tools before heading off to hunt mammoths and mastodons in the flatlands of central Ohio. A new study of the tools found at Welling suggests that Welling was much more than just a workshop.

Read more:

http://www.dispatch.com/news/20180701/archaeology-ancient-clovis-hunters-drawn-to-ohio-flint

According The UNESCO Eight archaeological sites situated in three geographical parts in the southeast of Fars Province: Firuzabad, Bishapur and Sarvestan. These fortified structures, palaces, and city plans date back to the earliest and latest times of the Sassanian Empire, which stretched across the region from 224 to 658 CE. Among these sites is the capital built by the founder of the dynasty, Ardashir Papakan, as well as a city and architectural structures of his successor, Shapur I. The archaeologic landscape reflects the optimized utilization of natural topography and bears witness to the influence of Achaemenid and Parthian cultural traditions and of Roman art, which had a significant impact on the architecture and artistic styles of the Islamic era.

It was just reported earlier today by BBC that UNESCO has removed the Belize Barrier Reef from its list of endangered World Heritage Sites after nine years.  It said that the government of the Central American country has taken “visionary” steps to preserve its coral Barrier Reef from further damage. The Belize Barrier Reef is the second largest in the world after Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and it is home to many threatened species including marine turtles, manatees and the American marine crocodile.

UNESCO added the reef to its list of world heritage sites in 1996 but it was in danger in 2009 following plans by the Belize government to allow oil exploration in nearby waters.  UNESCO has been urging Belize to put safeguards in place to protect what Charles Darwin described as “the most remarkable reef in the West Indies”.

In 2012, Environmentalists organized an informal referendum in which 96% of those who took part voted against offshore oil activity.  Just last year, in December 2017, lawmakers passed a landmark moratorium on oil exploration in Belizean waters, which makes it one of only a handful of countries in the world with such legislation.

At UNESCO’s meeting earlier this month, in Bahrain, UNESCO praised Belize’s “visionary plan to manage the coastline”, saying that “the level of conservation we hoped for has been achieved”. This is a remarkable step for Belize which hoped that the country’s oil revenue would greatly help the economy in a country where the standard of living among many people is still low. The decision came just under a year after UNESCO opted not to place the Great Barrier Reef on its “in danger” list, arguing that Australia had taken action to preserve it too.

After several months of silence, officials at the Cultural Heritage Organization have finally revealed this week that a dam built 2500 years ago has been deliberately destroyed.

Achaemenid Dam, known as the “Bostan Khani,” is registered in the Iranian National Heritage List.

The dam was built during the reign of Cyrus the Great, and were preserved until the advent of the Islamic Republic. The remains are now destroyed due to policies of negligence towards non-Shia and non-religious monuments.

The dam was located on a branch of the Pulwar River, near Pasargad. Archaeologists believe that this unique work was designed to contain floods and store large amounts of water for public use as well as use in agriculture and horticulture. In fact, this historic barrier resembles modern engineering systems of water management, i.e. the same engineering and management endeavors that Iran has been lacking during the Islamic Republic due to inability, neglect, and profit-seeking attitudes of government officials.

The Achaemenid Dam, with its iron structures, was once damaged in the seventies by a local landowner, and the remnants of this damage were completely wiped out only recently.

This time, those who destroyed the dam were more equipped with tools such as bulldozers, tractors, loaders, and performed their work in a few days. Cultural Heritage officials say they have not been informed of these actions for a long time.

It is quite clear that, as always, the Cultural Heritage Organization is not ready to share the facts of such cases of the non-religious cultural and historical devastation with the people of Iran.

Earlier this month (June 2018) Italian scholars claim they have unearthed the first known piece by Renaissance genius Leonardo Da Vinci.  The piece which has been named  “The Archangel Gabriel,” a painted glazed tile, was signed and dated by an artist believed to be the 18-year-old Da Vinci.

The scholar’s claim is based on a signature and date painted in the angel’s jaw line, barely visible to the naked eye. It reads “Da Vinci Leonardo,” with the apparent date of authorship; “1471.”  Earlier this month, after three years of scientific and artistic investigations, Professor Ernesto Solari, an art historian and expert on the works of Da Vinci, along with Ivana Rosa Bonfantino, a handwriting expert, announced that this could be the first known work produced by Da Vinci.

As reported by CNN, the glazed tile was found by the descendants of the aristocratic Fenice family of Ravello, Italy. It is believed that the family did not know the origins of the piece or that it was even a Da Vinci, but, they realized it was something that shone a bit brighter than the other things they found when cleaning out the house, and that is when they called the experts to verify and find out who the artist might have been.

Bonfantino who has examined many historical handwriting samples, analyzed a number of Leonardo’s work, noting that his penmanship evolved from his youth, but claimed that the “match was very close” between different examples and the one found on the tile.

The scholars find this finding very exciting as they now have a glimpse into the work that Da Vinci did as a young man. It is thanks to the descendants of the family that found the artistic piece that the scholars can now attribute the work to Da Vinci.

“My hope is that it remains in Italy — it is part of our national heritage,” said Professor Solari, according to CNN.

Archeologists hail extraordinary find of suspected ‘Hun woman’ with a jet gemstone buckle on her beaded belt.

The ancient woman was buried wearing a silk skirt with a funeral meal. Picture: Marina Kilunovskaya

After a fall in the water level, the well-preserved mummy was found this week on the shore of a giant reservoir on the Yenisei River upstream of the vast Sayano-Shushenskaya dam, which powers the largest power plant in Russia and ninth biggest hydroelectric plant in the world.

The ancient woman was buried wearing a silk skirt with a funeral meal – and she took a pouch of pine nuts with her to the afterlife. 

In her birch bark make-up box, she had a Chinese mirror.

Near her remains – accidentally mummified – was a Hun-style vase. 

‘The lower part of the body was especially well preserved.’ Pictures: Marina Kilunovskaya

A team of archeologists from St Petersburg’s Institute of History of Material Culture (Russian Academy of Sciences) working on the shoreline in Tyva Republic spotted a rectangle-shaped stone construction which looked like a burial. 

‘The mummy was in quite a good condition, with soft tissues, skin, clothing and belongings intact,’ said a scientist. 

Natalya Solovieva, the institute’s deputy director, said: ‘On the mummy are what we believe to be silk clothes, a beaded belt with a jet buckle, apparently with a pattern. 

Archeologist Dr Marina Kilunovskaya said: ‘During excavations, the mummy of a young woman was found on the shore of the reservoir.

‘The lower part of the body was especially well preserved … 

‘This is not a classic mummy – in this case, the burial was tightly closed with a stone lid, enabling a process of natural mummification.’

Astonishingly, the grave’s contents were preserved despite being underwater for long periods since the dam became operational in the 1980s. 

Scientists believe the woman was buried between 1,900 and 2,000 years ago though further tests are needed to date remains.

A Hun-style vase was found near her remains, leading archaeologists to speculate she was a member of the nomadic group, who dominated much of central Europe and Asia between the fourth and sixth centuries AD.

The Huns established their short-lived empire after spreading rapidly from China, and are believed to have contributed to the collapse of the western Roman Empire during the fifth century.

By The Siberian Times reporter

https://siberiantimes.com