CAIRO Jan 29 (Reuters) – Looters broke into the Egyptian Museum during anti-government protests late on Friday and destroyed two Pharaonic mummies, Egypt’s top archaeologist told state television.

[snip]

The two-storey museum, built in 1902, houses tens of thousands of objects in its galleries and storerooms, including most of the King Tutankhamen collection.

The museum is adjacent to the National Democratic Party’s headquarters, around whom the protests are centered. It makes sense that the headquarters and the museum would be come linked in the minds of the protestors.

It’s like Iraq all over again.

Amenhotep III was the father of Amenhotep IV, aka Akhenaten, the heretic king who instituted what might have been the world’s first recorded attempt at monotheism, moved his capital to the new city of Akhetatan (modern Tel Amarna), and is well known to most historians because of the copious Akkadian tablets that his son Tutankhamen (originally name Tutankhaten) left behind in that city when he moved his capital back to Thebes after his father’s death, tablets that provide a incalculably important window into the political situation of the ancient Near East in the Late Bronze Age. All that to say, from an historian’s point of view Amenhotep III’s claim to fame was having sired the heretic king… or not.

Every report of the finding of Amenhotep III’s visage has had words to the affect of those by Carol Whyte at Examiner.com:

A team of archaeologists headed by Dr. Hourig Sourouzian, discovered the head of King Tut’s grandfather, Amenhotep III, who ruled from 1387 – 1348 B.C.

Now of course, this is statement is accurate. However, I am still miffed that King Tut seems to be more the Egyptian superstar than his illustrious father.

Queen Nefertiti (c.1370 B.C.-1330 B.C.) is one of the most famous figures of the ancient world, and all because of a single work of art: a limestone bust owned by the museums of Berlin. Hers is one of the best-known faces in art, enjoying almost Mona Lisa status. Last week it was reported that two separate authors, the Swiss historian Henri Stierlin and Berlin-based Erdogan Ercivan, believe it is an early-20th-century work.

How crazy a world is it where folks are asserting that the Shroud of Turing is real and that the Nefertiti bust is a forgery. Wild.

(HT: Dr. Claude Mariottini)

The cover story in the April 2009 issue of National Geographic is on Hatshepsut, a female Pharaoh from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt.

Daughter of Thutmose I and consort of her half-brother Thutmose II, Hatshepsut assumed the role of Pharaoh and ruled Egypt for more than twenty years (c. 1479-1458 BCE) before the reign of her stepson, Thutmose III. The article covers her reign, her stepson’s deliberate attempts to erase her from history and  recent events leading to a probable identification of her mummy.

She was one of the greatest builders in one of the greatest Egyptian dynasties. She raised and renovated temples and shrines from the Sinai to Nubia. The four granite obelisks she erected at the vast temple of the great god Amun at Karnak were among the most magnificent ever constructed. She commissioned hundreds of statues of herself and left accounts in stone of her lineage, her titles, her history, both real and concocted, even her thoughts and hopes, which at times she confided with uncommon candor. Expressions of worry Hatshepsut inscribed on one of her obelisks at Karnak still resonate with an almost charming insecurity: “Now my heart turns this way and that, as I think what the people will say. Those who see my monuments in years to come, and who shall speak of what I have done.”

Read more in Chip Brown’s article, The King Herself.

The passages, inscribed on the subterranean walls of the pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara, reveal that the Egyptians enlisted the magical assistance of Semitic Canaanites from the ancient city of Byblos, located in what is now Lebanon.

While the passages in question have been known since the 19th century, Richard Steiner from New York’s Yeshiva University was the first to realize the passage that had confounded Egyptologists might be Semitic. A pdf of his lecture “Proto-Canaanite Spells in the Pyramid Texts: A First Look at the History of Hebrew in the Third Millennium BCE,” (in Hebrew) can be found at the Academy of the Hebrew Language website. This lecture is much more detailed, but I’m hoping that he will soon publish his findings.

To my mind, two things are of immediate interest. First, while separated by over a millennium, the snake charms from Ugarit (CAT 1.100; 1.107) are an obvious Levantine parallel. Given the nature of the rituals mentioned in these early Egyptian texts, the importance of finding an ally when dealing with snakes is fascinating. Granted, this might just be a standard ritual derivation in the ancient Near East, but it is still an important attestation of the same phenomenon. Second, the use of a foreign tongue — in this case proto-Canaanite — in ritual texts is again quite interesting. This practice is standard in Hittite, Akkadian, and Ugaritic ritual texts from the second millennium BCE, but this might be the earliest attestation of finding ritual words of power from foreign lands. Then again, it might also indicate the common practice of embracing ritual practitioners of foreign origins (once again, note numerous Hittite rituals).

I came about the piece from Codex’s post Ancient Egyptian Semitic Snake Spells (or “Snakes in a Pyramid”) who in turn seems to have found it at S. W. Flyn’s Palimpsest blog Egyptian Semitic Snakes. A trackback and a shout out to both of you