"Lixus is an ancient city on the banks of the Loukous River. First settled by the Phoenicians in the 12th century BC, it flourished under the Roman empire. The site is home to the only Roman amphitheater in Morocco [northwestern Africa] and a large industrial complex where fish was preserved in salt. The city was destroyed during the Muslim conquest of Morocco in the late 7th century." Source: Archaeology News Network.
Note: "Lixus was first settled by the Canaanites in the 12th century BC and was later controlled directly from Carthage. It was part of a chain of Canaanite towns along the Atlantic coast of modern Morocco ... Some ancient Greek writers located at Lixus the mythological garden of the Hesperides, the keepers of the golden apples. The name of the city was often mentioned by writers from Hanno the Navigator to the Geographer of Ravenna, and confirmed by the legend on its coins and by an inscription. The ancients believed Lixus to be the site of the Garden of the Hesperides and of a sanctuary of Hercules, where Hercules gathered gold apples, more ancient than the one at Cadiz, Spain."
"A 3,000-year-old quartzite head of Egyptian 'Boy King' Tutankhamun was auctioned off for $6 million Thursday [July 4?] in London despite a fierce outcry from Cairo." Source: Archaeology News Network.
The Egyptian government claimed that the statue was stolen from the Karnak Temple several decades ago, but "it was never able to provide evidence for the Tutankhamun bust being illegally obtained." Christie's, the auction house, "argued that Egypt had never before expressed the same level of concern about an item whose existence has been 'well known and exhibited publicly' for many years." Which is a fair point, I guess.
Egypt has been trying to recover artifacts looted during the 2011 revolution. Things have calmed down since then, but the region is still unstable with sporadic terrorist attacks on tourists and an ongoing conflict in the Sinai peninsula. Normally I'd say that archaeological artifacts belong in their country of origin, but in this case it seems like Egyptian relics would be safer in European museums and private collections outside of the country.
"My first care was to locate the wooden lintel above the door: then very carefully I chipped away the plaster and picked out the small stones which formed the uppermost layer of the filling. The temptation to stop and peer inside at every moment was irresistible, and when, after about ten minutes' work, I had made a hole large enough to enable me to do so, I inserted an electric torch. An astonishing sight its light revealed, for there, within a yard of the doorway, stretching as far as one could see and blocking the entrance to the chamber, stood what to all appearances was a solid wall of gold." Source: Howard Carter, quoted in "Entering King Tut's Tomb," Eyewitness To History.
Note: "Carter was a neat, rather stiff man in his late forties, with a carefully clipped mustache and slicked-back hair. He had a reputation in archaeological circles for obstinacy and a temper, but was also respected, if somewhat grudgingly, for his serious and scholarly approach to excavating." Source: "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt," by Toby Wilkinson.
Carter was like a character out of an H. Rider Haggard novel, one of the prototypes for the figure of the archaeologist / treasure hunter made famous by Indiana Jones. He came from an era before the West had been ravaged by two insane world wars and before Egyptology became a specialized academic profession.
Old photographs taken at the Tut dig show Carter working at the site in a suit and tie, no less. He entered Tut's tomb with his companions--George Herbert, fifth earl of Carnarvon, and Lord Carnarvon's daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert--using a candle to test the air before entering the different chambers. Archaeology was more primitive back in those days, but it was more romantic and adventurous as well.
Reading about Howard, it's hard not to compare the society he came from to the decaying Britain of today. Despite all of its faults, the culture that produced characters like him is long gone and I can't see that as progress.
"Howard Carter, the British explorer who opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, will forever be associated with the greatest trove of artifacts from ancient Egypt. But was he also a thief?" Source: Spiegel Online (2010)
Carter was apparently doing everything he could to move his discoveries to Britain. According to the Spiegel Online article, "[d]ocuments show that the hero of the tombs cheated on many counts, manipulating photographs, forging documentation on the discovery and deceiving the Egyptian Antiquities Service." The Carter team allegedly took as many artifacts as they could get their hands on and "...objects in several museums have now been revealed to belong to Tutankhamun's treasures."
The artifacts should have remained in Egypt, of course, and most of them did, but for some reason I can't get too irate over Carter's maneuverings. You can rant and rave about imperialism and plundering all you want, but it's hard to fault the guy for trying to lay claim to this fantastic discovery for Britain.
"According to Dr. Janet Davey from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Australia, some ancient Egyptians were naturally blonde or red haired. Her research has brought an answer to an intriguing question connected with Egyptian mummies and the effects of the mummification process." Source: Ancient Origins (2016).
"An article published recently by The Sydney Morning Herald says that the mystery of the red and blonde hair discovered on some ancient Egyptian mummies may finally be solved. The new research was necessary to check the common perception that no ancient Egyptians had hair that wasn’t colored dark brown or black. Until now, most researchers had claimed that the different colors of the mummy hair were a result of the mummification process itself."
Note:According to Wikipedia, the ancient Egyptians used natron, a "salt mixture from dry lake beds," as a drying agent during mummification ceremonies. Until recently, experts believed that this treatment could have changed the color of the mummy's hair, but Dr. Davey, with the help of industrial chemist Alan Elliot, ran an experiment which demonstrated that this wasn't the case:
"Davey and Elliot covered [hair] samples in the salty powder for 40 days. It is believed that this was the same amount of time that was needed in ancient times to dry out the bodies. The donors of the hair were men and women aged from 4 to 92 years old. Most of the samples were dark hair, with one grey, one fair, and one with henna on it for comparison.
"After 40 days, all the hair was removed from the salty powder and they appeared unchanged. Microscopic analysis also showed no change in the hair."
"Mummies from ancient Egypt have revealed another secret — some of them share very little of the sub-Saharan African ancestry that dominates the genetic heritage of modern Egyptians." Source: ABC News (2017).
"The discovery, published today in Nature Communications, suggests the African heritage evident in modern Egyptian populations may have been the result of the slave trade down the Nile in the past 1,500 years."
Comment: The story here, while buried in a flood of technical jargon, is fairly simple. The ancient Egyptians had more in common with people from the Near East (which includes parts of Europe) than with the modern Egyptian population. In recent centuries, the Egyptians began to mix with Sub-Saharan Africans, creating a kind of genetic discontinuity. In other words, the current Egyptian population are not the same people as their ancestors:
According to the paper in Nature, "modern Egyptians are shifted towards sub-Saharan African populations. Model-based clustering ... further supports these results and reveals that the three ancient Egyptians [mummies used in the study] differ from modern Egyptians by a relatively larger Near Eastern genetic component, in particular a component found in Neolithic Levantine ancient individuals ... In contrast, a substantially larger sub-Saharan African component, found primarily in West-African Yoruba, is seen in modern Egyptians compared to the ancient samples."
"... In 1996, underwater archaeology in the harbour of Alexandria conducted by Franck Goddio located the island ... The excavations showed that the island had been occupied from before the founding of Alexandria and that it was totally leveled and prepared for construction around 250BC. The island was small (about 500 hectares or 1,200 acres) and fully paved, with three branches leading in different directions. The main branch was 300 metres (1,000 ft) long and had an esplanade facing the site of the Caesarium temple on the mainland seafront. On the esplanade Goddio uncovered the remains of a relatively modest (90 metres by 30 metres) marble-floored 3rd century BC palace, believed to have been Cleopatra's royal quarters."
Most of the artifacts have been removed to museums, but divers can still explore the palace. According to the Underwater Photography Guide, "The site is really shallow, just 5 to 8 meters, which gives you plenty of bottom time. You can see many of the columns of the palace, huge stones everywhere, big bowls used in ancient times to keep water or food and two Sphinxes ... You may also see stones with ancient Egyptian writings on [them] if the visibility is good enough (by good enough I mean more than 2 meters)."
"Who built the Sphinx? The most compelling evidence that the Sphinx was built for the Egyptian Pharaoh Khafre during his reign (2520-2494 BC) is in the architecture, geology, and archaeology of the Sphinx and its related monuments." Source: Ancient Egypt Research Association.
Khafre ruled during the 4th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom. He was the son of Pharoah Khufu, thought to have commissioned the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Khufu had another son, King Djedefre, but "until recently, experts thought that King Djedefre was a murderer and outcast who couldn't possibly have had the power to create the Great Sphinx," according to the Smithsonian Magazine (2013?). The new evidence described in the above video "makes him a more likely candidate."
It's possible that the sphinx actually shows the face of Khufu, rather than Khafre or Djedefre.
There's also a possibility that the Sphinx predates the 4th Dynasty. This theory is controversial, but if true it would mean that the statue wasn't built by any of these pharaohs:
"More recently, a new theory emerged that places the statue’s origins much further back, to some 9,000 years ago. Supporters of this hypothesis point to extensive erosion of the limestone near the top of the Great Sphinx, arguing that the last time the region experienced enough rainfall in the region to cause this type of erosion on limestone was 7000 B.C." Source: The History Channel (2015).
"More traditional Egyptologists reject this view for several reasons," according to NBC News. "First, a Sphinx built earlier than 7000 B.C. would upset our understanding of ancient civilization, as there is no evidence of an Egyptian civilization this old."
One outlandish theory -- that the pyramids and the sphinx were built by refugees from Atlantis -- led to an interesting discovery.
The possibility that the Sphinx predates Egyptian civilization itself has led to all sorts of speculation that the statue was actually constructed by aliens. Why aliens would build a statue of a lion's body with or without a human head (the original may have been the head of a lion) has never really been explained as far as I know. Presumably, the statue had some kind of astronomical significance, but never mind that. The problem with the Ancient UFO crowd is that they immediately turn to aliens whenever they run into one of these ancient mysteries. Even if the Sphinx was built before the Egyptians came along -- which I doubt -- it would only prove, once again, that prehistoric people were a lot more advanced than we have been led to believe.
"The Great Sphinx of Giza (... English: The Terrifying One; literally: Father of Dread)... is a limestone statue of a reclining sphinx, a mythical creature with the body of a lion and the head of a human. Facing directly from West to East, it stands on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile in Giza, Egypt. The face of the Sphinx is generally believed to represent the Pharaoh Khafre." (Wikipedia)
The Terrifying One may have a more complicated history, however. According to Colin Reader, an English geologist, it's possible that the Sphinx wasn't originally a statue of the pharaoh at all. It may have been a lion, a representation of the sun god. The pharaoh's out-of-proportion head may have been added later, turning the statue into a sphinx.
"Colin Reader has proposed that the Sphinx was the focus of solar worship in the Early Dynastic Period, before the Giza Plateau became a necropolis in the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2134 BC). He ties this in with his conclusions that the Sphinx, the Sphinx temple, the Causeway and the Khafra mortuary temple are all part of a complex which predates Dynasty IV (c. 2613–2494 BC). The lion has long been a symbol associated with the sun in ancient Near Eastern civilizations." (Wikipedia)
"... In the New Kingdom, the Sphinx became more specifically associated with the sun god Hor-em-akhet ... or 'Horus-at-the-Horizon' ..."
Reader's controversial theories are based on the premise that the sphinx is far older than commonly believed. He apparently agrees with the water-erosion hypothesis, "a fringe claim contending that the main type of weathering evident on the enclosure walls of the Great Sphinx was caused by prolonged and extensive rainfall that would have predated the time of Djedefre and Khafre, the Pharaohs credited by most modern Egyptologists with building the Great Sphinx and Second Pyramid at Giza around 2500 BC." (Wikipedia) "Egyptologists, geologists and others have rejected the water erosion hypothesis and the idea of an older Sphinx, offering various alternative explanations for the cause and date of the erosion."
In the next video, Robert Schoch, an associate professor of Natural Sciences at Boston University, explains the water-erosion hypothesis on the Joe Rogan show.
The reason why the sphinx was built depends, in large part, on how old the statue is. Reader and Shoch's theories may be "fringe," but the truth is that we really don't know much about the sphinx to begin with:
"The Great Sphinx is one of the world's largest and oldest statues, but basic facts about it are still subject to debate, such as when it was built, by whom and for what purpose." (Wikipedia)
"... It is impossible to identify what name the creators called their statue, as the Great Sphinx does not appear in any known inscription of the Old Kingdom and there are no inscriptions anywhere describing its construction or its original purpose. In the New Kingdom, the Sphinx was revered as the solar deityHor-em-akhet ... and the pharaoh Thutmose IV (1401–1391 or 1397–1388 BC) specifically referred to it as such in his 'Dream Stele'".
"An enormous stone sphinx representing the pharaoh Ramses II has spent nearly a century in the Egypt Gallery of the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. But today (June 12) the sphinx was relocated in 'a monumental move' that saw the colossal statue 'floating' on so-called air dollies — a technology that uses high-powered air compression in a manner similar to hoverboards, museum representatives said in a statement." Source: Live Science.
"It is no exaggeration to say that we owe most of our knowledge of ancient Egypt to the work of her scribes. The ancient Egyptians covered their temples and tombs with hieroglyphs, but they also employed scribes to record everything from the stocks held in the stores for workers, the proceedings in court, magic spells, wills and other legal contracts, medical procedures, tax records and genealogies. Scribes were central to the functioning of centralised administration, the army and the priesthood and in truth very little happened in ancient Egypt which did not involve a scribe in some manner." Source: Ancient Egypt Online.