"Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities says local archeologists have unearthed the mummy of an unusually large animal, most likely a lion or lioness." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"The ministry said on Monday the mummy was excavated in Saqqara, a town south of Cairo that was a vast necropolis in antiquity and is home to the famed Step Pyramid."
"In ancient Egypt, sacred ibises were collected from their natural habitats to be ritually sacrificed, according to a new study." Source: Science Daily.
"Egyptian catacombs are famously filled with the mummified bodies of Sacred Ibises. Between around 664BC and 250AD, it was common practice for the birds to be sacrificed, or much more rarely worshipped in ritual service to the god Thoth, and subsequently mummified. In ancient sites across Egypt, these mummified birds are stacked floor to ceiling along kilometers of catacombs, totaling many millions of birds. But how the Egyptians got access to so many birds has been a mystery; some ancient texts indicate that long-term farming and domestication may have been employed."
Note: The sacred ibis has long since evolved into the sacred bin chicken.
Notes: The quote above is misleading because it makes it sound like these mummified animals were discovered under the famous Step Pyramid. In reality, the Catacombs of Anubis aka the Dog Catacombs are located under the desert to the northeast of the pyramid.
"The Dog Catacombs, as they are known, date to 747-730 B.C., and are dedicated to Anubis, the Egyptians' jackal-headed god of the dead," according to Live Science (2011). "They were first documented in the 19th century; however, they were never fully excavated."
"According to a new research study, a 5,000 square foot network of underground tunnels are stuffed full of linen-wrapped dogs, along with a few foxes and cats laid to rest thousands of years ago by the cult following of a canine-like deity [Anubis] who Egyptians believed would usher them into the afterlife." (Daily Beast)
"A few of these animals presumably lived in the Anubieion temple at Saqqara, revered as living representatives of the god ... Their mummies might be categorized as those of 'sacred animals' ... who were worshipped during their lifetimes as manifestations of the god, and then mummified and buried with great pomp after their death." -- Killing Man's Best Friend?, Archaeological Review From Cambridge, 2013.
"A scanning project [of Egyptian animal mummies] at Manchester Museum and the University of Manchester has revealed that about a third of the bundles of cloth are empty inside." Source: BBC (2015).
"Researchers believe there was a huge appetite for these religious offerings, and demand for the mummies may have outstripped supply."
Note: Animal mummies were used as votive offerings in ancient Egypt, where many of the gods were represented in animal forms:
"Animal mummies were votive gifts. Today you'd have a candle in a cathedral; in Egyptian times you would have an animal mummy." (BBC)
"You would go to a special site, buy an animal mummy, using a system of barter. You'd then give it to a priest, who would collect a group of animal mummies and bury them."
Unfortunately, it looks like many of the ordinary people who wanted to show their devotion fell victim to a swindle operated by the embalmers. Many of these "mummies" contained no animal parts at all. Instead, they were stuffed with "organic material such as mud, sticks and reeds, that would have been lying around the embalmers' workshops, and also things like eggshells and feathers, which were associated with the animals, but aren't the animals themselves."
Pagan or Christian, religion in general has always been rife with fraud.
"A tiny, 2,100-year-old mummy from ancient Egypt had long been thought to contain the remains of a treasured bird - which would make sense, considering the hawk-themed decorations and small size." Source: Science Alert (2018).
"But researchers conducting a CT scan have found something else entirely - the remains of a severely malformed human foetus, stillborn at no later than 28 weeks."
"'Zimbabwe' is a Shona name that, while the translation varies, can mean houses of stone. The ruins contain numerous stone enclosures with soaring walls as tall as 11 meters (36 feet). They were made without the use of mortar." Source: Live Science.
"Much of Great Zimbabwe is unexcavated and what the different enclosures were used for is a source of debate among archaeologists. The earliest written records for the city date to the 16th century, a time after it was largely abandoned. "
Great Zimbabwe is thought to have been built by the Gokomere culture (ancestors of the Shona) over several centuries between the 11th and 15th centuries AD. The central ruins may have been a royal palace and the city was probably an important trade center. According to Wikipedia, "[c]auses for the decline and ultimate abandonment of the site around 1450 A.D. have been suggested as due to a decline in trade compared to sites further north, the exhaustion of the gold mines, political instability and famine and water shortages induced by climatic change." In other words, no one really knows what happened.
The area around Great Zimbabwe was apparently well-developed at one time. According to Wonders of the Past (1943) (1), "when the Rhodesian pioneers burst into Mashonaland, and spread over the country in search of gold, they were vastly surprised to find that they had been anticipated. Over a great area of gold-bearing country, 600 by 700 miles in extent, they found open workings and closed mines reached by shafts which went down to a depth of from 70 to 150 feet, and worked-out reefs to lengths of from 300 to 7,500 feet. The bygone miners must have been industrious beyond belief..."
(1)Wonders of the Past is a rare two-volume collection of essays on a wide range of archaeological sites and ancient history subjects. Though out-of-date in many ways, it includes a lot of fantastic old photographs, line-drawings, color plates and exploration stories, and the essays were written before political correctness had infected academics. Highly recommended if you can find it. (I stumbled on my copy by accident at a local library sale).
Next video was produced by the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority. Yes, this failed state has a tourism industry. Besides the local wildlife (if there's any left), maybe foreign visitors get to see the sites where white farmers were murdered over the years in some of Mugabe's land grabs.
According to the academic consensus, the stone structures in Zimbabwe were built by the ancestors of the local Shona tribes who have traditionally been subsistence farmers. The Shona are known for their stone sculptures and "the precolonial Shona states received a great deal of their revenues form the export of mining products, especially gold and copper," (Wikipedia). The Great Zimbabwe State (12th - 16th centuries AD) was one of several kingdoms that rose and fell in the region over the years.
If the ancestors of the Shona built Great Zimbabwe, the obvious question is what what happened to their knowledge of stoneworking. According to Wonders of the Past, the original Rhodesian explorers found the natives living in "huts made of reeds and clay," so if the consensus is correct the picture that emerges is of a relatively advanced culture and trading center that collapsed long before the first colonialists arrived.
Dating back to at least 2,000 BC, the history of Nubia is confusing because several ancient kingdoms rose and fell in this part of Africa and the term "Nubia" is sometimes used to refer to one or more of these early kingdoms while at other times it just refers to the region as a whole. Complicating matters even more, the ancient Egyptians referred to their Nubian neighbors as Kushites, a kingdom in Nubia, and some sources use the term "Kush" to refer to the entire area.
The Nubian people were apparently descendants of the "the Noba people, nomads who settled the area in the 4th century [BC] following the collapse of the kingdom of Meroë," a city located on the east bank of the Nile, (Wikipedia).
The most well-known civilization of the Nubians was the previously mentioned Kingdom of Kush, which came into existence after the Bronze Age collapse (~1200 - 1150 BC) and fall of the Egyptian New Kingdom (~11th century BC). This is another source of confusion -- for me -- because at least one source I've found says that the Nubians didn't take over the region until after the fall of the Kingdom of Kush. Most of the sources, however, say that it was a Nubian kingdom, so I'll leave it at that.
Egypt had a complex and volatile relationship with Nubia. During the Early Dynastic Period (c3100 - 2686? BC), Egypt traded with Nubia, but "none of these trading expeditions, it seems, was aggressive in character, though the Egyptians occasionally had cause to protect themselves against the local populations," according to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations. During the Old Kingdom (c2613 - 2160 BC), Egyptian expeditions "were regularly sent through Nubia to obtain exotic products such as incense, ivory and panther skins. These expeditions were not without incident." (Ibid)
This trade between Egypt and Nubia continued for millennia. Wars sometimes broke out and traders were sometimes killed, apparently by local tribes, during these trade expeditions, but "relations between the two peoples also show peaceful cultural interchange and cooperation, including mixed marriages," (Wikipedia). Egypt's southern borders shifted back and forth as Egyptian power waxed and waned, and over time it appears that the two populations became thoroughly mixed.
The history of the relationship between Egypt and Nubia is long and complex, with Egypt conquering Nubia several times and Nubia conquering Egypt around 760 BC. After the conquest, the Nubians established the short-lived 25th Dynasty - sometimes referred to as the Nubian Dynasty or the Kushite Empire. The Black Pharoahs didn't last very long, however. They were conquered by the Assyrians around 656 BC.
"The Nubia Museum in Aswan houses finds made during excavations carried out as part of UNESCO’s International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, threatened by the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. Besides showcasing many of the more than 3,000 objects found during the excavations, the Museum serves as a focal point for Nubian history and culture, its collections presenting the history of Nubia from prehistory to the present day." Source: UNESCO.
Notes: "Nubia, part of the classical Ethiopia, is the region of the middle Nile Valley from Aswan to the Fourth Cataract. Modern literature also includes the central Sudan (the Butana, or island of Meroe) as far as Khartoum within the definition. After Egyptian domination during the New Kingdom (c.1550 -1080 BC), indigenous kingdoms flourished into medieval times." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD,3rd ed revised).
"Lower Nubia was fairly prosperous in the Roman period and large quantities of imported goods are found in Nubian cemeteries." (OCD) The origin of the name 'Nubia,' which came into use during the Roman period, is obscure, but may have derived from nwb, the ancient Egyptian word for gold. Other sources connect it with the term Noubades, the Greek name for people who moved into northern Nubia sometime in the 4th century AD. Confusingly, most of the region south of the 1st cataract of the Nile was called 'Kush' at the time.
"Major General Richard William Howard Howard Vyse (25 July 1784 – 8 June 1853) was a British soldier and Egyptologist. He was also Member of Parliament (MP) for Beverley (from 1807 to 1812) and Honiton (from 1812 to 1818)." (Wikipedia)
"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 centralized 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.
"Much of what is known about ancient Egypt is due to the activities of its scribes and the officials. Monumental buildings were erected under their supervision, administrative and economic activities were documented by them, and stories from Egypt's lower classes and foreign lands survive due to scribes putting them in writing." Source: Wikipedia.
"Scribes were considered part of the royal court, were not conscripted into the army, did not have to pay taxes, and were exempt from the heavy manual labor required of the lower classes (corvée labor). The scribal profession worked with painters and artisans who decorated reliefs and other building works with scenes, personages, or hieroglyphic text. "