"In ancient Egyptian art, people often can be seen sporting cones on their heads. Now, for the first time, archaeologists have revealed evidence that they actually existed outside of artwork." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"Two head cones made of wax and fabric have been uncovered in graves in Amarna, a city built by the pharaoh Akhenaten and inhabited for some 15 years ending in 1332 BC, according to findings published in the journal Antiquity. The city is home to thousands of graves, including those of ordinary people."
Video from Dec. 14, 2019.
"The ancient Egyptians were known for their spectacular headwear, from double crowns worn by pharaohs to the striped nemes headcloths immortalized by Tutankhamun’s golden death mask. But some of the items worn by the ancients have long defied explanation. Take, for instance, head cones: mysterious, elongated domes found adorning the heads of prominent figures in an array of 3,550- to 2,000-year-old works of art." Source: Smithsonian Magazine.
"Archaeologists batted theories back and forth for years, speculating on the purpose of these curious cones. Some contended they were scented lumps of ointment designed to be melted, then used to cleanse and perfume the body. Others insisted the cones were part of a burial ritual, entombed with their wearers to confer fortune or fertility in the afterlife. And many doubted whether the cones were real at all: Perhaps, they argued, the cones were restricted to the two-dimensional realm of wall paintings—pure artistic symbolism denoting special status like halos in Christian art, as Colin Barras writes for Science magazine.
"Now, after years of doubt, the naysayers have (probably) been proven wrong. Reporting yesterday in the journal Antiquity, a team led by Anna Stevens of Australia’s Monash University unearthed two real-life head cones in graves at the archaeological site of Amarna, Egypt. Head cones, it appears, did exist—and, at least in some cases, they joined their wearers in death."
"The tombs of ancient Egypt have yielded golden collars and ivory bracelets, but another treasure — human DNA — has proved elusive. Now, scientists have captured sweeping genomic information from Egyptian mummies. It reveals that mummies were closely related to ancient Middle Easterners, hinting that northern Africans might have different genetic roots from people south of the Sahara desert." Source: Nature (2017).
This is huge news. The opening paragraph in this Nature article is worded very carefully, but if you keep reading, the story of who the ancient Egyptians were and where they originated comes into sharp focus. We now have solid evidence that the ancient Egyptians were Indo-Europeans, not sub-Saharan Africans:
"Both types of genomic material showed that ancient Egyptians shared little DNA with modern sub-Saharan Africans. Instead, their closest relatives were people living during the Neolithic and Bronze ages in an area known as the Levant. Strikingly, the mummies were more closely related to ancient Europeans and Anatolians than to modern Egyptians." (Emphasis added)
This study is truly groundbreaking. The Afrocentrists won't like it so they'll probably ignore it altogether, but no one has ever taken their heavily politicized Black Egypt mythology seriously. Afrocentrists have never seemed to be able to grasp the concept that "Africa" doesn't mean "black." North Africa was always part of the Mediterranean world. The Sahara desert formed a natural barrier that basically divided the continent in two, both geographically and genetically.
Modern Egyptians do have some black African ancestry, but the mixture appears to have occurred fairly recently. According to the researchers who conducted this latest DNA study, "there was probably a pulse of sub-Saharan African DNA into Egypt roughly 700 years ago. The mixing of ancient Egyptians and Africans from further south means that modern Egyptians can trace 8% more of their ancestry to sub-Saharan Africans than can the mummies from Abusir el-Meleq."
Note: I might be wrong about this, but I think Abusir el-Meleq is ancient Bousiris, aka Abusir (?), the location of a large necropolis where the mummies used in this DNA study were discovered.
Another important result of this study is that it reveals where the ancient Egyptians came from originally and by extension gives us a general picture of how north Africa was settled. Neolithic and Bronze Age people from southwest Asia, the Anatolian peninsula, eastern Europe and the region around the Black Sea migrated down along the Mediterranean coastline into north Africa and apparently settled throughout the area between the Med and the Sahara desert. At one time the region was green and lush, but desertification forced them to concentrate in the Nile Valley where they laid the foundations of the Old Kingdom.
This study is being described as a first, but I'm not sure that's completely accurate. Years ago a DNA study was conducted on the mummy of King Tut which may have confirmed his European ancestry. As far as I know the full study was never released, though several reports claimed that Tut's DNA showed that he was "disabled, malarial and inbred." The Egyptian government apparently suppressed the full test results, but iGENEA, a Swiss genomics company, "started a Tutankhamen DNA project based on what [they said were] genetic markers that appeared on a computer screen during a Discovery Channel special on the famous pharaoh's genetic lineage," according to a 2011 Live Science story which dismissed the project as "unscientific".
According to iGENEA, King Tut belongs to haplogroup R1b1a2 which "arose about 9.500 years ago in the surrounding area of the Black Sea. The migration of this haplogroup into Europe started at the earliest with the spread of agriculture since 7.000 BC. It is very probable that it is also connected to the Indoeuropeans who spread over Europe a little later in several waves of migrations."
That sounds pretty accurate. Maybe the iGENEA study was unscientific, but in light of these new DNA results they may have been right after all, at least in general.
Comment: Many of the sources I've read about this story use semantic tricks in their lead paragraphs to soften the impact of the DNA results. For example, Science Daily concludes its opening summary of the research with the sentence "[t]he study found that modern Egyptians share more ancestry with Sub-Saharan Africans than ancient Egyptians did." Technically, that's true, but the sentence is deliberately worded to obscure the most important finding. To get the full picture you have to dig deeper into the article, but that's typical with subjects which have become contaminated with modern identity politics. I have a feeling that this news won't get a lot of exposure in the modern indoctrination camps that still try to pass themselves off as universities.
"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."
"Egypt on Saturday unveiled the details of 30 ancient wooden coffins with mummies inside discovered in the southern city of Luxor in the biggest find of its kind in more than a century." Source: Reuters.
"A team of Egyptian archaeologists discovered a 'distinctive group of 30 colored wooden coffins for men, women and children' in a cache at Al-Asasif cemetery on Luxor’s west bank, the Ministry of Antiquities said in a statement on Saturday."
Note: There have been a lot of archaeological announcements coming out of Egypt lately, all part of a stepped-up media campaign designed to show that the country is stable and safe for foreign visitors. According to Archaeology News Network, "Egypt has sought publicity for its archaeological discoveries in the hopes of reviving its tourism sector, which was badly hit by the turmoil following the 2011 uprising [which was apparently carried out with the support of the US government]." The situation in Egypt seems to have improved, but the country is still under a Level 2 (Exercise Increased Caution) travel advisory issued by the Department of State.
"Experts have begun restoration work on the golden-plated coffin of Egypt’s boy-king Tutankhamun for the first time since the discovery of the tomb in 1922, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities said on Wednesday." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"The coffin and the treasured collection of Tutankhamun’s tomb are expected to be the centrepiece of the new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) that Egypt will open next year near the Pyramids of Giza."
"'The gruesome mummy of Unknown Man E, also known as the ‘Screaming Mummy’, has long puzzled scholars,' renowned Egyptologist Zahi Hawass told Al-Ahram Weekly, adding that this particular mummy is surrounded in mystery. Although he was re-buried in the royal mummy cache of Deir Al-Bahari, he was not wrapped in the usual fine linen bandages like the rest of the mummies. Instead, he was wrapped in sheepskin, which was considered impure by the ancient Egyptians. His hands and feet were tied with leather thongs. He was not even mummified, but was merely left to dry in natron and then had some resin poured into his open mouth." Source: Archaeology News Network (2018).
Note: There has been speculation that this is the mummy of a 20th Dynasty Egyptian prince known as Pentawar who was "involved in the so-called 'harem conspiracy', a plot to kill his father [Ramesses III] and place Pentawer on the throne," according to Wikipedia. "He either killed himself or was executed following the assassination attempt."
It's possible, I guess, that this man wasn't actually screaming at the time of his death. The drying out process may have caused his mouth to open.