Before the mummies: desert origins of the Pharoahs.

Discussion in 'Middle East' started by Margot2, Sep 1, 2015.

  1. Margot2

    Margot2 Banned

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    Egypt never fails to fascinate us... and we're always learning something new.

    From 2006

    The Western Desert of Egypt, near the Dakhleh Oasis, appears to be one of the most uninhabitable places on the planet. Any search for signs of life on this Martian surface seems pointless. But as we crest a ridge of sand, with chunks of ironstone clinking underfoot, archeologist Mary McDonald is about to show me something that puts paid to that notion: evidence that she has found not only the beginnings of settled life in North Africa, but almost certainly the beginnings of the longest-lasting civilizationthe world has ever known—the Pharaonic, or Dynastic, civilization of the Nile Valley, heretofore thought to have derived from elsewhere in the Middle East.

    https://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/is...ummies.the.desert.origins.of.the.pharaohs.htm

    Excerpt:

    Most archeologists now agree that the Neolithic Revolution of the Nile Valley was homegrown, with important, even decisive inputs from the Western Desert, and that it grew in complexity to become the Old and New Kingdoms. “Mary’s work has been an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the origins of Egyptian civilization,” says Hassan, who was among her early supporters. “Her work confirmed that one of the main strands in the early civilization of the Nile Valley was the contribution from the inhabitants of the Sahara.”



    According to discoveries so far, it was another 1500 years before the civilization that grew out of the Neolithic Revolution on the Nile would make significant ventures back west to Dakhleh again. Not too far from where we stand, a rock inscription was found a few years ago by a German expedition. It tells of a mission dispatched by Cheops and his son to search for minerals for the kingdom.

    Reports must have come back positive. Dakhleh looked promising enough to justify the establishment of a permanent Old Kingdom settlement there. Mills and his wife, Lesley, also an archeologist, are now excavating a Fifth Dynasty site nearby at Ain el-Gazzareen that dates to about 2300 bc, and which is thought to be the oldest in the region. “Long-distance traffic was going on long before then,” says Mills. He thinks Ain el-Gazzareen was likely the westernmost settlement of the Dynastic period, and that it may have served as a Pharaonic “last outpost” before trading caravans headed west and north to places like Libya. Mills has found ample evidence of a large bread-making industry—thousands of broken bread molds, as well as huge quantities of animal bone. Along with water, bread and dried meat would have provisioned any convoy.

    That would have been critical in such unforgiving terrain. Sand in our eyes, we take one last look around before returning to our Land Rover, well pleased with having trodden in the earliest footsteps of what would become perhaps the world’s most captivating civilization.

    WORLD’S OLDEST BOOK?

    It was on January 20, 1988, while excavating a third- century Roman house at Kellis, part of the Dakhleh Oasis Project, that student volunteer Jessica Hallet excitedly called out to her supervisor to come and look at a piece of wood with writing on it. Colin Hope, director of the Centre for Archaeology and Ancient History at Australia’s Monash University, wandered over to delicately brush sand from it. What emerged from that ancient kitchen were two wooden-paged books. One contained three speeches by the Greek orator Isocrates; however, it was the other book, underneath that one, that has garnered more attention.

    The second book, dubbed the Kellis Agricultural Account Book, is a revealing record written by the manager of an agricultural estate of all the comings and goings of the business of the estate over three years. Its 1784 entries list payables and receivables, including annual obligations to the landlord, the mistress of the house and the field workers. Income items include crops like wheat, barley, chickens, figs, olive oil, honey and wine. Outgoing payments included “to Syrion, for wage,” “to Father Psennouphis, for wedding gifts,” “transport charge,” and notes indicated how each payment was made, whether in cash or produce or both. It’s an extremely important written record that can be compared to archeological remains found at the site.

    The three years of the Kellis book were either 361 to 364 or 376 to 379, just before the site was abandoned. Wooden books were popular at the time, though papyrus ones were about to come into common use. A private letter, written in Greek and found in the house next door, contained an order: “Send a well-proportioned and nicely executed 10-page notebook for your brother Ision.” The addressee didn’t have to go far. A room adjacent to where the book was found revealed a bookmaker’s workshop containing acacia-wood mallets, three cut wooden pages, a block marked for cutting and a tool box which allowed Hope to reconstruct the process of making the book.

    Hope agrees that calling it “the world’s oldest book” is a matter of definition. “It’s certainly the oldest as we know a book,” he says, “with a front and back cover, a pagination system and individual pages bound at the spine.”

    Made from a single block of acacia wood, the book’s eight pages measure 33 by 11 centimeters (13"by 4"). Each page is coated with gum arabic to provide a writing surface. They’re held together by tightly spun linen strings threaded through pairs of holes drilled at the top and bottom. Should the binding ever have broken, re-ordering the pages would have presented no problem: Notches along the spine line up to a perfect V when the pages are in the correct order.

    The book is now safely housed in the Kharga Archeological Museum in Egypt’s Kharga Oasis, near Dakhleh, where crops similar to the ones named in it are grown, and similar payments continue to be made.
     
  2. Margot2

    Margot2 Banned

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    Evidence of Pharaonic Sea in Tayma, Arabia.

    http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2010/11/saudi-arabia-history-archeology-islam.html

    Excerpt:

    The inscription found bears the name of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III, who ruled in the 12th century BC, and probably functioned as an ancient road sign to travelers, guiding them on their way to Tayma.

    Display won't be an issue for the inscription outside Tayma -- it's carved into the side of a mountain. But the news conference held Sunday at the National Museum sought to cast the discovery as a major archaeological find, indicating a clear effort by authorities to set an example by celebrating Saudi Arabia's pre-Islamic past.

    "This is the first royal inscription found, and not just for anyone, for one of the most important kings," said al Ghabban. "This is the past, the history of the country, and we give the same importance to all of it and people understand that this is historical evidence."
     

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