Posted on 02/13/2014 8:29:44 PM PST by BenLurkin
CAIRO — Spanish archeologists have unearthed a 3,600-year-old mummy in the ancient city of Luxor, Egypt’s Antiquities Minister said Thursday. Prosecutors accused nine people including three Germans of smuggling stone samples from pyramids.
In a statement, Mohammed Ibrahim said the rare find in a preserved wooden sarcophagus dates back to 1600 BC, when the Pharaonic 17th Dynasty reigned.
He said the mummy appears to belong to a high official. The sarcophagus is engraved with hieroglyphs and decorated with inscriptions of birds’ feathers.
The exact identity of the well-preserved mummy will now be studied, Ibrahim said, adding that it was discovered by a Spanish mission in collaboration with the Egyptian antiquities ministry.
Antiquities department head Ali Al-Asfar said the two-meter sarcophagus still bears its original coloring and writings.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Don’t anybody ping bill clintoon, please.
From the photo, incredible preservation!!
Pelosi?
Bizarre products came from mummies, or parts thereof. Such commodities included “Mummy,” ground mummies molded into pills for medicinal use (175); “mummy brown” paint (176); and cheap fuel for locomotives. Mark Twain reported in his 1869 travelogue The Innocents Abroad (Hartford, Conn.) that mummies were burned like coal to produce steam on the rail line from Cairo to Alexandria (176–77).
Entrepreneurs imported mummy rags to make paper in the United States. Paper mogul Isaac Augustus Stanwood, for example, had trouble obtaining enough domestic rags during the Civil War until he hit upon the idea of bringing over shiploads of linen-wrapped Egyptian mummies. His machinery macerated linen bandages and papyrus fillers. From the resulting slurry, Stanwood produced coarse brown sheets “sold to shopkeepers, grocers, and butchers, who used [them] for wrapping paper” (189).
http://www.ajaonline.org/online-review-book/1184
It’s really amazing there are still finds of this quality to be made.
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