Mysterious Buried Artifacts Discovered in Egypt's Valley of the Kings

Four deposits of artifacts possibly buried as a ritual act of sorts before the construction of a tomb have been discovered in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

The so-called foundation deposits, arranged in a boxlike shape, contain a mix of artifacts, including the head of a cow, a vase painted in blue and flint blades that have wooden handles that are still preserved after more than three millennia...

The discovery was made in its "western valley," an area sometimes called the "valley of the monkeys" after a scene depicting 12 baboons was discovered in one of its tombs...

[Afifi] Ghonim, an archaeologist with the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities, was field supervisor of the Egyptian expedition to the valley that took place between 2007 and 2011, and [Glen] Dash led a team that did ground-penetrating radar work. This expedition, led by Zahi Hawass, was the largest since Howard Carter discovered King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922...

These foundation deposits are usually laid out so that four of them form a box shape and a fifth is placed on the axis of the tomb. "We found the four deposits that made up the box, but not the fifth. Perhaps it too is there, awaiting discovery in front of the tomb," Ghonim said.

I went there back in 1977-78. Alexandria, took the tour through the desert to Cairo. It was crazy. I was going to go ashore and barter a knife and some pens...no chance.

First or second night there (I think) the Embassy Marines invited the entire ship to their walled in compound for a party! I went out with a friend for a ride on a horse drawn buggy, and a person would jump on the sideboard trying to sell you stuff...one scruffy guy jumped up and was trying to sell us a half-full bottle of something that was supposedly whiskey, but could have been piss...the driver reached over, full palm in the guy’s face and pushed him into the road.

We drove up to a traffic stoppage on the road that ran parallel to the Mediterranean, and as we approached, I saw it was some naked guy, wearing only a loincloth of some kind, dragging himself across the road. He appeared to be paralyzed from the waist down and was dragging his legs. His elbows and knees were scraped and bloody.

The thing that blew my mind is that people drove right up to him, slammed on their brakes and leaned on their horns. My mouth was wide open. I had spent a night with my family walking the streets of New Delhi, and that had been my first introduction to abject poverty, even more than I had seen in the Philippines. But there was something callous and hard about the way these people treated this guy dragging his crippled body across that pavement.

When we got to the compound, it was a wild scene. Hundreds of drunk guys stumbling around in groups inside this compound...could have been 100 or 500, I can’t remember how many. Had an interesting interaction with SGTMAJ Douglass, the top enlisted marine with the detachment on the JFK, back when they had them (I don’t know if he was SGTMAJ at that time). He was a most impressive individual, and clearly had the respect and obedience of the men serving under him. And he seemed really big, too, like a football player. (He was later the top enlisted killed the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut.

Anyway, me and a few other guys took the tour to Cairo the next day. Back then, they didn’t care if you climbed on the pyramids, and I remember climbing up about three levels and suddenly feeling as if it was a bad, bad idea. I heard that some years later some guys got killed climbing them, and they banned it.

Amazing to think you could just walk up and climb on them. Someone told me they went to Stonehenge once, and it was the same way. Now they have it all walled off.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.