Posted on 09/04/2018 9:15:29 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
When Ariela Algaze signed up for a spring 2018 course on museums, she didn't expect to get wrapped up in the mystery of an ancient Egyptian mummy case that Jane Stanford herself purchased more than 100 years ago... Algaze's research led her to discover information that was not known by university scholars - including inscriptions on the coffin and the name of the mummified woman inside it... Algaze learned that the artifact contained writing after sifting through hundreds of its fragments, which have been stored in three boxes, unstudied for decades. The mummy case, which Jane Stanford purchased in 1901, was once display at the Stanford Museum. But the 1906 earthquake shattered the coffin made up of fragile cartonnage, a type of ancient Egyptian material of either linen or papyrus covered in plaster, into hundreds of pieces. The fragments went largely unexamined until Algaze took them out and studied each piece as part of Christina Hodge's course, Museum Cultures: Material Representation in the Past and Present. As part of the class, Algaze and other students picked an object from Stanford's collections to research and present in an exhibit at the Stanford Archaeology Center... Algaze's research into the coffin advanced when she discovered two inscribed fragments. To translate the text, Algaze consulted with Egyptologists Foy Scalf at the University of Chicago and Barbara Richter at the University of California, Berkeley, and other experts on demotic, the ancient Egyptian written language. Algaze found that the name of the buried woman was Senchalanthos... Hodge, academic curator and collections manager of the Stanford University Archaeology Collections... said it's possible that the inscriptions were mentioned somewhere, but those records did not survive the 1906 earthquake.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
This historical photo shows the ancient Egyptian mummy case on display at the Stanford museum before the 1906 earthquake broke it into pieces. Credit: Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries
Ariela Algaze found that two fragments of the cartonnage she studied contained ancient Egyptian writing. Credit: Christina Hodge
Perhaps this is a stupid question - but if they have photos of the unbroken case and the fragments, why not glue the thing back together?
Transcribed to English... 2 Cheeseburgers, 1 Chocolate shake, 3 Chicken tenders and a smoothie.
Gotta wait for the grant money.....and I’m betting this is not a NEW discovery....just a reincarnation of an OLD study.
Did someone say mummy?
Don’t read them out loud.
***fragile cartonnage, a type of ancient Egyptian material of either linen or papyrus covered in plaster, into hundreds of pieces.***
This was quite common back then. I remember fifty five years ago a news report of Egyptologists taking apart a papyrus breastplate from a mummy and finding an unknown Greek play written on the pieces. It was the story of a boy and girl separated when young, then as adults coming together, falling in love and soon to get married. The Egyptologists were in suspense trying to find how the play ended. We never found out.
Was it a “best by” date?
This was quite common back then. I remember fifty five years ago a news report of Egyptologists taking apart a papyrus breastplate from a mummy and finding an unknown Greek play written on the pieces. It was the story of a boy and girl separated when young, then as adults coming together, falling in love and soon to get married. The Egyptologists were in suspense trying to find how the play ended. We never found out.
Old Story - Boy meet Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy and Girl
meet again
..
I forgot to mention they were brother and sister.
That's what she was working on when she found the texts.
You said it was from ancient Greece so I just assumed that would be the case.
Brother and sister? Must have been by Sophocles. :^)
Treasures found inside ancient reptile mummies now under restoration at UC Berkeley
https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/96legacy/croc.html
Aeschylus Meets the Mummy: 2,500-Year-Old, Lost Greek Trilogy Found Under Wraps
http://www.playbill.com/article/aeschylus-meets-the-mummy-2-500-year-old-lost-greek-trilogy-found-under-wraps-com-116390
[Etruscan]
The Liber Linteus: An Egyptian Mummy Wrapped in a Mysterious Message
https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/liber-linteus-egyptian-mummy-wrapped-mysterious-message-002690
Yes, it's hard to believe that someone didn't see these before or even after the case was broken.
This is the great scandal of archaeology. Warehouses are full of relics packed away and never studied or written up.
Its more fun to go out and dig stuff up than to study it and write papers about it.
...and if a best by was involved, why haven't they called the Geek Squad?
Inscriptions are one of those things Egyptologists get especially excited about, so you would think that someone would have noted down that this cartonnage has writing on it. The fact that this wasnt documented is very unusual.
Hodge said its possible that the inscriptions were mentioned somewhere, but those records did not survive the 1906 earthquake.
No, actually there is no such scandal.
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