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"[The king] Unis seizes the sky and splits its iron."Inscribed in hieroglyphs in a 4,400-year-old pyramid, this sentence evidences that ancient Egyptians understood the extraterrestrial origin of iron-rich meteorites—thousands of years before European scientists reached the same conclusion......the world's oldest-identified iron objects are small beads that come from a burial in Gerzeh, a roughly 5,300-year-old village in northern Egypt. Other pre-Iron Age iron objects have been found in Egypt, including an amulet in the 4,000-year-old tomb of Queen Aashyet in Deir el-Bahari and a dagger blade in King Tutankhamun's tomb...The earliest-known Egyptian references to iron in connection with stars, meteoroids...

It was the greatest puzzle in the world. For three thousand years the ancient Egyptians covered the walls and ceilings of their temples and tombs with a form of writing known as hieroglyphs. More, the bone-dry climate of Egypt had preserved vast quantities of this hieroglyphic text written on papyrus. And in 1800, no one on earth could read a word of it. When Egypt became Christian in the fourth century A.D., the use of these hieroglyphs, associated with paganism, died out. The last known hieroglyphic inscription was chiseled into stone in the year 394. Within a generation, the last...

Archaeologists have uncovered the largest collection of ancient Egyptian 'notepads' found since the beginning of the 20th century. In the long-lost city of Athribis, in central Egypt, researchers have cataloged more than 18,000 inscribed pieces of pottery, some of which seem to have been written by students. The shards of inked pottery are known as 'ostraca'. Much cheaper and more accessible than papyrus, remnants of broken jars and other vessels were used in ancient Egypt on a daily basis to detail shopping lists, record trades, copy literature and teach students how to write and draw. In fact, a large...

I never paid any attention to it before, but when looking in the reference section of an old Bible, I noticed a picture of Moses holding the 10 Commandments and on them was Masoretic Text which was not in existence in Moses' time. Moses smashed the first set that God etched in Exodus 31:8 and chiseled out the second set. The language during Moses' time would not have been Masoretic Text with its diacritic markings, nor its predecessor, Aramaic Hebrew, nor its predecessor, Paleo Hebrew. Paleo Hebrew though would have been in use during the time of the Davidic Kingdom...

The online tool for mobile and desktop is divided into three sections - called 'Learn', 'Play' and 'Work'. Users can 'Learn' about the language of ancient Egypt by following a short educational introduction in six steps that become increasingly difficult. The first step lets the user trace hieroglyphics with their cursor as accurately as possible for the machine learning to identify. The new Google Arts & Culture tool Fabricius lets anyone interactively discover the hieroglyphic language by means of three dedicated gateways - Learn, Play and Work Learn takes the user through six interactive steps to introduce you to Egyptian...

An inscribed ancient Egyptian scarab and five clay tablets with carvings of naked women have been found in Rehob, a 3,500-year-old city in Israel. The carvings likely depict ancient fertility goddesses, such as Asherah or Ashtarte, Amihai Mazar, an archaeology professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science. "[They] were used at home, as part of popular domestic religious practice in the domestic sphere, mainly related to fertility of women," Mazar said in an email, noting that similar carvings have been found at other archaeological sites in the region... Made of a mineral called steatite, the scarab contains...

By the beginning of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (a few years after 2000 B.C.E.), the pressure of immigrants on the eastern Delta was so strong that the Egyptian authorities built a series of forts at strategic points to "repel the Asiatics," as the story of Sinuhe tells us.1 More than a century later, however, Egyptian policy toward the Asiatics changed. Instead of trying to prevent them from coming in, the Egyptians cultivated close relations with strong Canaanite city-states on the Mediterranean coast and allowed select Asiatic populations to settle in the eastern Delta. The last of the great pharaohs of...

In a landmark article in the March/April 2010 issue of BAR, Orly Goldwasser, professor of Egyptology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explained how the very first alphabet, from which all other alphabets developed, was invented by illiterate Canaanite miners in the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem in the Sinai peninsula. Inspired by Egyptian pictorial hieroglyphs and a desire to articulate their own thoughts in writing, these Canaanites created 22 alphabetic acrophonetic signs scratched into the rock that could express their entire language. But Goldwasser did not convince everyone. Anson Rainey, emeritus professor of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures and Semitic...

According to Karen Covello-Paran, director of the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, "We discovered a wide rare bracelet made of bronze. The ancient bracelet, which is extraordinarily well preserved, is decorated with engravings and the top of it is adorned with a horned structure. At that time horns were the symbol of the storm-god and they represented power, fertility and law. The person who could afford such a bracelet was apparently very well off financially, and it probably belonged to the village ruler. It is interesting to note that in the artwork of neighboring lands gods and...

Ancient civilisations in Mexico developed a writing system as early as 2,000 years ago, new evidence suggests. The discovery in the state of Veracruz of a block inscribed with symbolic shapes has astounded anthropologists. Researchers tell Science magazine that they consider it to be the oldest example of writing in the New World. The inscriptions are thought to have been made by the Olmecs, an ancient pre-Columbian people known for creating large statues of heads. The finding suggests that New World people developed writing some 400 years before their contemporaries in the Western hemisphere. ...... "I think it could...

NOTE: If I know anything about the rabid naysayers on FR, at least some of the RELIGIOUS [vs spiritual] types will wail and rant that ANYTHING having to do with numbers and The Bible has to be crossing the line into dealing with Biblically forbidden NUMEROLOGY. This is nonsense. The dictionary definition of “numerology” makes clear that numerology is the study of numbers, as the figures designating the year of one’s birth, “to determine their supposed influence on one’s life, future, etc.” [Quix color, bold emphasis on the definition from: HERE: http://www.infoplease.com/ipd/A0562554.html Clearly, the Biblically prohibited issue is INTEREST IN,...

<p>CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) -- An Egyptian scholar based in London, England, has been delighting Arab audiences with his inquiries into the recondite world of medieval Muslims who wrote about ancient Egypt and had some insights into hieroglyphic writing.</p> <p>Among Western scholars, who have led the field of Egyptology since Napoleon's 1798 campaign and Jean-Francois Champollion's groundbreaking work on hieroglyphics in the 1820s, the conventional wisdom has been that Arabs and Muslims dismissed ancient Egypt as an irrelevant pagan civilization.</p>