Advanced imaging techniques reveal secrets of sealed ancient Egyptian animal coffins

Researchers from the British Museum have gained valuable insight into the contents of six sealed ancient Egyptian animal coffins using cutting-edge neutron tomography.

Lead researcher Daniel O’Flynn and his colleagues present the findings of their examination of six sealed ancient Egyptian animal coffins, all of which were dated between 650 and 250 BC, in a new article published in Scientific Reports.

It is thought that animals were sacrificed and mummified to honor the gods, some serving as offerings or even participating in rituals, while others served as physical manifestations of the gods.

The researchers examined the coffins’ interiors using the non-invasive neutron tomography technique to check for any signs of the animals that had been interred there.

They were able to detect actual biological materials in the coffins, which could be linked to specific animals known to have existed in Egypt during the first millennium BC, much to their delight.

This study’s findings were significant for two reasons. First, the study demonstrated that the animal coffins were just that—coffins—real coffins used to bury actual animals. As had been suspected but previously unprovable, the animal images engraved on the top of the boxes actually did represent the animals sealed inside.

Daniel O’Flynn of the British Museum, who led the study published in Scientific Reports, said: “The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of neutron tomography for the study of mummified remains inside sealed metal containers, providing evidence linking the animal figures on top of votive boxes to the concealed remains.”

The coffins, made of copper compounds, were discovered in various locations, including the ancient cities of Naucratis and Tell El Yehudiyeh. Respectively, the coffins bore figures of lizards, eels, and part-eel, part-cobra creatures with human heads.

The authors note that it is rare for such coffins to still be sealed. Inside the coffins, researchers found intact skulls similar to North African wall lizard species, broken-down bones, and textile fragments believed to be linen.

“Linen was commonly used in ancient Egyptian mummification, and we suspect it was wrapped around the animals before they were placed in the coffins,” explained Dr O’Flynn.

The authors found lead within the three coffins without loops, which they suggest may have been used to aid weight distribution within two of them and to repair a hole found in the other.

They speculate that lead may have been selected due to its status in ancient Egypt as a magical material, as previous research has proposed that lead was used in love charms and curses.

The study also posited that loops found on the exterior of three coffins may have been used to hang them from shrine or temple walls, statues or boats during religious processions, indicating the deep importance animals played in religious practices. While the heavier lead-containing coffins without loops may have been used for different purposes.

Cover Photo: An animal coffin, surmounted by a human-headed part-eel, part-cobra creature wearing a double crown, is one of six sealed ancient Egyptian animal coffins researchers have studied.

Tomb of Amun Temple Steward Discovered in Saqqara

An archaeological mission from the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden (RMO) and the Egyptian Museum in Turin (Museo Egizio) uncovered the remains of Panehsy’s tomb, the steward of Amun Temple in the early Ramesside period, along with a collection of smaller chapels in the Saqqara Necropolis.

“The new discovery sheds new light on the development of Saqqara Necropolis during the Ramesside period and introduces new individuals that were yet unknown in the historical sources,” said Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. 

The tomb of Panehsy, which has the form of a freestanding temple with a gate entrance, an inner courtyard with columned porticoes, and a shaft to the underground burial chambers, is situated north to the tomb of the famous Maya, the high-ranking official from the time of Tutankhamun.

The mud brick walls of the upper structure are 1.5 metres high and embellished with decorated limestone revetment slabs.

These show the colourful reliefs of the tomb owner and his wife Baia, who was the singer of Amun, along with several priests and offering bearers.

Christian Greco, director of the Museo Egizio in Turin, said the most beautiful representation depicts Panehsy worshipping the cow goddess Hathor. Beneath it, Panehsy and Baia sit together before an offering table.

A bald man with leopard skin around his shoulders stands opposite the couple. This was the priest who took care of their mortuary cult, pouring out water.

Lara Weiss, a curator of Leiden’s Egyptian and Nubian collection, pointed out that during excavation work, the mission stumbled upon four smaller tomb chapels located to the east of Panehsy’s tomb, one of which is of the gold foil-maker of the treasury of the Pharaoh Yuyu.

The tombs are very well preserved, and their walls bear high-quality, detailed, and stunning decorations. Although it is a relatively small tomb chapel, four generations of Yuyu’s family were venerated in beautiful colourful reliefs showing Yuyu’s funerary procession and the reviving of his mummy to live in the afterlife as well as the veneration of the Hathor cow and the barque of the local Saqqara god Sokar.

Another notable find was made at the eastern side of Panehsy’s tomb, where a yet anonymous chapel with a very rare sculptured representation of the tomb’s owner and his family was discovered.

The artistic style of the representation might have been inspired by the statues neighbouring the tomb of Maya and Merit.

The archaeological mission aims to understand the history of Saqqara, one of the most important burial sites of ancient Egypt.

The Leiden Museum conducted research in Saqqara together with the Egypt Exploration Society of London from 1975 to 1998. Since 1999, Leiden University has been a partner in the project, and in 2015 the Museo Egizio in Turin joined the mission.

Ancient Wooden Tags Offer Clues to Egypt’s Climate

Swiss scientists are reconstructing the climate of the ancient world using small wooden artefacts hung on mummified remains.

Throughout history, the earth’s climate has undergone natural fluctuations. Although insignificant compared with the current crisis, these fluctuations would nevertheless have been enough to make and unmake empires.

According to recent studies, they would have contributed first to the rise of the Roman Empire and then to its fall. Basel- and Geneva-based scientists funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) are endeavouring to reconstruct the climate of Roman-governed ancient Egypt in a bid to better understand the effects it had on the history of a region or empire.

The team is aided in its tasks by remarkable “Rosetta stones” in the form of wooden labels attached to Roman-era mummies. Before sending their deceased loved one to the embalmer, families would attach a label bearing the dead person’s name, the names of their parents and sometimes a short religious message to the body.

The labels were a way of identifying the deceased, who would no longer be recognisable once wrapped in their bandages, and ensuring that embalmers did not mix bodies up.

A wealth of information in museums

The wooden labels provide more information than just the identity of Pkyris, the defunct son of Besis and Senpnouth, or the late Tsenpetese, daughter of Panahib. They also contain precious information about the climate at the time because, like all wooden artefacts, they have growth rings.

Each ring marks the passing of one year. Good years are indicated by broad rings, since the tree grew faster. Narrower rings can be evidence of years of drought.

A few pieces of wood are obviously not enough in themselves to reconstruct the climate of the time. It would be necessary to observe the same pattern in several dozen samples at least.

The greater the number of overlaps, the more reliable the conclusions. In addition, to recreate the subtleties of climate fluctuation, it is essential to compare the growth rings of several tree species with different responses to climatic conditions such as drought or extreme heat.

“That’s why mummy labels are ideal for our purposes”, explains François Blondel, an archaeologist at the University of Geneva. “Not only are there thousands of them in museums around the world, they’re made from lots of different tree species, such as pine, cypress, cedar and juniper”.

Dating climate events

In the International Journal of Wood Culture, the researcher analysed the ring sequences of over 300 labels. He then identified the overlaps – in other words, the cases where ring sequences match up with each other.

These overlaps provide an initial outline of what the climate used to be like in the eastern Mediterranean, in modern-day Lebanon, the Greek islands or the mouth of the Nile – the areas where the trees were harvested.

There are a few good years here and an unfortunate succession of droughts there, but the actual dates are still unclear, François Blondel explains. “We can’t yet assign a precise date to the rings and the events they record”.

The next step going forward will therefore be to locate these events in history. With luck, the scientists will find a datable specimen. Then, by looking for overlaps with other labels from the same tree species and region, they should be able to pinpoint the exact date. If not, they will have to resort to radiocarbon dating.

By combining several samples of wood taken along the rings of the same specimen, it is possible to statistically reduce dating uncertainty – to virtually zero in the best-case scenario.

The scientists still have to find the right specimens and, above all, obtain permission from museums for invasive radiocarbon analysis.

The search has only just started, explains Sabine Huebner. As leader of the SNSF project that is trying to reconstruct the climate of Roman Egypt, the Professor of Ancient History at the University of Basel coordinates the work of historians, archaeologists and climatologists.

“Mummy labels are just a proxy tool that we are using to reconstruct the climate of Roman Egypt, the breadbasket of the Roman Empire, and understand how climate fluctuations influenced changes in society, government and the economy”. It is a perfect example of how questions raised by ancient history can be of pressing importance to the modern-day world.

Researchers use 21st-century methods to record 2,000 years of ancient graffiti in Egypt

Simon Fraser University researchers are learning more about ancient graffiti—and their intriguing comparisons to modern graffiti—as they produce a state-of-the-art 3D recording of the Temple of Isis in Philae, Egypt.

Working with the University of Ottawa, the researchers published their early findings in Egyptian Archaeology and have returned to Philae to advance the project.

“It’s fascinating because there are similarities with today’s graffiti,” says SFU geography professor Nick Hedley, co-investigator of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded project.

“The iconic architecture of ancient Egypt was built by those in positions of power and wealth, but the graffiti records the voices and activities of everybody else. The building acts like a giant sponge or notepad for generations of people from different cultures for over 2,000 years.”

As an expert in spatial reality capture, Hedley leads the team’s innovative visualization efforts, documenting the graffiti, their architectural context, and the spaces they are found in using advanced methods like photogrammetry, raking light, and laser scanning. “I’m recording reality in three-dimensions — the dimensionality in which it exists,” he explains.

With hundreds if not thousands of graffiti, some carved less than a millimeter deep on the temple’s columns, walls, and roof, precision is essential.

Typically, the graffiti would be recorded through a series of photographs — a step above hand-drawn documents — allowing researchers to take pieces of the site away and continue working.

Sabrina Higgins, an SFU archaeologist and project co-investigator, says photographs and two-dimensional plans do not allow the field site to be viewed as a dynamic, multi-layered, and evolving space.

“The techniques we are applying to the project will completely change how the graffiti, and the temple, can be studied,” she says.

Hedley is moving beyond basic two-dimensional imaging to create a cutting-edge three-dimensional recording of the temple’s entire surface.

This will allow the interior and exterior of the temple, and the graffiti, to be viewed and studied at otherwise impossible viewpoints, from virtually anywhere— without compromising detail.

This three-dimensional visualization will also enable researchers to study the relationship between a figural graffito, any graffiti that surrounds it, and its location in relation to the structure of temple architecture.

While this is transformative for viewing and studying the temple and its inscriptions, Hedley points to the big-picture potential of applying spatial reality capture technology to the field of archaeology, and beyond.

“Though my primary role in this project is to help build the definitive set of digital wall plans for the Mammisi at Philae, I’m also demonstrating how emerging spatial reality capture methods can fundamentally change how we gather and produce data and transform our ability to interpret and analyze these spaces. This is a space to watch!” says Hedley.

Researchers Study Severed Hands Uncovered in Egypt

In 2011, archaeologists excavating a site in northern Egypt known as Tell el-Dab’a came across a grisly scene. As they probed a series of pits outside the city’s palace walls, 12 skeletal hands reached back at them.

The dismembered hands, researchers reported last week in Scientific Reports, are likely a cache of battlefield trophies—prizes lopped from enemies’ bodies and exchanged for gold in a ritual known as the “gold of honor.” Egyptian texts and wall carvings describe the custom, the researchers note, but these hands represent the first physical evidence of it.

“It’s very nice evidence,” says Isabelle Crevecoeur, a physical anthropologist at CNRS, the French national research agency, who was not involved with the study. “From the biological and anthropological evidence, there’s no doubt it was part of a ritual.”

The hands were dated to 1500 B.C.E., when Tell el-Dab’a was known as Avaris and briefly served as the capital of ancient Egypt. When Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who has led digs at Tell el-Dab’a for decades, first saw the remains, he immediately thought of the trophy-taking ritual.

According to ancient accounts, Egyptian warriors presented the hands of slain enemies to the pharaoh, who rewarded them with gold necklaces or golden pendants in the shape of flies.

Some researchers had an alternative explanation: that the severed appendages represented a brutal punishment for criminals, perhaps thieves. There is no written or pictorial evidence of such punishments in ancient Egypt, however, and the new analysis of the Tell el-Dab’a hands supports the trophy-ritual hypothesis. For one, the hands were carefully cut from the arm. Any bones below the wrist had been removed, leaving just the hand and fingers.

“They were all prepared properly to look just like a hand should,” says German Archaeological Institute paleopathologist Julia Gresky, who led the study.

She and colleagues found no cutmarks on the bones, suggesting an almost surgical effort went into preparing them. That makes a convincing case for ritualistic amputation, not barbaric punishment, Crevecouer says. “No signs of cutting is a sign that they did it very carefully, not with an ax or something. It’s delicate work. That, for me, is a good argument they did it for a ritual.”

The care also suggests the hands were removed after death, not hacked from living prisoners. They were probably severed after rigor mortis–a tightening of the tendons in the hours after death–had passed, Gresky argues. Otherwise, it would have been difficult to cut the tendons connecting hand to arm without leaving marks on the bones.

After they were removed and modified, eight of the hands were placed carefully in a shallow pit, with several more hands laid into another pit less than 1 meter away. “If it was punishment, the hand would have just been thrown away,” Gresky says. “But they really took care with them and placed them nicely.” Located just in front of the city’s central palace, the pits would have been visible from the throne room, suggesting the pharaoh prized the hands—and supporting the notion that they were a war trophy, the researchers note.

Fingers are among the first parts of the body to decompose and fall apart, so finding intact hands suggests they were all deposited in a single event or ceremony, rather than one at a time. “Finding articulated bones means the deposits must have been made very quickly, and then protected,” Crevecoeur says. “The hand was still fleshy when it was buried–otherwise it would have fallen apart.”

The “gold of honor” ritual was probably introduced to Egypt by interlopers known as the Hyksos, Bietak says. These invaders–who perhaps came from the eastern Mediterranean–conquered Egypt around 1640 B.C.E. and controlled the region for about a century, ruling from Avaris. They introduced Egyptians to chariots and new types of weapons, such as slings and distinctive battleaxes.

Bietak thinks they also introduced the custom of taking enemies’ hands as trophies. Later in Egypt, the ritual appears to have become standard practice. Ahmose I, the pharaoh who eventually forced the last of the Hyksos out of Egypt, “had a heap of hands depicted on the wall of his temple at Abydos,” Bietak says.

The custom both honored the pharaoh and inflicted punishment beyond the grave. Since the ancient Egyptians believed one’s body had to be intact in order to pass into the next world, severing the right hand would have disfigured their enemies’ souls as well as their bodies, barring them from the afterlife.

Digital Image Depicts 30,000-Year-Old Egyptian

A lifelike facial approximation of a man who lived 30,000 years ago in what is now Egypt may offer clues about human evolution.

In 1980, archaeologists unearthed the man’s skeletal remains at Nazlet Khater 2, an archaeological site in Egypt’s Nile Valley. Anthropological analysis revealed that the man was between 17 and 29 years old when he died, stood approximately 5 feet, 3 inches (160 centimeters) tall and was of African ancestry.

The skeleton is the oldest example of Homo sapiens remains found in Egypt and one of the oldest in the world, according to a study published March 22.

However, little else was known about him other than that he was buried alongside a stone ax.

Now, more than 40 years later, a team of Brazilian researchers has created a facial approximation of the man using dozens of digital images they collected while viewing his skeletal remains, which are part of the collection at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. 

“The skeleton has most of the bones preserved, although there have been some losses, such as the absence of ribs, hands, [the] middle-inferior part of the right tibia [shin bone] and [the] lower part of the left tibia, as well as the feet,” first aut, an archaeologist with the Ciro Flamarion Cardoso Archaeology Museum in Brazil, told Live Science in an email. “But the main structure for facial approximation, the skull, was well preserved.”

One characteristic of the skull that stood out to the researchers was the jaw and how it differed from more modern mandibles. A portion of the skull was also missing, but the team copied and mirrored it using the opposite side of the skull and used data points from computerized tomography (CT) scans from living virtual donors. 

“The skull, in general terms, has a modern structure, but part of it has archaic elements, such as the jaw, which is much more robust than that of modern men,” study co-researcher Cícero Moraes, a Brazilian graphics expert, told Live Science in an email. “When I observed the skull for the first time, I was impressed with that structure and at the same time curious to know how it would look after approaching the face.”

By digitally stitching together the images in a process known as photogrammetry, the researchers created two virtual 3D models of the man.

The first was a black-and-white image with his eyes closed in a neutral state, and the second was a more artistic approach featuring a young man with tousled dark hair and a trimmed beard.

“In general, people think that facial approximation works like in Hollywood movies, where the end result is 100% compatible with the person in life,” Moraes said. “In reality, it’s not quite like that. What we do is approximate what could be the face, with available statistical data and the resulting work is a very simple structure.

“However, it is always important to humanize the individual’s face when working with historical characters, since, by complementing the structure with hair and colors, the identification with the public will be greater, arousing interest and — who knows — a desire to study more about the specific subject or archeology [and] history as a whole,” he added.

The researchers hope that providing a look at this ancient man could help archaeologists better understand how humans have evolved over time.

“The fact that this individual is over 30,000 years old makes it important for understanding human evolution,” Santos said.