Oh, how horrible

Egypt: Train hits school bus; 47 children killed

A speeding train crashed into a bus carrying children to their kindergarten in southern Egypt on Saturday, killing at least 47, officials said. Distraught families searched for signs of their loved ones along the tracks in the aftermath of the latest disaster to hit the country's railway system.

The bus was carrying more than 50 children between 4 and 6 years old when it was hit near al-Mandara village in Manfaloot district in the province of Assiut, a security official said, adding that it appears that the railroad crossing was not closed as the train sped toward it.

I feel so sorry for the families in this terrible tragedy.

What a loss

A black day for heritage: burning the Egyptian Scientific Institute

Founded in 1798 by Napoleon Bonaparte, the Egyptian Scientific Institute was the oldest institution of its type in the Middle East. It's collection includes the original of Description de l'Egypte. The building burned when a Molotov cocktail which was thrown during protests missed it mark and hit the institute instead.

Updated: Egypt Institute Burns; Scholars Scramble to Rescue Manuscripts

Egypt's oldest research institute caught fire during demonstrations in central Cairo on 18 December, destroying an unknown number of precious books and manuscripts. Shocked Egyptologists call the destruction a "tragedy," and are now trying to locate and salvage the research treasures.

The Institut d'Égypte was founded as a scientific research academy by Napoleon Bonaparte during his 1798 Egyptian campaign, an invasion which brought the country's ancient history to the attention of Western scholars. The collection includes at least 20,000 documents and books, many of which are irreplaceable. Among the books is a rare original copy of the Description de l'Egypt, the first extensive illustrated text on Egyptian antiquities, temples, and monuments.

According to that news story, 35,000 items had been rescued, although their condition was not given.

Words fail me. Thank you to Mahmoud Khalifa for posting to the IFLA list and Soraya Assar for passing it on to MEDLIB-L, alerting us to what had happened.

Oh, my

I have an interest in aegyptology, so for years I've read news stories quoting Zahi Hawass, sometimes driving me crazy with some of his pronouncements. That's not going to be the case anymore, apparently.

Egypt's iconic antiquities chief fired: Critics said longtime leader was too close to former Mubarak regime

Egypt's antiquities minister, whose trademark Indiana Jones hat made him one the country's best known figures around the world, was fired Sunday after months of pressure from critics who attacked his credibility and accused him of having been too close to the regime of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

Zahi Hawass, long chided as publicity loving and short on scientific knowledge, lost his job along with about a dozen other ministers in a Cabinet reshuffle meant to ease pressure from protesters seeking to purge remnants of Mubarak's regime.

"He was the Mubarak of antiquities," said Nora Shalaby, an activist and archaeologist. "He acted as if he owned Egypt's antiquities, and not that they belonged to the people of Egypt."

Here's hoping his successor will continue to campaign for the exploration of Aegypt's past, as well as the preservation of its antiquities.

Bravely protecting history

Human Shield of Civilians Protects Egypt's Museums

Egypt's ancient treasures appear to be safe today, after citizens, and later the military, banded together to stop looters amid an uprising that left some of the world's most prized artifacts perilously vulnerable to common thieves.

Egyptians, desperate to protect their country's heritage from the kind of mass looting that devastated Baghdad's museums in 2003, created a kind of human shield around Cairo's Egyptian Museum this week, linking arms in front of the historic site and chasing down vandals who had managed to enter the building after it was abandoned by the country's police.

And it's not just museums...

Ismail Serageldin, the director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, thanked Egypt's young people for protecting the library's historic collection. "The library is safe thanks to Egypt's youth, whether they be the staff of the Library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building from potential vandals and looters," Serageldin wrote on the library's website.

Hurrah for these volunteer guardians!

Social networking has been a major player in this crisis, and continues to be

One of my friends, who never really saw the point of things such as Facebook and Twitter, admitted the other day that he had no idea that they could help topple governments. So far the Aegyptian leader still seems to be in place, but that could change. In the meantime, Internet and even cell phone use have been cut off by the government. For those who can get to a regular phone, there is some help for trying to get messages of what is going on to loved ones and to the world, also using the social networking tool Twitter:


Techies make way for stranded Egyptians to be heard

For those stuck in Egypt without the Internet, Google, Twitter and SayNow have teamed up to create an innovative voicemail system: Call a number and leave a message, and the system blasts it out into the universe in the form of a tweet with the hashtag #egypt.

Links in the tweets go to the actual voicemail, and volunteers are translating the tweets.

I hope that this can end peacefully and that it will not usher in some ultra-conservative religious party in a grab for power. I'm also keeping a co-worker in my thoughts--she is from Iraq but some of her family went to Aegypt looking for stability, so I'm sure this is tense time for her.

More on the destruction of Aegyptian antiquities

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Broken and missing treasures amid the chaos

Looters smash treasures and mummies in Egyptian Museum

Looters broke into the Cairo museum housing the world's greatest collection of Pharaonic treasures, smashing several statues and damaging two mummies, while police battled anti-government protesters on the streets.

Let's hope no other historical artefacts are destroyed or stolen during the present chaotic environment there. It could have been worse. The building next door, which was not part of the museum, was torched. Of course, it's not over by a long shot.

Cool

Robot to expose hidden secrets of pyramid: Device will unlock Egyptian room that has been sealed for 4,500 years

Following in the footsteps of Howard Carter and Abbot and Costello, a specialized robot will penetrate deeper into the Great Pyramid of Giza than ever before. The robot, part of a years long exploration called the Djedi Project, will explore a shaft inaccessible to a previous robot, unlocking a room that has remain sealed for 4,500 years.

Here's some more information on the Djedi Project from Dr Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Aegypt.

Oooh, wonderful!

Temple to cat god found in Egypt

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a 2,000-year-old temple in Alexandria dedicated to a cat goddess.

The temple is the first trace of the royal quarters of the Ptolemaic dynasty to be revealed in Alexandria.

The find confirms the Greek dynasty of Egyptians continued the worship of ancient animal deities.

The Goddess is, of course, Bastet, sometimes known simply as Bast.

Violence begets violence

Muslims, Christians set homes ablaze in Egypt: Fires follow killing of 6 Christians on Coptic Christmas, rape of Muslim girl

The area of Nagaa Hamady, a little north of Luxor in Aegypt, has become in embroiled in violence after the (Coptic) Christmas Eve [Wednesday night] drive-by shooting of six Coptic Christians. Two of the three men held are believed to be related to a Muslim girl who was said to be raped about a month ago by a Copt. In the wake of the shootings, four Muslim shops in a nearby village and four Coptic houses in another have been torched. Demonstrations also yielded several arrests.

Here's hoping for peace to reassert itself. Copts and Muslims have co-existed in Aegypt for many hundreds of years, and I'd like to see this as an isolated incident that will die down. But whenever you get into retaliation violence, there's a tendency for it to escalate first.

Oooooooooh!!!

Egypt archaeologists discover huge tomb near Cairo

Archaeologists in Egypt have said they have discovered the largest known tomb in the ancient necropolis of Sakkara, to the south of Cairo.

The tomb dates back 2,500 years to the 26th Dynasty and contains important artefacts, including mummified eagles.

It is one of two newly discovered tombs found by an Egyptian team working close to the entrance of Sakkara, the burial ground for Egypt's ancient capital.

Ack!

People who have backgrounds in classical and ancient history (well, any kind of historical studies) should probably not watch television. (Of course, then they'd miss things like 'Heroes'.) The History Channel itself is egregious in 1) promoting shows that have nothing to do with history [like 'Monster Quest] or 2) presenting bad or dumbed-down history. Which is why I thought I'd give Discovery a whirl tonight.

Tonight I was watching Discovery's 'Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer', which was overall very entertaining and interesting, but then at the end they wrapped it all up neatly by indicating that Cleopatra had eliminated her siblings and then herself, in essence ending the Ptolemaic line.

They totally ignored her children. One, which she purportedly had with Caesar, was co-ruler for awhile and after her death was proclaimed pharaoh. He was captured and executed on orders of Octavian (later known as Augustus Caesar). That is the true end of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Aegypt, and Pharaonic Aegypt in general. But there may be descendants of Cleopatra out there, for she had three other children with Mark Antony, who were given into the care of Antony's former wife (and Octavian's sister) after the deaths of their parents. It is unknown whether the boys survived to adulthood; it is thought they died of illness prior to their sister's marriage. But the sister settled with her husband in Mauretania and ruled there. She in turn had two children, a boy and a girl, although I think after that the descendants become difficult to trace. Her son ruled Mauretania after his father's death and was murdered on orders of Caligula, after producing a daughter.

I guess that's the appeal of true history--it's never something you can really wrap up in an hour and there's lots of loose ends that can be fascinating.

Still, the show was very interesting, talking about the life and death of Cleopatra's younger sister, Arsinoë, who had been held hostage by Caesar, escaped, and then led a rebellion that routed the Romans from the Pharos of Alexandria and nearly cost Caesar his life. She was later captured, paraded in shame in Rome, and exiled to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesos, an ancient place of sacrosanct sanctuary which was violated when she was dragged from the Artemisium and murdered. At the time Mark Antony was in charge of the province that included Ephesos. The show follows an investigation into a tomb that was situated inside the city limits (rare in ancient times) of a woman (rare still), found in the 1920s and studied further with forensic techniques. The belief is that this woman was Arsinoë, whose tomb was shaped in a way reminiscent of the Pharos. The bones matched the gender and age. A skull model was reconstructed from photos taken at the time of the first excavation (the original was lost during World War II) and using computers a face was put onto it to give a sense of what Arsinoë, and perhaps to some degree, Cleopatra, looked like.

They also included a small shot of a horned viper, one of several snakes sometimes called an asp, which is supposed to be the manner of Cleopatra's suicide. (Personally I vote for the Aegpytian cobra as the manner of her demise; it is fitting given its link to the royal family and is also sometimes called an asp, which simply means poisonous snake anyway.) This was timely as in the game yesterday (we're set in the Sudan, which was Upper Aegypt in ancient times, at the moment), we were attacked by magical asps that managed to bite my character as she fought the evil cultists, leaving her pretty close to death until she put herself into a stasis-like trance. I came across a video of a Field's Horned Viper which pretty much reminded me of what I was visualising at the time, although this particular snake is not native to Africa (but then do magical venomous snakes HAVE to be???) It is a Pseudocerastes; the African ones are the Cerastes themselves. The embedding is disabled, but the video's interesting, if for no other reason than the man doing closeups on a venomous snake with the cage open. Don't watch if you're ophidiophobic.

Ah, a great chance at exploration!

Cave complex may lie beneath Giza Pyramids: British explorer claims to have found the lost underworld of the pharaohs

'In his memoirs, British consul general Henry Salt recounts how he investigated an underground system of "catacombs" at Giza in 1817 in the company of Italian explorer Giovanni Caviglia,' [Andrew] Collins said.

The document records that the two explored the caves for a distance of 'several hundred yards,' coming upon four large chambers from which stretched further cave passageways.

With the help of British Egyptologist Nigel Skinner-Simpson, Collins reconstructed Salt's exploration on the plateau, eventually locating the entrance to the lost catacombs in an apparently unrecorded tomb west of the Great Pyramid.

Meanwhile...

Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, has dismissed the discovery.

'There are no new discoveries to be made at Giza. We know everything about the plateau,' he stated.

Those are just the sorts of words scientists should never utter, for no matter if it's biolgoy, history, or archaeology--someone's going to come along to prove you wrong. I'd be interested if Collins' claims will be borne out. If so, it's a significant discovery. If not, it will be yet another spurious claim about the mysteries of Aegypt.

Well, I did sleep in

Listening to: Rob Thomas' Something to Be, 'I am an Illusion'

to after 4:30 in the afternoon, although I went to bed after 4 this morning, so it was about 10 12 hours (math was never my forté). I got up about noon to check my blood sugar (it was a little over 200) and ate a little breakfast, then went on back to sleep.

It's a gorgeous day, sunny, with a light breeze, so I've opened all the windows. I'm going to get ready and then go make a Kroger run. Then I'm going to come back, wash some dishes and straighten up the house with the Mummy and Mummy Returns on (I got the full collector's edition for signing my lease...I didn't have the second movie before except on VHS. I love them. When I want to relax, I watch them--yeah, it's the library scene with the bookshelves dominoing that grabbed me the first time. Technically I have the Scorpion King now, but I heard it was really, really bad. I might watch it at some point, but it's been so long since I've watched the others, I don't know when I'll have time. Did you know there's a Mummy 3 in the works? They'll start filming this summer for a story with an Chinese theme, moving from Aegypt, so Oded Fehr (did you know he's from Israel and served in the Israeli army?) will not be reprising his role of Ardeth Bey. John Hannah will be Jonathan again. Jet Li will be the villian, and Michelle Yeoh is also listed in the cast, so it sounds like it will be good, but what bothers me is the absence of Rachel Weisz as Evelyn. No word on who is playing their grown-up son Alex, Here is some Mummy trivia for you, by the way.

I also came across an interesting series of books, Aegpyt, by John Crowley (who though born in Maine, apparently lived for some time as a kid in Northeastern Kentucky) I'd like to read (can't believe I haven't heard of them with my mediaeval history background and the fact that at least one scholar, Harold Bloom, lists the first two in his Western Canon).

Okay, it's been awhile since I started writing (so many links take time!) and it's grown overcast. I need to get ready and go to the store before the heavens open up (although hopefully it will be a short storm, like the other day).