The ancient Egyptians sometimes reused crafted materials. This block, which features a battle scene, was likely created during the reign of Amenhotep II between 1427 and 1400 B.C., during the 18th dynasty. But when it was discovered, the block was being used as part of the foundation of the unfinished mortuary temple of Ramesses IV (who ruled from 1153 to 1147 B.C., during the 20th dynasty).

The painted sandstone slab was discovered in Luxor in 1912 by Egyptologist Herbert E. Winlock, who later became the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the block in its collection. In his original publication describing the artifact, Winlock wrote that it featured a scene of an Egyptian pharaoh slaying his enemies with a bow and arrow. "The block may be taken as one of the best preserved specimens of the great imperial pictorial-relief yet discovered," he wrote.

The excellent preservation of the artifact and its vibrant colors was likely due to its reuse in Ramesses IV's temple foundations, Catharine Roehrig, the Met's curator emerita of Egyptian art, wrote in a 2008 explanation of the relief fragment.

Measuring roughly 24 by 45 inches (61 by 115 centimeters), the painted sandstone carving was likely part of a larger scene depicting an Egyptian pharaoh vanquishing an enemy army, according to Roehrig. The pharaoh's chariot and horses appear in the upper-right corner, while a rival soldier tries to avoid being trampled to death. Three of the enemies have been pierced by arrows.

The pointed beards and distinctive clothing suggest the enemies were ancient Syrians or possibly the Hyksos, a Semitic-speaking foreign dynasty that ruled Egypt from around 1640 to 1530 B.C., during the Second Intermediate Period, James P. Allen, former curator of Egyptian art at the Met, wrote in 2005. The battle scene may therefore reflect historical conflicts fought between dynasty 18 pharaohs like Amenhotep II and Asiatic rulers.

But the relief was unlikely to have been created as a commemoration of a specific historical battle. "Their primary purpose was to portray the pharaoh in his role as the victorious defender of Egypt," Roehrig wrote.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Several ancient Egyptian princesses buried with bows, arrows and a dagger may have trained with those weapons during their lives, possibly using them while hunting or practicing archery, a controversial new study suggests.

Researchers examined the remains of six royal individuals who lived during Egypt's Middle Kingdom nearly 4,000 years ago. After analyzing the muscle-attachment sites on these bones, the researchers suggested that certain pronounced areas might be linked to repeated activities such as archery and weapon handling.

"Members of the royal family, especially the women, were active participants in skilled, physically demanding activities such as archery and hunting," study first author Zeinab Hashesh, an archaeologist at Beni-Suef University in Egypt, said in a statement.

The finding, published Friday (July 17) in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, challenges the assumption that weapons placed in the women's tombs were largely ceremonial. It may also provide new information about the health and physical activities of royal women.

However, bioarchaeologists who were not involved in the study told Live Science that skeletal changes cannot reliably indicate a specific activity. Age, body size, genetics and other repetitive movements can produce similar results, they said.

Royals rediscovered in a museum basement

In the 1890s, French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan excavated a site near the tomb of pharaohs Amenemhat II and Amenemhat III. From these excavations, de Morgan found various royal individuals, whose partial remains were later stored at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

For decades, the remains were forgotten about. But in 2020, museum workers rediscovered the bones during a museum curation project. The collection included King Hor, Princess Ita, Khenmet, Itaweret and Noub-Hotep, as well as an unidentified woman who may have been Princess Sathathormeryt (also spelled Sithathoriunet). Four of the women are believed to have been daughters of the pharaoh Amenemhat II.

However, the skeletons' identities depend heavily on those 19th-century labels, which "means that we cannot be certain how reliable they really are," Sonia Zakrzewski, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email. Most of the individuals' skulls were missing, and only around 22% to 58% of each skeleton survived. Their soft tissues had largely decayed into powder, but the remaining bones allowed the team to estimate the sex and age and look for injuries, diseases and signs of physical activity.

Signs of weapons training?

Using X-ray scans and specialized infrared spectroscopy, which can help identify different materials, the researchers examined the entheses, the places where muscles, tendons and ligaments attach to bones. Repeated muscle use can contribute to enlarged or pronounced attachment sites, although several other processes can also create this result.

Princess Ita, who died between the ages of 28 and 34, had pronounced attachment sites on parts of her right shoulder, arm and hand. The team suggested that these changes could reflect repeated gripping and weapon handling, possibly involving the ornate dagger found in her tomb.

Princess Noub-Hotep, who died in her early 40s, had strongly developed attachment sites in her forearms and right hand. De Morgan had discovered "arrows with their barbs in an astonishing state of preservation" in the princess's tomb, according to an 1896 issue of the journal American Anthropologist.

Similarly, Princess Itaweret showed robust attachment sites around her shoulder and chest, while Khenmet had pronounced features on her arms and shoulders. King Hor also displayed differences between muscle attachments on the left and right sides of his body.

The authors argued that these patterns fit actions involved in drawing back a bowstring ‪—‬ a process that can create muscular asymmetry between the left and right upper body. They also posited that these muscular patterns could be from gripping objects like daggers or maces and suggested the weapons buried with the royals weren't just symbolic.

Experts remain doubtful

Despite the pronounced attachment sites on these individuals' bones, Zakrzewski said it's unknown if the royals got buff through archery or some other activity.

The sites on the bones show that "certain muscles appear to have been repeatedly used, but the actual cause of that use is uncertain," she said. "We cannot say therefore that these skeletal changes necessarily are associated with the use of weaponry," especially since the researchers didn't look at comparison groups from the Nile Valley or elsewhere.

Zakrzewski added that it's unknown why artifacts like arrows were included in the tombs. Perhaps they were meant to be "used by individuals associated with the deceased," she said.

Scott Haddow, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Turin in Italy who was not involved in the study, noted that some of the skeletal changes were present on both sides of the remains.

"Archery is a highly asymmetrical activity; finding generalized, bilateral robusticity in some bones (with some asymmetry observed in other bones) does not make a particularly strong case for these individuals practicing archery," he told Live Science via email.

The individuals' ages at death could also explain the differences. Khenmet was between 35 and 45 when she died, while Noub-Hotep was approximately 40 to 44. Muscle-attachment sites are influenced by aging, as well as by body size and genetics, Haddow said.

Princess versus pauper

One of the study's largest caveats was the absence of a comparative group, which would have shown how unusual the changes were compared with other Egyptians from the same period.

"It would be very useful to know how much such side differences exist in contemporaneous Egyptians, whether royal or not," Zakrzewski said.

Besides missing a comparison with a "control" group, other experts believe that the researchers are reading too much into the weapons being buried with the royals.

"Although the presence of funerary artifacts (e.g., arrows, daggers) makes the princesses' involvement in such activities plausible, the authors provide limited biomechanical or biomedical evidence to substantiate this claim," Sébastien Villotte, an anthropologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, told Live Science via email.

He added that "a more robust approach would involve comparing these individuals to non-elite contemporaries from the same region and period. This would help determine whether such degenerative changes (at these locations) were common in the general population (who were unlikely to engage in the same activities) or truly indicative of elite-specific behaviors."

Although the study has a number of uncertainties, Zakrzewski said they shouldn't diminish the value of examining the remains. "It allows us to sort of put flesh on the bones and understand more about their lives," she said.

Can you identify these historical objects of war? Test your smarts with our weapons of the world quiz!

Archaeologists have discovered 18 ancient tombs in an Egyptian town along the Mediterranean Sea.

The tombs ‪—‬ which were unearthed in Marina el-Alamein (also spelled Alamin), about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Alexandria ‪—‬ date to the Ptolemaic (322 to 30 B.C.) or Roman (30 B.C. to A.D. 395) period, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a translated statement announcing the find.

During the Ptolemaic period, Egypt was ruled by the descendants of one of Alexander the Great's generals, while the Roman period started with the death of Cleopatra VII, when Egypt became incorporated into the Roman Empire as a province.

The team noted that 11 of the tombs had been carved deep into the ground, while the seven others were located closer to the ground's surface. The tombs held many artifacts ‪—‬ most notably, 24 "gold tongues" that were likely put into the mouths of mummies, and an offering altar with a base designed to look like a false door.

"The false door is one of the oldest and most recognizable elements of ancient Egyptian funerary architecture. In traditional Egyptian belief, it symbolized the interface between the worlds of the living and the dead, through which the deceased could spiritually receive offerings presented by the living," Hesham Hussein, the undersecretary for Lower Egypt and Sinai archaeology at Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, told Live Science in an email.

The fact that the design of a false door was carved into the altar "suggests that the symbolic meaning of the false door remained important even as its architectural function evolved," Hussein added.

Gold tongues from ancient Egypt

Gold tongues have been found in mummies at a number of ancient Egyptian sites. The ancient Egyptians considered gold to be the flesh of the gods, and they believed gold tongues could help the deceased communicate with them in the afterlife.

"Gold tongues are a well-documented feature of some burials dating to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods in Egypt," Hussein said. "They are generally interpreted as symbolic funerary amulets intended to enable the deceased to speak in the afterlife, particularly during the judgment before Osiris, or more broadly to communicate and recite sacred formulas in the next world."

Interestingly, one of the newly found gold tongues is shaped like the "Eye of Horus." Horus was a falcon-headed god associated with the sky and warfare. Artifacts shaped like his eye are often found in Egypt and were used to ward off evil, according to the statement.

However, it's unclear if some of these artifacts are actually gold tongues, Attilio Mastrocinque, a retired archaeology professor formerly at the University of Verona in Italy, told Live Science. Mastrocinque has written extensively about Greek and Roman religion but was not involved in this excavation.

After looking at the photos posted by the ministry, he noted that one appears to show a wheat ear. Wheat ears were associated with fertility and images of them were popular in the ancient world. The newfound artifact looks similar to silver wheat ears that have been found in Roman sanctuaries in Europe, Mastrocinque added.

Altar with a false door?

False doors are commonly found in ancient Egyptian tombs and offering altars are often near these doors. In this case, the base of an offering altar resembles a false door.

Krzysztof Jakubiak, an archaeology professor at the University of Warsaw who has excavated at Marina el-Alamein in the past but was not involved in the recent excavation, noted that this find likely needs additional analysis.

"I would exercise caution in asserting a direct comparison between the iconographic motifs visible on the discovered altar and those of the false door iconography," Jakubiak told Live Science in an email. He said it's possible that the altar was not finished and its existing appearance simply resembles a false door.

Hala Mostafa, an archaeology professor at Ain Shams University said in an email that he thought the altar may depict the hieroglyphic sign for "offering" rather than a false door.

Goddess statue and other finds

One of the tombs contained an 8.2-foot-long (2.5 meters) granite coffin whose lid was still on when the tomb was discovered. The team is currently examining the skeletal remains found inside.

Other finds included an incomplete statue of Aphrodite, a Greek goddess associated with love and beauty. During ancient Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty, Greek culture and religion became increasingly popular in Egypt. Mastrocinque said it will be interesting to see if there is a structure for Aphrodite near the statue

"It is important to know where this statue has been found," Mastrocinque told Live Science in an email. "Was there a little cultic place of Aphrodite within this funerary complex?"

Dorota Dzierzbicka, director of the Polish-Egyptian Archaeological Mission to Marina el-Alamein, said that the new finds, along with finds made at the site in the past, reveal that the town was "a culturally diverse community in which Egyptian and Graeco-Roman traditions coexisted and blended in everyday life and funerary practices." She noted that the new discoveries were made by Egyptian archaeologists who work at the site.

See how much you know about mummies with our mummy quiz!

In most areas of archaeology, excavators painstakingly dig layer by layer to reveal not just buried artifacts but also charred seeds, broken bones and microscopic grains of ancient pollen. This delicate process is followed by months of intensive lab work to study the newfound remains. But there is one kind of archaeologist that takes a different approach to understanding the past. Experimental archaeologists replicate how people did things in the past, using techniques they recreate from archaeological information and modern knowledge.

In his new book, "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations" (Little, Brown and Co., 2025), science writer Sam Kean explores the experimental side of archaeology. Through a series of ancient and modern vignettes, Kean discovers how Stone Age city dwellers kept their houses cool 9,000 years ago, how the Romans used needle and thread to style hair, and how bog bodies were formed in Iron Age Europe.

In this excerpt, Kean meets two men who used ancient techniques to diligently mummify a human body in an effort to understand how ancient Egyptians took care of their dead.

Related: Read our interview with Sam Kean on 'Dinner with King Tut'

Cultures throughout history have mummified their dead, and a handful still do today, but Egyptian mummies remain the most iconic. Unfortunately, the Egyptians wrote down virtually nothing about their embalming process. This leaves experimental archaeology as one of the few avenues available for understanding mummification, and several practitioners have indeed re-created mummies in modern times. In most cases, they work with animals, but a few intrepid souls have mummified human beings, most famously when Bob Brier and Ronn Wade did so in 1994.

Wade grew up wanting to be a mortician like his father. After a stint as a medic in the Vietnam War, he became an anatomist and eventually the head of Maryland's state anatomy board. Brier also has training in anatomy, but is an Egyptologist by training and passion. He's accumulated so many books on Egypt over his life that he rents a second apartment just to accommodate them. Brier and Wade selected their mummy from the pool of people in Baltimore who donated their bodies to science. Ultimately, they settled on a seventy-six-year-old Caucasian man who died of a heart attack. His identity remains secret, but a bit crassly, Wade nicknamed him E. M. Balm.

For authenticity's sake, Brier and Wade used replicas of pharaonic-era tools and materials, including linen wraps, an oddly wide wooden embalming table, and copper and obsidian blades — although they quickly abandoned the copper ones, which couldn't cut flesh well. Before starting on their mummy, they practiced one important step on other cadavers: extracting the brain. Instead of using full cadavers for this, they obtained some decapitated heads leftover from a medical school's plastic surgery class. ("They were looking a little weird," Brier recalls. "They'd had facelifts and such.")

From some scant references, Brier knew that Egyptian embalmers removed the brain by inserting a hooked rod through the nostrils, but the details were vague. Brier and Wade first tried scooping the brain out with such a rod, but the tissue proved too soft and wouldn't come out. They finally took to squirting water up the cadaver's nose, then used the rod to whisk the brain into a slurry. After that, it poured right out. "Like a milkshake," Brier says. "A strawberry milkshake to be exact."

Skills honed, the duo began making their mummy in May 1994. The first step involved removing his organs.

Different organs met different fates in Egypt. Unclear about the purpose of the brain, embalmers typically threw it away. The heart, in contrast, was left in situ [in place]; it was considered the seat of all thinking, emotion, and intelligence. Abdominal organs were carefully extracted and preserved. Following this protocol, Brier and Wade made a 3½-inch [9 centimeters] incision in their cadaver's abdomen and removed the spleen, liver, gallbladder, lungs, and twenty-two feet [6.7 meters] of intestines. Given their size, extracting the liver and lungs required some creative geometry and determined squeezing. The most difficult part involved detaching the lungs from the heart while working blind inside such a tiny hole.

With the organs removed, the pair cleaned the abdomen with palm wine and myrrh, then stuffed frankincense into the skull. This was an important ritual step to prepare the body for the afterlife, and also helped kill microbes and mask bad smells. Ancient embalmers used other sacred substances as well, often imported from Europe and Asia at great cost — pistachio resin, beeswax, castor oil. Ramses the Great's mummy had peppercorns from India shoved up his nose.

Next, Brier and Wade dehydrated the body using natron, a mineral of equal parts salt and baking soda that forms naturally in Egyptian wadis, or dry gullies. Like a sponge, natron sucks the moisture out of flesh, leaving it too dry to support bacteria, maggots, beetles, and other putrefying agents; the leftover tissue is essentially jerky. (Fully committed to authenticity, Brier dug the natron himself in Egypt, and recalls that sneaking hundreds of pounds of unidentified white powder through customs at JFK Airport was one of the more ticklish aspects of the project. Luckily, he was traveling with a film crew, and could hide the powder in suitcases amid their equipment.)

In their lab, Brier and Wade placed the mummy's spleen, lungs, liver, and intestines into bowls and covered them with natron. They also packed 29 linen bags of the powder into the body's empty torso, laid the body on top of 211 more pounds [96 kilograms], and dumped 583 additional pounds [264 kg] over it. They kept the body in Wade's old office, with the heat cranked up to 104 degrees F [Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius] and dehumidifiers running night and day to simulate Egyptian air.

Over the next five weeks, the natron on top turned crusty and brown from absorbing bodily juices, forcing Brier and Wade to crack through it with an iron rod. (Today Brier remembers the odor as acrid but not unpleasant, although news reports at the time say he and Wade donned surgical masks against the smell.) Regardless, the sight of the body beneath thrilled Brier. As it dries, the skin of mummies tightens and shrivels, especially on the face and scalp. The lips retract to reveal the teeth, and skin with less melanin turns brown-yellow. Brier always wondered whether those changes resulted from the immediate mummification process, or from several thousand years of weathering in Egypt's arid climate. One glance at his mummy and Brier knew the answer: even after five weeks, "he looked just like Ramses the Great," he recalls, with leathery skin, a beaky nose, and wispy hair sticking up. The embalming process, not time, made the iconic mummies we know today.

Beyond changing the body's appearance, the dehydration process left the limbs as stiff as tree branches, and dropped its weight from 188 pounds [85 kg] to just 79 [36 kg]. (Thirty-one pounds [14 kg] of that represented the removal of organs.) The organs drying in the bowls withered as well, which helped explain another mystery of Egyptian mummification: as other archaeologists have noted, embalmers typically placed the organs in so‑called canopic jars, funerary vessels with slim necks — so slim that it seemed impossible to fit the larger organs inside. But the natron shrunk them down enough to slip right in.

After removing him from the natron, Brier and Wade gave Mr. Balm a full body massage with lotus, cedar, and palm oils, another step that, while important ritualistically, also had pragmatic benefits — restoring flexibility to the joints, making the mummy easier to handle. This accomplished, they wrapped the body in linen bandages. (Embalmers in ancient times started with the hands and feet, wrapping each digit separately, then proceeded to the arms, legs, and torso. The penis was individually wrapped as well — or, if embarrassingly shriveled, a cod‑piece of stiff linen was bound in place.) At this point, they let the mummy dry for three more months in the arid office, which dropped its weight to 51 pounds [23 kg]. Afterward, they added several more layers of wrappings. In between the layers, they slipped magic amulets and scraps of papyrus with spells on them, a common practice in ancient times.

For the past three decades, the mummy has been lying in a metal casket in Maryland, stored at room temperature. Brier and Wade have partially unwrapped it twice to check for rot, but found nothing amiss. "He's dead and well," says Brier.

See how much you know about mummies with our mummy quiz!

Ancient Egyptians wove impressively detailed nets of colored beads to create funeral shrouds around 2,500 years ago. The popular bead nets were placed on top of mummies wrapped in linen and symbolized the transformation of the deceased into Osiris, the god of fertility and the sovereign of the dead.

This beaded funerary shroud is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), which purchased it in the late 19th century from Rev. Chauncey Murch, the director of the American Presbyterian Mission at Luxor, who was an avid collector of ancient Egyptian art. The shroud measures 18 inches long and 15.8 inches wide (45.7 by 40 centimeters), meaning it can easily cover a person's head and upper chest.

The bead-net shroud has three main components: a human face, a winged scarab and a broad collar, according to Egyptologist Emily Teeter, who published a close analysis of the artifact for the museum.

The person's face has been crafted primarily from dark-blue beads, while their facial features and eye makeup are abstractly depicted with black, red and yellow beads. A false beard similar to the famous example on the mask of Tutankhamun has been added in teal beads. The use of numerous blue beads may be a nod to the sky goddess Nut, whose body was sometimes depicted as a series of stars in a field of blue, Teeter wrote.

Just under the face is a winged scarab rendered in multicolored beads. It probably invokes Khepri, a scarab-faced sun god who represented creation and renewal, according to the AIC. While scarab amulets were often added to mummies during the wrapping process, this artwork depicts the scarab in beads on the shroud itself.

Below the scarab is a collar made of dark-blue, red, yellow, black and light-blue beads that create a series of yellow lotus flowers and red floral pendants.

Bead-net shrouds were typically placed over red linen that covered the wrapped mummy, according to Teeter. The shroud would have been held in place with ties that wrapped around the back.

"Together, the shroud and net imitated the wrappings of Osiris, hence symbolizing the assimilation of the deceased to the god," Teeter wrote. The goddess Nut also appeared frequently on mummies' chests. "Just as the arms of Nut encircled the deceased, the bead net enveloped the mummy," she wrote.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza, also known as the Great Pyramid of Khufu, has stood for more than 4,600 years, even through powerful earthquakes. Now, new research explains why: The structure is remarkably resilient to vibrations.

The pyramid has lost only about 33 feet (10 meters) of height since its construction during Egypt's Old Kingdom (2649 to 2150 B.C.). That's despite experiencing strong earthquakes over the millennia, including one with an estimated magnitude of 6.8 that struck south of Cairo in the city of Fayum in 1847 and a temblor with a magnitude of 5.9 in 1992 that knocked some of the topmost stones to the ground.

The new study of vibrations throughout the pyramid's structure suggests that certain architectural features, such as a series of chambers known as the pressure-relieving chambers above the chamber where the pharaoh Khufu once rested, dampen seismic movement toward the top of the structure.

"[T]he study highlights the extraordinary practical engineering knowledge of ancient Egyptian builders, who developed highly effective construction practices through centuries of experimentation and refinement," study co-author Asem Salama, a geoscientist at the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics in Cairo, wrote Live Science in an email.

Salama and his team placed vibration sensors in 37 sites in and around the Great Pyramid and recorded ambient vibrations when no tourists were inside the pyramid. "In heritage conservation, this information can provide important insights into structural stability, hidden vulnerabilities, and long-term preservation strategies while fully respecting the integrity of the monument," Salama explained.

The team found that throughout the pyramid, vibrations were remarkably similar, ranging from about 2.0 to 2.6 hertz. This was quite different from the frequencies on the ground nearby, which were typically around 0.6 hertz. This gap in frequencies means that during earthquakes, the pyramid sits apart from the vibrations traveling through the ground, perhaps contributing to its resilience, the researchers reported Thursday (May 21) in the journal Scientific Reports.

Other features contributing to the pyramid's stability include its massive base, strong limestone foundation and symmetrical geometry, Salama said. The vibrations do increase toward the top of the structure, which is typical in most buildings (imagine a skyscraper built to sway in an earthquake), but this pattern is interrupted by the pressure-relieving chambers that sit about 200 feet (61 m) high inside the pyramid. These chambers lie over the King's Chamber and are thought to have been built to take some of the weight off the pharaoh's final resting place. They also, it turns out, dampen vibrations that otherwise might travel toward the structure's apex.

The researchers plan to take more measurements at the Great Pyramid and hope to use similar methods at other important Egyptian archaeological sites. It's likely that some of the same features of the pyramidal shape help protect the other pyramids at Giza, but each structure is likely unique, Salama said, as ancient Egyptian architects evolved their methods over time.

"Earlier pyramids," he said, "show evidence of experimentation and structural evolution, including changes in slope geometry and internal layouts."

Are you a fan of mummies and hieroglyphs? Find out with our ancient Egypt quiz!

In 1987, the Cleveland Museum of Art acquired an unusual pendant depicting a lion's head carved out of amethyst on a gold base decorated with baboons. But one part was much older than the other and was originally carved as a game piece.

The lion's head pendant was crafted out of an ancient Egyptian gemstone as far back as 3,500 years ago. Then, around 2,700 years ago, an artisan in Sudan set the much-older Egyptian gemstone into a new metal mount made of eight seated baboons to create a magical religious object.

According to the Cleveland Museum of Art, the pendant measures about 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters) tall. A hole just under the lion's chin pierces the pendant, which would have been suspended on a string.

The purple amethyst and gold frame are a unique combination. The lion is similar to pieces found in the ancient Egyptian game senet, in which players would move their pawns across a board with 30 squares. The amethyst likely dates to the New Kingdom period (circa 1550 to 1070 B.C.), according to a 1996 study of the artifact. But the gold mount was added considerably later, likely in the Napatan period (circa 750 to 300 B.C.), named for the town that was used as the religious center of Nubia.

Recycling of old stone carvings was common among the ancient Nubians, who lived in what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan. In the early first millennium B.C., Nubian rulers viewed themselves as descendants of Ramesses II (who reigned from 1279 to 1213 B.C.) and repurposed and retrofitted semiprecious gems into new gold mounts to show their Egyptian connections. Under the later Kushite kings (circa 712 to 664 B.C.), this practice continued in Napata as the rulers incorporated Egyptian customs into their own culture.

Both the lion and the baboon were sacred in Kushite religion. The lion was associated with the god Amun, who was tasked with protecting the state and who merged with the sun god, Ra, and became known as the powerful creator deity Amun-Ra. The baboons were connected to the sun and the moon and were often depicted with their arms raised. In this pendant, the baboons lift the representation of Amun.

The lion's head pendant was meant to be worn in life, rather than as a funeral gift, and it demonstrates the ancient Nubians' clever use of Egyptian heirlooms to create new and religiously charged jewelry.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a Roman-era mummy with a copy of Homer's epic poem the "Iliad" inside its abdomen ‪—‬ a unique find that archaeologists are calling "exceptional."

Written on papyrus in Greek, the text records part of Book 2 of the "Iliad," which details the legendary Trojan War. The text found in the mummy lists the ships used against the city of Troy, according to a statement from the University of Barcelona. It would have been placed within the abdomen during the embalming ritual.

The mummy, which dates to a time when the Romans controlled Egypt, was found at a tomb within a cemetery in the modern-day town of Al-Bahnasa in Egypt, which was known as Oxyrhynchus in ancient times. The Romans controlled Egypt starting in 30 B.C., after Cleopatra died by suicide, until A.D. 641, when the Rashidun Caliphate took control of Egypt.

The site of Oxyrhynchus has been excavated off and on for well over a century. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, archaeologists found around 500,000 fragments of papyri at the site.

The newly discovered "papyrus was placed on the abdomen to protect [the] deceased in the afterlife," Esther Pons Mellado, co-director of the archaeological mission in Oxyrhynchus, told Live Science in an email.

Pons Mellado and Maite Mascort, who is also a co-director of the mission, explained that during the time the Romans controlled Egypt, it was common for papyri to be put inside mummies, in the chest or abdomen. However, it's unclear why ancient Egyptians thought papyri would help protect the deceased, Pons and Mascort said.

Remarkably, this is the first time a copy of Homer's "Iliad" has been found inside a mummy.

"The discovery is exceptional: it is the first time in the history of archaeology that a Greek literary text has been found deliberately incorporated into the mummification process," the University of Barcelona statement noted.

Although other Greek literary texts have been unearthed at Oxyrhynchus, "the real novelty" of the newfound literary papyrus is its "funerary context," Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, a linguistics professor at the University of Barcelona who analyzed the papyrus, said in the statement. He explained that papyri found inside mummies are often magical texts.

So far, archaeologists don't know much about the mummy with the "Iliad" papyrus. "We know that [it] was a male mummified individual but it's still under investigation," Pons and Mascort wrote in the email. They noted that the person was an adult.

The "papyrus is very important and relevant, but of course the study is not finished yet," Mascort and Pons wrote.

Gold and copper tongues

The "Iliad" mummy was found during a November-December 2025 excavation of a cemetery at Oxyrhynchus. The team's previous excavations at the cemetery revealed more than a dozen mummies with gold tongues, which ancient Egyptians thought would help the mummies communicate in the afterlife.

The team found three additional gold tongues and one copper tongue during the November-December 2025 excavation, a translated statement from Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said. For the ancient Egyptians, gold symbolized the flesh of the gods and it was thought that having a tongue made of gold would help you communicate with them. It's not clear why copper was used for one of the tongues.

It's also unknown if the mummy with the "Iliad" text had a gold or copper tongue; study of the mummy is ongoing.

Archaeologists have discovered a rare circular structure dedicated to a local Egyptian deity called Pelusius, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The 2,200-year-old religious building includes complex water infrastructure and was once connected to the Nile, which suggests the sanctuary was used for sacred water rituals.

The temple was found by archaeologists working at the site of Tell el-Farama in the ancient city of Pelusium, on the eastern edge of the Nile Delta in the North Sinai governorate, representatives from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in an April 9 translated statement. Given its strategic location near the mouth of the Nile, the bustling port city of Pelusium was used as a fortress in pharaonic times and later as a customs station during the rise of the Roman Empire. In 2022, archaeologists discovered a temple to Zeus crafted from pink granite at the site.

Experts initially uncovered the temple to Pelusius in 2019. A partial excavation of about one-quarter of the area revealed a red-brick circular structure, which archaeologists interpreted as representing the city's senate house, Hesham Hussein, head of the Central Administration for Antiquities of Lower Egypt and Sinai, said in the statement. But once a full excavation of the temple was completed and the building was completely exposed, that interpretation changed.

The sanctuary complex centered around a circular basin approximately 115 feet (35 meters) in diameter with a square pedestal in the middle. It likely once held a colossal statue of the god Pelusius, whose name comes from the ancient Greek word for "mud" or "silt." Water channels and reservoirs surrounded the basin. Within the basin, which was connected to a branch of the Nile, archaeologists found water and Nile silt, suggesting a symbolic association with Pelusius.

Based on the stratigraphic layers at the site, experts think the temple to Pelusius was built in the second century B.C. and was used continuously through the sixth century A.D.

The temple's unique architectural design, which blended ancient Egyptian traditions with both Greek and Roman styles, embodied the cultural exchange between Egypt and the wider world, Hisham El-Leithy, acting secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in the statement. El-Leithy described the discovery as "highly significant" because it shows that Pelusium was once a prominent city in an increasingly cosmopolitan ancient world.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a 2,000-year-old sandstone monument depicting a Roman emperor as a pharaoh.

The small rectangular monument, called a stela or stele, was found during restoration work at Karnak temple complex in Luxor (ancient Thebes). The slab, measuring about 23.6 by 15.7 inches (60 by 40 centimeters), dates to Tiberius' rule (A.D. 14 to 37), indicating that it features the powerful emperor, according to a translated statement by Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

When Tiberius came to power, Egypt had already been a province of the Roman Empire for 44 years. Tiberius was therefore the ruler who was responsible for maintaining ma'at, or the principle of cosmic order in ancient Egyptian religion, according to Egyptologist Abdelghaffar Wagdy, general director of Luxor's Antiquities and co-director of the Egyptian-French Archaeological Center leading the mission.

"To fulfill this role, the ruler needed to be shown performing traditional rituals in a form that the gods would recognize — namely, as a pharaoh," Wagdy told Live Science in an email.

The image on the newly uncovered stela features Tiberius standing in front of Amun, Mut and Khonsu, gods worshipped in Luxor, whose presence alongside the Roman emperor is important. "By offering Maat to them, the emperor is shown fulfilling his duty toward the local divine order," Wagdy said. "The triad also represents a divine family (father, mother and son), which mirrors the structure of kingship itself and reinforces the emperor's legitimacy."

By presenting Tiberius as a pharaoh, the Egyptians enabled his incorporation into the province's religious system. Egyptian-style representation of Roman emperors was common in religious settings. But the emperors retained their Roman style in coins and official Roman statues, according to Wagdy.

The incorporation of Egypt into the Roman Empire has been closely tied to three famous figures: Augustus (formerly Octavian), Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII. After discarding the third member of their triumvirate, a general named Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, Augustus and Antony each aimed to take control of the entire empire. Anthony allied with Cleopatra, ancient Egypt's last pharaoh. Augustus, Rome's future first emperor, ultimately defeated the two lovers at the Battle of Actium near Greece in 31 B.C. Egypt became a Roman province the following year.

Augustus was succeeded by his stepson, Tiberius, who exerted authority in Egypt via envoys and never set foot in the province, a common practice for Roman emperors. Tiberius' name appears on Egyptian monuments associated with temples as a way of preserving the region's religious institutions, Wagdy explained.

The stela "reflects a standard ideological and administrative system, in which emperors were presented as pious builders and protectors of temples, regardless of their actual level of involvement," he said. "The monument expresses what a king should be in Egyptian terms, rather than documenting his personal achievements."

The stela was uncovered during a recent restoration of a gate north of the Karnak temple complex, which was constructed from about 4,000 years ago up until Roman times. Coincidentally, the stela also features five lines of hieroglyphics detailing the renovation of the Temple of Amun-Ra's wall, according to the statement.

"It is highly likely that the stela originally functioned as a fixed architectural marker, embedded in the outer face of the enclosure wall, commemorating the restoration of that very section of the gateway," Wagdy said. Its days of public display aren't over, however. Two millennia later, the stela's new home will be in a museum, Wagdy said in the statement.

How much do you know about ancient Egypt? Test your knowledge with our ancient Egypt quiz!

Archaeologists discovered this beaded ensemble in the Old Kingdom tomb of a female contemporary of King Khufu in Giza in 1927. The linen string holding the 7,000 beads together had disintegrated, but based on where the beads were found and how this type of dress has been depicted in ancient Egyptian art, experts have been able to reconstruct the intricate garment.

According to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has this dress and several other examples of beadnet objects in its collection, the net was made from linen string and faience — a glazed ceramic made from finely crushed quartz. In this case, before firing, the faience paste was mixed with copper, which turned the beads blue and blue-green to mimic the semiprecious stones lapis lazuli and turquoise.

The midi-length beadnet features a diamond-patterned skirt and an empire-waist bodice made with rows of vertically strung faience beads. The dress is topped with a neckline of beads in concentric circles, and the bottom features a beaded fringe of mitre shells (sea snails). The completed beadwork net was likely draped over a linen dress or sewn directly onto it, rather than worn by itself.

Since Egyptian faience beads are quite fragile, the dress may have been worn only on special occasions, or it might have been made specifically for the woman's funeral, according to Tom Hardwick, an Egyptologist at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The blue and green on the dress may symbolize the Nile River and springtime, both of which were tied to the Egyptian idea of resurrection in the afterlife, according to Hardwick.

This beadnet dress is the earliest surviving example of the style, according to MFA Boston. Only about two dozen beadnet dresses exist in museums around the world. Two have been reconstructed at MFA Boston, and one has been reconstructed at the Petrie Museum at University College London. When ancient Egyptian clothing specialist Janet Johnstone, a clothing consultant who specializes in the interpretation and construction of ancient Egyptian clothing, reconstructed the Petrie Museum beadnet dress, she discovered that it was far too heavy to be worn regularly. (For anyone who wants to test their own beadnet sewing skills, Johnstone has provided a basic DIY guide.)

In the New Kingdom period (1550 to 1070 B.C.), the beadnet dress appears to have gone out of fashion while simpler beaded nets rose in popularity as grave goods. These "bead cloaks" have been found on top of New Kingdom mummies, revealing that beaded accessories remained an important part of ancient Egyptian funeral rituals for centuries.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Roughly 2,000 years ago, one visitor to Egypt's Valley of the Kings graffitied his name — Cikai Korran — eight times in Old Tamil, an Indian language. The prolific tagger joined several others in leaving dozens of inscriptions in ancient Indian languages on the Egyptian tombs, scholars reported at a recent academic conference.

The new discoveries add to growing evidence for the presence of people from South Asia in ancient Egypt.

Roughly 30 inscriptions written in three Indian languages were found in six different tombs in the Valley of the Kings, where Egyptian pharaohs and powerful nobles were buried for centuries. Half of the inscriptions were written in Old Tamil, and Cikai Korran was responsible for many of those, researchers wrote in a paper published in a book called "Tamil Epigraphy: A four-day international conference 11-14 February 2026, Proceedings Volume 1" (Government of Tamil Nadu, 2026). The researchers presented their findings at a February conference in Chennai, India.

New inscriptions

While early Egyptologists had noticed these inscriptions, and in some cases recorded them, they did not know which language they were and were unable to translate them, according to the researchers.

As part of a new investigation, the scholars dated the Indian inscriptions to between the first and third century A.D., when Egypt was a province of the Roman Empire and the Valley of the Kings "was a tourist destination, like today," Ingo Strauch, a professor in the Department of Slavic and South Asian Studies at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who helped identify many of the texts, said during the presentation he gave at the conference.

Visitors to the Valley of the Kings would write or inscribe texts on the walls of the tombs, often writing their name and sometimes more information on who they were. The visitors who came from India were no exception.

One of the Sanskrit texts was written by a man named Indranandin, who claimed that he was a "messenger of King Kshaharata." In an email to Live Science, Strauch noted that the Kshaharata dynasty ruled part of India during the first century A.D. and it's not clear which specific King Kshaharata the messenger served. Since Egypt was ruled by the Roman Empire, Indranandin may have traveled through the Valley of the Kings on his way to Rome.

"It is possible that Indranandin arrived by ship at Berenike [on the east coast of Egypt], perhaps together with other Indians, and from there continued inland to the Valley of the Kings," Strauch said. "Whether he later travelled on to Rome, however, is unknown."

One prolific graffiti artist was a man named Cikai Korran, who wrote eight inscriptions in five different tombs. The Tamil inscriptions translate to "Cikai Korran came here and saw," the scholars wrote in the conference proceedings.

Charlotte Schmid, a researcher at the French School of the Far East who also identified many of the texts, said in a talk at the conference that Korran tended to write his inscriptions high up. In the tomb of Ramesses IX (who reigned circa 1126 to 1108 B.C.), Korran wrote his inscription 16 to 20 feet (5 to 6 meters) above the tomb entrance. Schmid said that it's unclear how he got up so high.

In a tomb that belonged to two New Kingdom pharaohs named Tausert and Setnakhte, scholars found that Korran also left his signature by the tomb entrance. This is the only graffiti found on this tomb, which suggests that, at the time Korran was in Egypt, the interior of the tomb was closed off. Still, he was able to find the entrance and leave his inscription on it.

It's not clear who Korran was. The language he wrote in suggests that he was from southern India, but little else can be known for sure. Schmid noted that Korran could have been a chief, a mercenary or a merchant, among other possibilities.

Why Korran wrote his name so frequently and tried to write it as high as he did is also unclear. "It's weird, to be frank," Schmid said in the conference presentation.

Scholars react

These "new discoveries by Strauch and Schmid, alongside both old and more recent findings from the Roman Red Sea ports of Myos Hormos and Berenike, are exactly the kind of evidence of visiting Tamil and Western Indian merchants that we would hope to find — but have never previously been able to document on this scale," Kasper Grønlund Evers, an independent scholar who has studied ancient long distance trade but was not involved in the current research, told Live Science in an email.

These newly found texts "prove not just the mere presence of Indians in Egypt, but also their active interest in the culture of the land," Alexandra von Lieven, an Egyptology professor at the University of Münster who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email. Further research may lead to more Indian language inscriptions being found at other sites in Egypt, such as temples, von Lieven said.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

A rock shelter discovered in the southern Sinai Desert contains designs and inscriptions spanning a period of 10,000 years, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has announced in two statements.

Located on the Umm Arak Plateau, the rock shelter was discovered during an archaeological survey carried out by a team of Egyptologists. They were assisted by a local resident named Sheikh Rabie Barakat, who helped guide them to the site, the statements said.

The rock art is older than the pharaonic kingship in Egypt, which began in about 3100 B.C., but it appears that artists continued drawing there until medieval times.

The shelter is about 330 feet (100 meters) long and 10 feet (3 m) deep, with a ceiling up to 5 feet (1.5 m) high. The oldest rock art, which was dated based on its style, was found near the entrance and dates to between roughly 10000 and 5500 B.C., the statements said. It depicts a variety of scenes, including a hunter who's holding a bow and is accompanied by at least two hunting dogs.

Scenes from later time periods include people riding horses and carrying weapons, and there are inscriptions that date to ancient and medieval times. The rock art also includes geometric images made of X's, squares, ovals, crescents and more complex shapes. The archaeological team is in the midst of analyzing the designs.

The shelter is near ancient copper and turquoise mines and was likely "used across the ages as a lookout point and a place for gathering and rest," one of the statements said.

Ancient people in Egypt may have left their mark on the rock shelter while mining the Sinai for resources, noted John Darnell, an Egyptology professor at Yale University who has conducted extensive research in the Sinai but was not involved with the new discovery.

The "Sinai was an important region for ancient Egypt, a source of mineral wealth and a symbolically important region, the home of the goddess Hathor, 'Mistress of Turquoise,'" Darnell said. This discovery "will certainly help us better understand the interactions of the ancient [Egyptians] with the desert environment, and with those people living in and moving through the region."

The images released so far "appear to show material of late antique through perhaps medieval date," or roughly A.D 500 to 1500, Darnell said, noting that the rock art includes camels, humans and Nabataean inscriptions.

The Nabataeans were a people who flourished in the region between roughly 400 B.C. and A.D. 200, and are most famous for building the city of Petra in Jordan. Darnell noted that he looks forward to seeing images of the earlier rock art discovered at the site.

Live Science contacted the archaeological team but did not hear back by the time of publication.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

When British archaeologist Howard Carter and local Egyptians excavated the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922, they found thousands of artifacts buried with the young pharaoh. These sandals were one of the dozens of pairs of footwear that carried Tut to the afterlife, but the depiction of defeated enemies on their insoles makes them unique.

According to Carter's original object card, these sandals measured 11.2 by 3.6 inches (28.4 by 9.2 centimeters), making them roughly a U.S. men's size 11.5 shoe (EU 45). Carter discovered them lying underneath a basket in the tomb. However, it was not clear if that was their original location, as many objects had been moved around and some were looted in antiquity.

The sandals were made of wood and covered with a veneer of bark, green leather and pieces of gold foil on top of a layer of white paint. In the arch area of each sandal, there are depictions of two people bound with lotus and papyrus. Each sandal also has eight bow weapons — four near the toes and four at the heel — as well as a strap in the shape of a bow. Together, these made up the Nine Bows, the collective symbol for the enemies of Egypt.

The sandals are on display in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. An information card notes that the bound captives refer to King Tut's power and that the Nine Bows are "situated so that the king's feet step on them, reifying the trampling of Egypt's enemies by the monarch."

When his mummy was discovered, Tut was found to be wearing gleaming gold sandals and gold toe covers. It is unknown, though, whether King Tut ever wore any of the sandals discovered in his tomb during his life or if they were made specifically for his afterlife attire.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Archaeologists have discovered 5,000-year-old rock art in the Sinai Desert that depicts ancient Egypt's brutal conquest of the region.

The artwork "shows in a terrifying manner how the Egyptians colonized the Sinai and subjugated the inhabitants," the archaeologists said in a statement.

The scene shows a man raising his arms in triumph while another man is on his knees with an arrow in his chest and his hands tied behind his back. There is also a boat nearby and an inscription that says Min, an Egyptian deity associated with fertility, is "ruler of the copper area," archaeologists wrote in a new study, which was published in the 2025 edition of the journal Blätter Abrahams.

"[Looking] at the entire composition, we can assume the boat to have been associated with the Egyptian ruler, the triumphant man with god Min … and the subdued and killed man with the local inhabitants," the archaeologists wrote in the journal. They noted that in ancient Egypt, boats were often used as a metaphor for the pharaoh.

Other examples of rock art, dating back around 5,000 years, have previously been found in the Sinai that suggest the Egyptians conquered the region around that time.

"The motivation for the Egyptian expeditions to the south-western Sinai was not simply an abstract expansion of territory, but more specifically the availability of mineral resources, especially copper and turquoise," the team wrote.

At this time the Sinai was mostly inhabited by nomadic groups, said study co-author Ludwig Morenz, an Egyptology professor at the University of Bonn. The "rock panel certainly represents one of the earliest depictions of dominance in another territory," Morenz told Live Science in an email.

One interesting detail is that there used to be an inscription by the boat image that may have named Egypt's ruler, but it was deliberately erased, the archaeologists noted in the journal. It's unclear who erased it, when and why. There have been a number of instances in Egypt's history in which the name of a pharaoh was erased after a new pharaoh came to power, but it's unclear whether that's the case here.

The rock art was discovered by Mustafa Nour El-Din, an archaeologist with the Aswan Inspectorate at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, during a survey conducted in 2025. The archaeologists believe that more rock art remains to be discovered nearby.

"Research has just begun and we are planning for a first bigger campaign," the team wrote.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

Zahi Hawass, perhaps the world's most famous archaeologist, hopes to discover the tomb of the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti before he retires, and he says he may be getting close.

"If I made this discovery, I think I would be happy to end my career with the most important discovery of the most important queen of Egypt — Queen Nefertiti," Zahi Hawass, a former Egyptian antiquities minister, says in "The Man with the Hat," a new documentary about his life and career. The film, directed by Jeffrey Roth, will premiere on multiple streaming platforms Jan. 20.

Nefertiti was the wife of Akhenaten, a pharaoh who reigned from 1353 to 1336 B.C. and unleashed a religious revolution aimed at focusing Egypt's polytheistic religion around the worship of the Aten, the sun disk. At times, Nefertiti was displayed in ways that normally only a pharaoh would be shown, such as smiting an enemy. Some Egyptologists, including Hawass, believe she ruled as a pharaoh for a time after Akhenaten's death, taking on the new name Neferneferuaten.

Hawass and his team have been excavating in Egypt's Valley of the Kings for years. Previously, they found two tombs, known as KV 65 (found in 2006) and KV 66, that had been plundered, likely in antiquity. KV 66 was originally believed to be the room of another tomb, but follow-up work in 2015 determined that it was a separate tomb and it was named KV 66.

While the two tombs don't shed direct light on Nefertiti's tomb they, and the other discoveries made by Hawass' team show that there are still significant discoveries to be found in the Valley of the Kings. They also help map out more of the valley and help determine areas where Nefertiti's tomb is not located.

Now, his team is excavating in the eastern Valley of the Kings, close to the tomb of Hatshepsut, a powerful female pharaoh who ruled between 1479 and 1458 B.C. They hope Nefertiti's tomb will be found there. Hawass says that he doesn't have evidence to support this theory, but has a feeling it could be there.

"There is one area now that we are working in the east valley, near the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut," Hawass told Live Science. I'm hoping that this could be the tomb of Queen Nefertiti." Work is continuing, and "this discovery could happen soon," he said.

Repatriation to Egypt

Hawass has been involved in many other excavations and projects that are described in the new documentary. One initiative seeks to have the Rosetta Stone (now in the British Museum), the Dendera Zodiac (now in the Louvre) and the bust of Nefertiti (now in the Neues Museum in Germany) repatriated to Egypt. Hawass told Live Science he believes these three artifacts "are the icon of the Egyptian identity and their home should be the Grand [Egyptian] Museum," which opened in November.

It's "fair [for] these three objects to come back to Egypt because the Europeans, in the last century," took countless artifacts from the Nile region in the 19th and early 20th centuries, he said. These priceless treasures were brought to private households and museums in Europe at a time when Egypt was often controlled or heavily influenced by European powers.

Controversies

In addition to covering Hawass' life and work, the documentary discusses a few controversies he's been involved in. One of the most serious ones occurred after the 2011 Egyptian revolution that forced out longtime president Hosni Mubarak.

In April 2011, Hawass was sentenced to one year in prison for allegedly failing to uphold a court decision over a shop inside the Egyptian Museum, a decision that was later overturned on appeal. The dispute is complicated: When the museum was being remodeled and a new gift shop was built, the previous shop owner was barred from bidding because of disputes the owner and museum had had in the past. The owner went to court and got a legal order that he be allowed to bid on the new shop. But Hawass refused to implement the court order, saying that the winner of the bid had been decided.

Egyptian officials also investigated Hawass over other complaints. While he couldn't travel outside of Egypt for a time, he was never charged, and in 2013 he was able to travel outside the country again, one of his first stops was the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to kick off a lecture tour that aimed to promote tourism in Egypt.

He addressed this and other controversies in the documentary, saying that as he became better known, he found himself being criticized and attacked more frequently. He maintains that he conducted himself with integrity throughout his career.

How to watch "The Man with the Hat"

"The Man With The Hat" is streaming on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, from Saturday January 19.

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Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered the remains of a 4,500-year-old valley temple. The structure is part of a sun temple that ancient Egyptians built in honor of the sun god Ra, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a translated statement.

The temple is located at Abu Ghurab, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Cairo. The sun temple has two parts: an upper temple, which the archaeologists excavated several years ago, and the newly excavated valley temple, which the team started working on in 2024. The valley temple is positioned near the Nile River, and two temple parts are connected through a causeway.

The valley temple, along with the rest of the sun temple, is not an entirely new find. German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt excavated part of it in 1901, but the groundwater was higher at that time and he had to stop excavating, said Massimiliano Nuzzolo, an archaeologist with the Italian Archaeological Mission in Egypt who is co-directing the excavation team with archaeologist Rosanna Pirelli. Today the groundwater is lower and the team has managed to excavate half the valley temple since 2024.

The recent excavations have led to several discoveries, including the remains of a columned entrance portico, a public calendar of religious events carved into blocks, and dozens of decorated blocks with inscriptions that mention Pharaoh Niuserre (reign circa 2420 B.C. to 2389 B.C.), the ruler who had the temple built.

The upper temple was the main place of worship, but the valley temple made it easier for people to reach. The valley temple "was used as a landing stage for the boats approaching it from the Nile or, more likely, from one of its side channels," Nuzzolo told Live Science in an email. The "most convenient way to reach the upper temple was to enter the valley temple and go up on the hill where the upper temple was located through a ramp [the causeway]."

Public calendar

The valley temple had a calendar of religious events inscribed on decorated blocks. Borchardt found part of the calendar in 1901, and more of it was uncovered by the modern-day archaeological team. The events mentioned include the feasts of Sokar, a falcon-headed god associated with the Egyptian city of Memphis — a capital during the Old Kingdom. The blocks also mention the festival of Min, a god associated with fertility, and the procession of Ra.

"What is really important here is however the location of these blocks," Nuzzolo said. "They were all found in the area of the entrance portico and this seems to indicate that the façade of the temple, on the outside, was inscribed with this long calendar of feasts, possibly one of the first [examples] of 'public calendars' known so far to us."

Stars and games

The team also found a staircase that went up to the roof of the valley temple, the ministry statement said. Ancient Egyptians likely accessed the roof to observe the sky.

"The roof of the valley temple was probably used for astronomical observations but not for the celebration of the festivals," Nuzzolo said.

After about a century of use, the valley temple was turned into a residential area, the researchers found. They discovered two wooden pieces dating to this time that were used to play a board game known as "senet." Many senet pieces have been found at other sites in Egypt, including in the tomb of King Tutankhamun, but the exact rules of the game are unclear.

"The sanctuary thus became a dwelling and one of the favourite local [games] was probably playing senet," Nuzzolo said.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

While diving off the coast of Egypt, underwater archaeologists found the 2,000-year-old remains of a boat that may have been a luxurious "pleasure barge" for the ancient elite.

The team discovered the barge in the ancient harbor of Alexandria, the capital of Egypt during the Ptolemaic period (304 to 30 B.C.) and a major city when the Roman Empire later dominated the region.

The wreck consists of several well-preserved timbers, about 90 feet (28 meters) long, from a barge that had been about 115 feet (35 m) long and 22 feet (7 m) wide, according to a statement from French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio. He thinks it was a "thalamagos" (also spelled "thalamegos"), a Greek word that literally means "cabin carrier" and was used to describe Ptolemaic Egypt's floating palaces.

Goddio said his team discovered the remains of the vessel in October, during underwater excavations of now-sunken ruins of a Temple of Isis. The temple once sat on the island of Antirhodos, which now lies underwater, and was within the "Portus Magnus," or Great Harbor, used at Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period. The temple there was destroyed, probably during an earthquake in about A.D. 50, and the island sank beneath the waves between the fourth and the eighth centuries.

Goddio thinks the pleasure barge would have carried a luxuriously decorated central cabin and been propelled by oars. No remains of such a vessel have ever been found, although they were described by ancient writers and portrayed in Egyptian art.

Among the lotuses

Giant pleasure barges were popular during the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt and were described by the first-century-B.C. Greek geographer Strabo as ferrying the wealthy between choice spots: "… they hold feasts in cabin-boats in which they enter the thick of the cyami [Egyptian lotuses that grow in fresh water] and the shade of the leaves."

In Strabo's time, Alexandria was under direct Roman control — an ancient regime change that began at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., when naval forces commanded by Roman leader Octavian (later Augustus) defeated the navy of Cleopatra VII (the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty) and her lover, the Roman rebel Mark Antony.

Exactly how the newfound vessel ended up by the island of Antirhodos is unclear.

"This intriguing shipwreck could have been used along the canals in Alexandria as Strabo described," Goddio said in the statement. But it was found near the underwater ruins of the Temple of Isis on Antirhodos and may have been caught up in the destruction there.

As a result, the researchers suggested "a ritual use for this barge," Goddio said. It may have been part of the "navigatio iside," a naval ceremony held in Roman-era Alexandria when a procession celebrating Isis carried a richly decorated vessel called the "Navigium" through the streets. The mock-up boat represented the solar barque that the Egyptian gods used to navigate across the heavens. (Isis was the goddess of the sea.)

That, in turn, could mean that "this vessel was performing a yearly ritual voyage of the goddess from the Portus Magnus of Alexandria to the sanctuary of Osiris at Canopus, alongside the Canopic Channel" of the Nile, Goddio said.

Early Roman Egypt

The research into the wrecked vessel is at a very early stage, but it "promises to be a fascinating journey into life, religion, luxury and pleasure on the waterways of early Roman Egypt," Goddio said.

The vessel is a "spectacular find," said Timmy Gambin, a maritime archaeologist at the University of Malta whose research covers ancient vessels as well as wartime wrecks. However, it has not yet been scientifically determined if the vessel is actually a thalamagos, said Gambin, who was not involved in the discovery.

"It is yet early days to determine exactly what the vessel was used for," he told Live Science in an email.

November 2025 marks 100 years since archaeologists first examined Tutankhamun's mummified remains. What followed wasn't scientific triumph — it was destruction. Using hot knives and brute force, Howard Carter's team decapitated the pharaoh, severed his limbs and dismembered his torso. Then they covered it up.

Tutankhamun's tomb was first discovered in the Valley of the Kings by a team of mostly Egyptian excavators led by Howard Carter in November 1922. However, it took several years for the excavators to clear and catalogue the tomb's antechamber – the first part of what would become a decade-long excavation.

This meticulous work, as well as delays caused by friction between Carter and the Egyptian government, meant that it wasn't until 1925 that Tutankhamun's remains were uncovered. This milestone whipped up another wave of what has been termed "Tutmania" after the tomb's initial discovery generated a wave of popular fascination for Egyptian archaeology.

When Carter's team eventually opened Tutankhamun's innermost coffin, they found the pharaoh's body fused to the casket by a hardened, black, pitch-like substance. This resin was poured over the wrappings during burial to protect the body from decay.

Carter described the corpse as "firmly stuck" and noted that "no amount of legitimate force" could free it. In a desperate attempt to soften the resin and remove the body, the coffin was exposed to the heat of the sun. When this failed, the team resorted to hot knives, severing Tutankhamun's head and funerary mask from his body in the process.

The autopsy that followed was devastating. Tutankhamun was left "decapitated, his arms separated at the shoulders, elbows and hands, his legs at the hips, knees and ankles, and his torso cut from the pelvis at the iliac crest". His remains were later glued together to simulate an intact body — a macabre reconstruction that concealed the violence of the process.

Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley has pointed out that this destruction is conspicuously absent from Carter's public account of the autopsy. It is also absent from his private excavation records, which are available at the University of Oxford's Griffith Institute and online.

Tyldesley suggests that Carter's silence may reflect either a deliberate cover-up or a respectful attempt to preserve the dignity of the deceased king. His omissions, however, were documented in photos by the archaeological photographer Harry Burton. These shots offer a stark visual record of the dismemberment.

In some of Burton's images, Tutankhamun's skull is visibly impaled to keep it upright for photography. These images sit in grim contrast to the one Carter chose for the second volume of his work detailing the excavations, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen, published in 1927. In this sanitised image, the pharaoh's head is wrapped in fabric, concealing the severed spinal column, presenting a more palatable view for public consumption.

As we reflect on the centenary of this examination, it is worth reconsidering the legacy of Carter's excavation, not just as a landmark in Egyptology, but as a moment of ethical reckoning. The mutilation of Tutankhamun's body, obscured in official narratives, invites us to challenge narratives of archaeological triumph and to look back on the past with a more critical view.

"Today has been a great day in the history of archaeology," Carter wrote in his excavation diary on November 11 1925, when the medical examination of Tutankhamun's remains began. But the archival evidence suggests something far more morally complicated, even grisly, lying behind the seductive glint of gold.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered 225 shabtis — figurines meant to act as servants for the deceased in the afterlife — that belonged to the pharaoh Shoshenq III inside a tomb of a different pharaoh.

The figurines were found at the site of Tanis, in northern Egypt, in the northern chamber of the tomb of Osorkon II, near an unmarked sarcophagus. Hieroglyphs on the shabtis allowed the team to identify who they belonged to.

Although the tomb and sarcophagus were discovered in 1939, the shabtis were recently found by an Egyptian-French team that is conducting conservation work, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a translated statement. The team also uncovered new inscriptions that they are in the process of deciphering and analyzing.

Ancient Egyptians believed that shabti (also known as ushabti) figurines would work for the deceased in the afterlife, performing a wide variety of tasks such as farmwork and bringing the deceased objects, and they are often found in Egyptian tombs. The wealthy and powerful tended to be buried with hundreds of shabtis; for instance, the tomb of Tutankhamun has more than 400 of them.

Shoshenq III (also spelled Sheshonq III) reigned from around 825 to 773 B.C., when Egypt was not unified. Shoshenq III's "reign was long but difficult, with a bloody dynastic war between kings of the North [himself] and two kings in the south [his cousins] of Egypt," Frédéric Payraudeau, director of the French archaeological mission at Tanis, whose team found the shabtis, told Live Science in an email.

Despite the conflict, Shoshenq III managed to build "many monuments in Tanis [especially] a great Gate in the entry of the main temple precinct," Payraudeau said. The pharaoh also built a tomb for himself at Tanis, where Osorkon II (who ruled from about 874 to 850 B.C.) had already been buried. Both Osorkon II and Shoshenq III are part of what modern-day Egyptologists call the 22nd dynasty of Egypt.

The discovery of the shabtis, which are made of faience (glazed ceramic), inside Osorkon II's tomb indicates that Shoshenq III was not buried in his tomb but rather in an unmarked sarcophagus in the tomb of Osorkon II. Researchers have long known about this tomb, but they didn't know that Shoshenq III was buried there.

"The presence of the shabtis near the anonymous sarcophagus and also inscriptions on the connected wall indicates clearly that [Shoshenq III] was buried here and not in his own tomb," Payraudeau said.

Why Shoshenq III was buried in a predecessor's tomb "is a question we have to think about," he said, noting that it could be due to the conflict or arguments over Shoshenq III's succession.

Some of the artifacts in Shoshenq III's tomb carry the name of Shoshenq IV, who ruled during the following 23rd dynasty, said Aidan Dodson, an Egyptology professor at the University of Bristol in the U.K who was not involved with the research. "So the latter may have taken over the tomb of Shoshenq III and buried Shoshenq III in the nearby tomb of Osorkon II," Dodson told Live Science in an email.

In ancient Egypt, it wasn't unusual for tombs to be reused. However, why Shoshenq IV might have reused the tomb of Shoshenq III and moved him to the tomb of Osorkon II is unclear.

Conservation of Osorkon II's tomb and analyses of the shabtis and inscriptions are ongoing.

Mummy quiz: Can you unwrap these ancient Egyptian mysteries?

Two voids detected on the eastern side of the Pyramid of Menkaure on Egypt's Giza plateau hint at a second, hidden entrance to the pyramid, according to a new study.

The pyramid was built during the reign of the pharaoh Menkaure (circa 2490 to 2472 B.C.). It's the last and smallest of the three pyramids built on the Giza plateau and originally stood about 213 feet (65 meters) tall. The main entrance to the pyramid is located on the northern face.

The eastern side of the pyramid contains an area of polished blocks that have long puzzled researchers. "The stones are remarkably polished over an area around four meters [13 feet] high and six meters [20 feet] wide," the researchers who made the new discovery said in a statement. "Such smooth stones are otherwise only found at what is currently the only entrance to the pyramid, on the north side."

In other words, it's curious that the pyramid has polished stones but apparently no door on its eastern side.

In 2019, independent scholar Stijn van den Hoven published an article on Academia.edu and YouTube suggesting that another entrance to the Menkaure pyramid may be behind the polished blocks. The team decided to test van den Hoven's hypothesis, and over the past three years, the team has been conducting electrical resistivity testing (which measures how much resistance there is to electrical currents), ground-enetrating radar (which uses radio waves to examine what is underneath) and ultrasonic testing (which uses sound waves to examine a structure) on the eastern face of the pyramid.

By combining data from these three methods the team was able to get an idea of what was behind the eastern face of the pyramids. They detected two voids, located close together, with one being about 4.6 feet (1.4 m) behind the eastern face, while the other is about 3.7 feet (1.13 m) behind it, the team said in the statement.

While the findings support the possibility of a second entrance, more tests should be done to gather more data on the anomalies, the researchers wrote in their findings, published in the October issue of the journal NDT & E International.

Peter Der Manuelian, an Egyptology professor at Harvard University who was not involved with the research, said in an email that "this is a very interesting discovery, and shows we still have more to learn about the Pyramids at Giza."

He noted that, with a few exceptions, the entrances to Old Kingdom (circa 2649 to 2150 B.C.) pyramids are on the northern face. "Further exploration will hopefully tell us more about the significance of these voids, whether they are a construction anomaly, part of a second entrance, or something else," Der Manuelian added.

The research was done by a team from Cairo University and the Technical University of Munich as part of the Scan Pyramids project, which has been conducting remote sensing of Egypt's pyramids to learn more about them. Another scientific team with the Scan Pyramids project has been conducting tests on the Great Pyramid at Giza and has found two areas with voids.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

In 1906, archaeologists discovered this wig of an Egyptian woman known as Merit when excavating her tomb, which she shared with her husband Kha, in Luxor (known in ancient times as Thebes). Archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli wrote that the wig, made from dark-brown human hair, was still shining from the perfumed oils that had been applied to it more than three millennia before it was found.

Schiaparelli discovered the wig in a tall acacia wood box that was inscribed with Merit's name. Within the box, two wooden, linen-covered stands supported the wig. The richly furnished tomb also included the bejeweled mummies of both Kha — an architect for the New Kingdom pharaoh Amenhotep II — and Merit, as well as her stocked cosmetic chest, a basket of her hairpins, razors and wooden combs. Most of the 500-plus artifacts from the Tomb of Kha and Merit are in the collection of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy.

Merit wore her center-parted, crimped wig on top of her own shaved or closely cropped hair. The small waves were likely made by braiding the hair when wet and then taking out the braids when dry.

According to the Egyptian Museum, "this type of hairdo was often decorated with flowers and diadems, which were very fashionable in the mid-18th dynasty, as can be seen in paintings and statues of the period."

Wigs were commonly worn by elite men and women in ancient Egypt. They allowed people to have elaborate hairstyles but also protected them from direct sunlight and from head lice. Some people shaved their heads fully before donning a wig, while others wore their natural hair cropped short underneath the wig.

In a 2016 study of Merit's wig, researchers used gas chromatography mass spectrometry — an analysis method that identifies and measures chemical compounds in a sample — to figure out more details about Merit's original hairstyle and grooming regime. They found evidence of plant oil on the hair, which may have been used to keep it smooth and in good condition, like ancient hair gel. They also detected evidence of cholesterol — a compound found in the human scalp — on one of the combs, suggesting that Merit used the comb during her lifetime.

Based on this analysis, the researchers concluded that Merit "combed her own hair flat, smoothing it down with an application of the plant oil, plant gum, balsam and beeswax mixture that was also found between the comb's teeth."

A number of wigs and extensions have been preserved from ancient Egypt, with the earliest known example dating back to 3400 B.C., according to Egyptologist Joann Fletcher. The topic of Egyptian hairstyles has gained popularity in the past few decades, according to Fletcher, so there is still a lot to be learned from preserved wigs like Merit's.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

On a sunny morning, Egyptian workers were clearing the sands at the Valley of the Kings, when they uncovered the hint of stone steps about 13 feet (4 meters) below the tomb of Ramesses VI.

This sunken staircase would lead to the unlooted tomb of King Tutankhamun, a pharaoh who died as a teenager more than 3,200 years earlier.

The excavation team, helmed by British archaeologist Howard Carter but composed almost exclusively of Egyptians, had been clearing away sand near huts in the Valley of the Kings. Some stories hold that a water boy, Hussein Abd el-Rassul, may have been the first to spot the staircase.

When they found the steps, the group knew they had uncovered something important. The team worked feverishly until they reached the 12th step, where they discovered a small doorway covered with plaster, Carter wrote in his diary. On the door, they could partly make out the seal of the Royal Necropolis, which depicted the god Anubis as a king standing over the vanquished bodies of nine foes.

"Here before us was sufficient evidence to show that it really was an entrance to a tomb, and by the seals, to all outward appearances that it was intact," Carter wrote in his diary on Nov. 5.

As they explored further, the team found that the entryway had been filled with rubble — likely by priests intending to block the tomb, which was further evidence the tomb had not been looted.

For the next few weeks, the team excavated the steps and the doorway until they uncovered a seal bearing the cartouche — an oval filled with hieroglyphs depicting a ruler's name — of King Tutankhamun on Nov. 24. But the team still wasn't sure who was buried inside, because the rubble filling the entryway had a confusing mélange of pottery shards and broken boxes that bore signs of other ancient Egyptian monarchs, including Akhenaten, Tut's father.

On Nov. 25, they opened the first door to the tomb. The next day, they found a second door and cut a tiny hole inside to see what lay beyond it. No Egyptian officials were permitted to view the tomb, but Carter had brought along Lord Carnarvon, who had financed the tomb excavation; Lady Evelyn Herbert, Carnarvon's daughter; and Arthur Callender, an engineer with the dig. All waited anxiously to see what lay inside.

"It was sometime before one could see, the hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, but as soon as one's eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another," Carter wrote in his diary.

King Tut's tomb was the first unlooted pharaoh's tomb discovered in the modern era, and it was teeming with rich treasure. One of the most famous artifacts discovered was his ornate death mask, a 22-pound (10 kilograms) solid-gold face covering inlaid with semiprecious stones. But Tutankhamun was also buried with board games, several beds, and even a mannequin to try on outfits in the afterlife.

Tutankhamun was laid to rest in three nesting coffins — two made of gilded wood and the third (and smallest) of solid gold — and his body was soaked in oil that turned it black before he was mummified.

About a month after the tomb was opened, Lord Carnarvon died after a mosquito bite became infected following a shaving accident. And, in 1923, Pearson's Magazine published a fictional story called "The Tomb of the Bird," in which Carter's canary was found dead in the mouth of a cobra soon after the tomb was opened. The rumor mill and media reports spun these and a handful of other flimsy coincidences into evidence of a mummy's curse, the notion that whoever opened a pharaoh's tomb would face an early or unnatural death. However, a 2002 study found that the 25 Westerners exposed to the tomb (and thus the "mummy's curse") lived about as long as would be expected for the time.

Archaeologists have discovered a 3,500-year-old military fortress with a zigzag-style wall in the north Sinai Desert of Egypt, not far from the Mediterranean coast. The fort is remarkably well preserved, and even has the remnants of ovens and a hunk of fossilized dough that the fortress' soldiers never got a chance to eat.

Artifacts from the roughly 2-acre (0.8 hectares) fortress suggest that it may have been built during the reign of Thutmose I (circa 1504 to 1492 B.C.), the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a translated statement. Thutmose I was a pharaoh who expanded Egypt's empire into modern-day Syria, which helps explain the fortress' location.

The fortress was discovered at Tell el-Kharouba, an archaeological site near an ancient military road that was known as the "Way of Horus" or "Horus military road," for the Egyptian falcon-headed god of the sky and war. This road extended across the northern Sinai Desert, connecting the Nile delta to other parts of the eastern Mediterranean. Other fortresses have previously been found on the remains of the ancient road, the statement noted.

One of the walls located inside the fortress has a zigzag pattern, it runs from north to south and divides part of the western section that was used as a residential area. The zigzag pattern "helped reinforce the wall's stability and reduce the impact of wind and sand erosion," Hesham Hussein, the undersecretary for Lower Egypt and Sinai Archaeology with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities who led the team that excavated the site, told Live Science in an email.

Some of the outer recesses contained small ovens that were likely used "for daily domestic activities inside the fortress," he added. This is near where the team found the fossilized dough beside one of the ovens.

The large fortress was well guarded. So far, archaeologists have discovered 11 defensive towers in the fort, and some of the towers have "foundation deposits" made of pottery buried there when construction began. Some of the pottery has the name of Thutmose I stamped on it. In ancient Egypt, foundation deposits were commonly buried as ritual offerings at newly built structures.

Given its size it would have had a large number of soldiers. "Taking into account storerooms, courtyards, and other facilities, we estimate that the garrison likely ranged between 400 and 700 soldiers, with a reasonable average of around 500 soldiers," Hussein said.

Within the fortress, archaeologists found residences for soldiers. They discovered volcanic rock from the Aegean Islands, possibly used for construction, within the fortress. The team is looking to see if there is a nearby port that may have helped supply the garrison.

"The discovery of this fort is a very exciting one," said James Hoffmeier, an archaeologist and professor at Trinity International University who has excavated a different fortress in the Sinai Desert at the site of Tell el-Borg but was not involved with the new discovery.

The newfound fort and the previously discovered fort at Tell el-Borg are "part of the military road from Egypt to Canaan which made Egypt's control of the east Mediterranean coast possible for most of four centuries," Hoffmeier told Live Science in an email. He noted that Egypt would control the coastline into Canaan for most of the New Kingdom period, which lasted from around 1550 to 1070 B.C.

The finding that the newly discovered fort was likely built under the orders of Thutmose I is important because it supports "the long held view that Thutmose I was the father of Egypt's empire in Western Asia and that he likely was a key player in the beginning of this defense system which succeeding kings added more forts," Hoffmeier said.

Gregory Mumford, an Egyptologist and anthropology professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was not involved with the excavation, told Live Science that the research at the site will "expand greatly our understanding of the nature of Egypt's early New Kingdom's securement of Northeast Sinai along the 'Ways of Horus,'" and provide more insight into how Egypt guarded its eastern border.

Excavation of the site and analysis of the remains are ongoing.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

As humans evolved, our heads got bigger and walking upright narrowed the birth canal — a difficult and dangerous combination that means, in most cases, we need assistance in giving birth, from emotional support to intervention, as well as medical support for life-threatening conditions such as high blood pressure, uterine rupture and postpartum hemorrhage. Before written records, we see depictions of pregnancy and fertility, but little is known of how pregnancy and childbirth were viewed and treated.

In this excerpt from "Born: A History of Childbirth" (Pegasus Books, 2025), author and historian Lucy Inglis reveals records from ancient Egypt that show how female physicians treated issues of "the womb," how men reacted to periods, and how the first known pregnancy test actually worked.

There is one female physician who lived during the building of the great pyramids, around 2500 B.C., who we know about because her name and profession were recorded on her son's tomb door in Saqqara: Peseshet, the Overseer of Female Physicians.

Women like Peseshet were not the local wise women but respected professionals. Her son Akhethotep was a royal official, so his mother was firmly embedded in the literate elite classes. The tomb door, however, leaves us with as many questions as it does answers.

Who were the female physicians she oversaw? Who and what did they treat? The "professional" middle class of Peseshet and the tattooed priestess also left the world's first specific gynaecological text, the "Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus", which dates from 1825 B.C.. It contains 34 paragraphs of advice that most doctors today would not recommend following, and it diagnoses almost every female complaint as being that of "the womb."

The examination of a woman "whose eyes are aching till she cannot see, on top of aches in her neck," which sounds like a migraine, leads to the conclusion that she must have "discharges of the womb in her eyes." This is treated by "fumigating her with incense and fresh oil, fumigating her womb with it, and fumigating her eyes with goose leg fat. You should have her eat a fresh ass' liver."

While fumigating her womb can't have helped, perhaps the liver at least provided some welcome nutrition.

Only one examination, which sounds like a prolapse, correctly points to genuine involvement of the womb itself. It is treated by the pouring of oil, although on which part of the body is not identified. The papyrus also recommends putting a clove of garlic in your vagina before bed, and if your breath smells of garlic the next morning, it means well for the pregnancy. If not, it bodes ill.

The papyrus is also notable, however, for the first use of the term "wandering womb," a term that would haunt women in various guises for another two millennia. The immaculate record-keeping of the workers of Deir el-Medina also includes intriguing entries for absence known as hsmn, meaning menstruation.

A set of tablets written in the reign of Ramses II cover a 280-day period in which 10 prominent workmen took "sick days" owing to hsmn. As men do not menstruate, this is something of a puzzle. The meaning is clarified, however, by the scribe Qenhikhopshef's fuller entry for Day 23 — he was absent due to his wife "having her menses." That winter the foreman of the works, Neferhotep, also took time off for his daughter's period.

Historians over the past century concluded that this must mean that the Egyptians thought that the menstruating body was "unclean," but this is just speculation. There are ancient Nubian customs still found in modern Ethiopia and Sudan which warn that menstruating or pregnant women should not enter cemeteries. Perhaps it was not the women who were unclean but the workers.

Rather than fearing that the husband of a menstruating woman might bring pollution to the sacred Valley of the Kings, the male workers may have been asserting their right not to "take their work home with them." To do so might have brought death into their homes at a time when the women in their family were vulnerable.

The elites of any society leave monuments, art and literature behind for us to find that aim to portray their patrons as somewhat superhuman, but the poor rarely leave any trace of their existence at all. It is only relatively recently that their lives began to be recorded for statistical purposes. So it is no surprise that it is from the written records of the middle classes of ancient Egypt that we learn about the first known pregnancy test, written around 1350 B.C., in the medical text known as the Berlin Papyrus.

It states: "Barley [and] wheat, let the woman water [them] with her urine every day with dates [and] the sand, in two bags. If they [both] grow, she will bear. If the barley grows, it means a male child. If the wheat grows, it means a female child. If both do not grow, she will not bear at all."

Remarkably, this theory was tested in 1963 and found to be accurate in 70% of cases, although the success of gender determination was not recorded. The tests have even been repeated subsequently at various intervals up until 2018 and have correctly identified 70–85% of pregnant participants.

Excerpt from Born: A History of Childbirth by Lucy Inglis. Published by Pegasus Books on October 7, 2025.

King Tutankhamun ruled over ancient Egypt during the New Kingdom, in the aftermath of his father — the revolutionary Akhenaten. He ruled from childhood and died young, at around 18, earning him the modern nickname of the boy king. It seems he died suddenly and unexpectedly, so was hastily buried in a tomb jam-packed with treasures.

When his unlooted tomb was unearthed in 1922, the discovery captivated the world. Since then, King Tut's artifacts and mummy have been extensively studied. So, how much do you know about the 18th-dynasty pharaoh? Take our quiz to find out.

Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button!

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An "unparalleled" funerary statue of an ancient Egyptian man whose name may be Messi has been discovered at the Saqqara necropolis — and it shows him standing with what appears to be his tiny wife and even tinier daughter, who is holding a goose.

Measuring just over 40 inches (103 centimeters) tall and carved out of limestone, "the most prominent figure depicted is that of a nobleman standing tall with an advancing left foot representing youth, vitality and strength," researchers wrote in a study published May 13 in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.

The statue also depicts "a woman, his presumed wife, on a smaller scale kneeling and holding on to his right leg," and behind his left leg there is "a representation of a girl, presumably his daughter," the researchers wrote in the study. The girl clutches a goose in her left hand, which "opens its beak in a visual representation of a goose honk."

Archaeologists found the statue in 2021 at the site of Saqqara, a vast necropolis where the ancient Egyptians buried their dead for thousands of years. It has no inscriptions, but based on its design, the statue appears to date to the fifth dynasty (circa 2465 to 2323 B.C.), a time when pyramids were being built in Egypt. (The last royal pyramid was built by King Ahmose I, who reigned from 1550 to 1525 B.C. After that, Egyptian royals were buried at the Valley of the Kings near ancient Thebes.)

"I found the statue hidden under the sand, and nearby was a false door inscribed with the name 'Messi,'" Zahi Hawass, a former antiquities minister and senior author of the paper, told Live Science in an email. False doors are commonly found in Egyptian tombs, and the Egyptians believed that the spirit of the deceased could enter and exit the tomb through them. "Messi" could refer to the name of the nobleman.

The statue may symbolize "a connection with family, suggesting that they will reunite in the afterlife, as they did in life," Hawass said. The "scene depicting the daughter with a goose reflects daily life, serving a similar function to that of scenes usually seen on tomb walls," Hawass added.

As for Messi's large size compared with the woman and girl, size often equaled importance in ancient Egyptian artwork. For instance, royalty and tomb owners were often shown to be larger than those around them.

"Unparalleled" discovery

"The discovery of this statue is unparalleled in the field of Egyptian art," said Hawass, who co-authored the study with Sarah Abdoh, the head of the Department of Sculpture, Architectural Formation, and Restoration at Benha University in Egypt. It "stands apart from other known family statues of the Old Kingdom, as all figures are carved in full three-dimensionality, with the exception of the daughter, who is presented in high relief.

"This striking artistic choice positions the statue as the only known example of its kind from the Old Kingdom," Hawass said, adding that it was unusual for an Egyptian statue from this time to have the three-dimensional representation combined with a high-relief depiction.

"By integrating two sculptural traditions within a single monument, the artist exhibited a remarkable spirit of experimentation," Hawass said. "Thus, this statue emerges as a unique masterpiece of innovation, reshaping our understanding of Old Kingdom Egyptian art."

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

Hundreds of coins depicting Cleopatra VII, an Egyptian pharaoh who was a lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, have been discovered at Taposiris Magna, a temple site from ancient Egypt. On top of that, the same team recently found a submerged port on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt and say that it's possible that her tomb could be located underwater near the port.

Both finds are part of "Cleopatra's Final Secret," a new documentary that premieres on the National Geographic channel Sept. 25 at 10 p.m. EDT (9 p.m. CDT) and on Disney+ and Hulu the following day.

The documentary follows the research of Kathleen Martinez, an archaeologist who leads excavations at Taposiris Magna and has long been searching for the long-lost tomb of Cleopatra. However, although Martinez thinks Cleopatra was buried at Taposiris Magna, other archaeologists are skeptical of this idea.

According to Martinez, the coins were found within a temple dedicated to the goddess Isis. Her team found hundreds of coins across the site — more than 200 inside the courtyard of the temple, more than 300 at the entrance, and more in other locations within or near the temple. Notably, the team unearthed more than 330 coins near a wall of the temple in a "sacred trench" that appears to have been hidden.

What's more, research has revealed a port, which is now underwater, beside the temple. Researchers investigating the port have already found the remains of pottery vessels as well as stone and metal anchors. This port was in use around the time of Cleopatra.

Most of the coins are made of bronze. And while the excavation, cleaning and identification of the coins is ongoing, it appears that many depict Cleopatra VII, Martinez told Live Science. The coins found at the entranceway and courtyard of the temple were intended as offerings to the goddess Isis, she said.

Related: Where is Cleopatra's tomb?

Cleopatra's missing tomb

Cleopatra reigned over Egypt from roughly 51 to 30 B.C. For a time, she was a co-ruler with Caesarion, a child who was her son with Julius Caesar. After Caesar's assassination in 44 B.C., she became a lover of Mark Antony, a Roman general who was a co-ruler of the Roman Republic, and had three children with him. Antony was defeated in a civil war against Octavian, another Roman co-ruler who later became Rome's first and, arguably, longest-serving emperor. After Octavian won, Cleopatra VII died by suicide rather than be taken to Rome.

Cleopatra VII's tomb has never been found, but Martinez said there's evidence the pharaoh was buried at Taposiris Magna. She made several arguments for this, including that Cleopatra felt a close relationship with Isis and that the large number of Cleopatra VII coins suggests the tomb is there.

In addition, there are dozens of other burials at the site that date to around Cleopatra's VII's time, Martinez said. Some of these include gilded mummies, which indicate that Taposiris Magna was used for elite burials in Cleopatra's time. Many other scholars disagree with this theory and tend to believe that Cleopatra was buried in Alexandria.

"Sacred trench"

Martinez's team started excavations at Taposiris Magna in 2005 and found the first Cleopatra VII coins in 2006. They have been continuing excavations ever since. Last year, they found a "sacred trench," as Martinez called it, that appears to have been hidden near the wall of the temple.

So far, more than 330 coins, most of which depict Cleopatra VII, have been found inside the trench. Many other artifacts have also been discovered, including a bust depicting someone who might be Cleopatra VII, the remains of female makeup, the model of an unknown pharaoh, and a ring that has an image of Hathor (a goddess associated with love and beauty) on it along with a Greek inscription on the back which says the "justice of Ra [a sun god] has arisen," Martinez said.

Martinez believes these coins and artifacts were hidden to prevent them from being captured by the Romans. "This is clear evidence that Cleopatra was loved and they wanted to preserve things that were [from her time]" and didn't want the Romans getting them, Martinez said.

"No archaeological evidence yet"

Live Science was shown an exclusive video clip showing a few of the coins being excavated. Scholars not affiliated with the excavation said the coins appear to depict Cleopatra VII but disagreed with the idea that she is buried at the site.

"Yes indeed, these are coins struck during the reign of Cleopatra, and bearing her portrait," Andrew Meadows, a classics professor at the University of Oxford, told Live Science in an email. "Was she buried there? We have absolutely no ancient literary or documentary evidence to suggest so. And I have seen no archaeological evidence yet to suggest that she was."

Thomas Faucher, director of the Center for Alexandrian Studies in Egypt, said "these are, indeed, bronze coins of Cleopatra VII." However, the "idea of Cleopatra [being] buried in Taposiris has long been rejected by a lot of scholars," he told Live Science in an email, adding that he also has doubts.

Sitta von Reden, a professor of ancient history at the University of Freiburg in Germany, said she believes Cleopatra was buried in Alexandria in a now-submerged area near the royal palace. However, she doesn't rule out that the temple at Taposiris Magna might have claimed to have had Cleopatra's body.

"It may well be that individual sanctuaries claimed to have the body of Cleopatra and may have set up a cult in their temple district for whatever reason," von Reden told Live Science in an email.

Martinez said she understands that many scholars disagree with her theory, but she doesn't mind.

"In science I think it's good to have different opinions," Martinez said. She still believes in her theory, saying that "I am convinced that we will find the tomb of Cleopatra at Taposiris Magna." The tomb could be in a part of the site that is now underwater, she said, noting the discovery of a large tunnel leading to the newfound underwater port. She will continue to search for Cleopatra's tomb at the site until the tomb is found there or elsewhere.

The ancient Egyptians took a number of measures to safeguard the pyramids. But did they ever resort to booby traps?

The answer, Egyptologists told Live Science, is an emphatic no.

"No, they didn't use booby traps in the pyramids, but they could make it damn difficult to get in!" Reg Clark, an independent scholar and Egyptologist who has written extensively about ancient Egyptian tomb security, told Live Science in an email.

It's not clear where the idea of booby traps inside Egypt's pyramids originated. Tombs with booby traps have at times been portrayed in movies (such as Indiana Jones films) and video games (such as the Tomb Raider franchise). But it doesn't appear that the ancient Egyptians used booby traps, like a spiked pit beneath a false floor or a rope snare that could leave an intruder hanging upside down, at all.

"Booby traps are unknown to Egyptologists," Rolf Krauss, an independent scholar and Egyptologist who has written extensively on Egypt's pyramids, told Live Science in an email. Krauss said booby traps would not have been effective at stopping robbers who wished to plunder a pyramid. He noted that ancient tomb robbers worked in large teams and a booby trap would not have gotten all of them.

You "may catch one or perhaps two tomb robbers in/with a booby trap," Krauss said. "But what about the others? A tomb or funerary construction large enough to hide a booby trap cannot be entered and robbed by a single person; only a team would be able to do that." Instead, pyramid builders used a range of architectural means to prevent people from robbing the structures.

Related: What did the ancient Egyptian pyramids look like when they were built?

In his book "Securing Eternity: Ancient Egyptian Tomb Protection from Prehistory to the Pyramids" (The American University in Cairo Press, 2019), Clark wrote that one reason pyramids were built was to help protect the pharaoh's final resting place. Before pyramids were constructed, pharaohs were buried in smaller "mastaba" tombs — flat-roofed, rectangular structures with inward-sloping walls — that were easier to break into, he said. By contrast, tomb robbers had to dig a much deeper tunnel into or underneath pyramids to get to the pharaoh's burial chamber.

"The sheer mass and nature of the resistant materials that comprised the pyramid's superstructure provided a high level of protection to the internal arrangements within and/or below," Clark told Live Science in an email.

After the pharaoh was buried, the passageways and entrances to the pyramid were blocked off. There are passageways in the Great Pyramid that do not lead to the burial chamber, but their exact purpose is unclear; it's not certain if they were created to deceive intruders.

The "very blockings of the passageways and shafts in some pyramids could also present a hazard to an intruder," Clark said. "Sadly, this was made evident in [Egyptian archaeologist] Zakaria Goneim's excavation of the Third Dynasty Pyramid of Sekhemkhet at Saqqara in the 1950s. As Goneim's workmen were clearing the main passage into the pyramid, the backfill and blockings in a construction shaft above the main entrance corridor collapsed onto them, killing one and injuring two."

In ancient times, Egyptians used "sliding stone blocks to close off burial chambers," David Ian Lightbody, an Egyptologist and adjunct professor at the University of Vermont, told Live Science in an email.

Lightbody added that "spells of magical protection" were written on some of the pyramids. Known as the "Pyramid Texts," they do not "curse" a tomb robber, but they were thought to provide the pharaoh with magical protection as he worked his way through the afterlife. One line says, "Osiris, carry off all those who hate [the pharaoh], who speak evilly against his name" (translation by Samuel Mercer).

One of the most serious hazards for a robber was the punishment for getting caught. Clark noted that a 20th-dynasty (circa 1186 to 1070 B.C.) text suggests that the punishment for robbing a tomb was getting your nose and ears cut off and then being impaled.

Despite these measures, protections often failed. Many pyramids, including the Great Pyramid constructed for the pharaoh Khufu, were robbed in antiquity or the Middle Ages (circa A.D. 500 to 1500). During the 18th dynasty (circa 1550 to 1295 B.C.), the Egyptians stopped building royal pyramids and instead buried pharaohs within the Valley of the Kings, a decision which may have made it easier to guard the tombs. This still did not prevent theft, however; most tombs in the valley were robbed, with the tomb of Tutankhamun being a notable exception.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

A 3,300-year-old whistle carved out of a cow's toe bone has been discovered in Akhetaten (modern-day Amarna), an ancient Egyptian capital founded by the father of King Tutankhamun.

It is the first bone whistle to be found from ancient Egypt and was likely used by a "police officer" who was monitoring workers of a royal tomb thousands of years ago, according to a new study.

"It is very unique," study co-researcher Michelle Langley, an associate professor of archaeology at Griffith University in Australia, told Live Science in an email.

Archaeologists with the Amarna Project discovered the whistle in 2008 while excavating a site within Akhetaten, but hadn't analyzed it until recently. The city is famous for its founder, the pharaoh Akhenaten, who forbade worship of Egypt's many gods except for Aten, the sun disk. But the capital, established circa 1347 B.C., lasted only about 15 years and was abandoned after the pharaoh's death. Later, King Tut reintroduced the Egyptian pantheon to the kingdom.

The whistle, "a very unassuming artefact," sheds light on the activities of the city's nonroyal inhabitants, Langley said. The bone has a single hole drilled into it, and it "fits comfortably in your palm," she said.

In an experiment, the researchers made a replica out of a fresh cow toe bone and found that the "natural form of the end of the bone creates the perfect surface to rest your lower lip so you can blow across the hole," Langley said.

Related: 30 incredible treasures discovered in King Tut's tomb

Police whistle

The researchers found the whistle at a site known as the Stone Village, which is near another site called the Workman's Village. Both villages likely housed workers involved in the creation of the royal tomb, according to the research team, which was directed by University of Cambridge archaeologists Anna Stevens and Barry Kemp.

Previous excavations revealed that the villages had a complex network of roadways next to a series of small structures, which may have been good vantage points for officers to watch over the area, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Sept. 1 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.

"This area appears to have been heavily policed in order to keep the sacred location of the tomb known and accessed by only those that need to know and go there," Langley said.

In particular, the whistle was found in a structure that the team had interpreted as being some kind of checkpoint for people coming in and out of the Stone Village, Langley said, so "the whistle being used by a policeman or guard makes the most sense."

At another famous site, Deir el-Medina — the village of tomb workers for the Valley of the Kings — tomb workers were policed in a similar way, she said. And other New Kingdom artifacts, such as texts and images, reveal that the Egyptians had police officers known as "medjay."

"The medjay were a semi-nomadic group of people originally from the desert region and who were well-known for their elite military skills," Langley said. "They were used by the Egyptians as a kind of elite police force."

Further clues suggest that the newfound whistle was used by a police officer. For example, the decorated tomb of Mahu, the chief of police at Akhetaten, was previously uncovered in the area.

"In his tomb, one scene shows police holding men in custody — apparently having been caught trying to sneak into the city," Langley said. "In other scenes, we see a series of sentries standing along what might be a roadway like that around the villages."

In another image in Mahu's tomb, sentries stand guard at small structures that may be checkpoints. "So, we do know that police were actively guarding the boundary and areas of the city," Langley said.

When Langley first saw the whistle, it reminded her of bone-carved whistles from Stone Age Europe. After ruling out other uses for the Egyptian artifact, such as being a game piece, Langley and her colleagues were excited that they had documented ancient Egypt's first known whistle.

"While there has been a lot of attention given to the tombs and monuments built by the Pharaohs, we still know relatively little about the more average person," Langley said. Sites like Amarna are so important because they record "the lives not only of Pharaoh and his court, but also the regular, everyday people."

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

Archaeologists in Jerusalem have discovered a rare, miniature gold coin that depicts the Egyptian queen Berenice II and dates to the reign of her husband, the third ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt.

The Ptolemies were a Macedonian royal dynasty founded by one of Alexander the Great's generals, Ptolemy I Soter, during Egypt's Hellenistic period (circa 323 to 30 B.C.).

The coin was likely minted in Alexandria 2,270 years ago, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), which made the find in Jerusalem. It may have been part of a collection of coins that were gifted to soldiers returning from the Third Syrian War (246 to 241 B.C.), a conflict between the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt and the Seleucid Empire of Syria.

"It's a gorgeous coin," Robert Kool, head of numismatics at the IAA, said in a video describing the discovery. "We [have] only found 17 of these coins over the past 100 years."

Of those coins, this one is the first to have been found outside Egypt and in organized excavations. It was unearthed in the City of David, an archaeological site in East Jerusalem that is considered the city's ancient settlement core.

Rivka Langler, who has been excavating an area of the site called the Givati Parking Lot for two years, spotted the coin while sifting through soil. "I was sifting the excavation soil when suddenly I saw something shiny," Langler said in a statement. "At first, I couldn't believe what I was seeing, but within seconds I was running excitedly through the excavation site."

Related: 'Extremely rare' 2,500-year-old broken silver coin unearthed near Jerusalem

One side of the coin shows a portrait of Queen Berenice II wearing a tiara, a veil and a necklace. The other side, which depicts a cornucopia and two stars, bears the ancient Greek inscription "Basileisses," which means "of the Queen."

Berenice II was the wife and consort of Ptolemy III, who ruled in Egypt between 246 and 221 B.C. — but the inscription on the coin suggests Berenice may have been a ruler in her own right, according to the statement.

"She was a queen of an area which was called Kirinyaka, today in eastern Libya," Kool explained in the video. "When she married her cousin Ptolemy III, this area became part of this large and very, very important and rich Hellenistic kingdom. When her husband, Ptolemy III, invaded Syria, she took over as the regent of Egypt."

Queens of the Ptolemaic dynasty occasionally appeared on coins, with one famous example being Cleopatra VII (known simply as Cleopatra), the daughter of Ptolemy XII. But the new discovery still stands out as one of the oldest such coins and suggests Queen Berenice II had great political power or influence, according to the statement.

It's unclear how the coin ended up in Jerusalem, but its discovery there indicates that the ancient city was rapidly recovering from the destruction of the First Temple in 586 or 587 B.C., when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II laid siege to Jerusalem.

"Until now, the prevailing scholarly view was that [after the siege] Jerusalem was a small, marginal, resource-poor town," Yiftah Shalev, an archaeologist with the IAA who co-led the excavations, said in the statement.

However, "Jerusalem seems to have begun recovering already during the Persian period [586 to 333 B.C.] and grew stronger under Ptolemaic rule," Shalev said. "Jerusalem in the centuries after the destruction of the First Temple was not desolate and isolated, but rather a city in the process of renewal, reestablishing ties with the dominant political, economic, and cultural centers of the period."

The elite in Jerusalem likely shared ties with the ruling elite in Egypt, Yuval Gadot, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University and the excavation director, said in the video. "The golden coin we found here … tells us that Jerusalem was an important city," he said.

This delicate stone vessel was discovered in 1936 in the tomb of Sabu, an ancient Egyptian official buried in the Saqqara necropolis during the first dynasty period. When it was found, the disk was in pieces. It has since been reconstructed and is in the collection of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Sabu's mastaba, a rectangular tomb with sloping walls and a flat roof, was excavated by British Egyptologist Walter Emery. In his publication describing the Saqqara tombs, Emery wrote that the burial chamber had been looted for its jewelry and precious metals. But Sabu's skeleton was intact inside a wooden coffin, and his tomb was filled with dozens of stone and pottery vessels, flint and copper tools, the remains of two oxen, and a unique bowl.

Emery described the Sabu Disk as an ornamental tri-lobed bowl that measured 24 inches (61 centimeters) in diameter and 3.9 inches (10 cm) tall. The bowl was carved out of metasiltstone, a sedimentary rock that has undergone some metamorphism.

Related: Hornelund Brooches: Viking age gold ornaments mysteriously buried in Denmark 1,000 years ago

According to Egyptian archaeologist Ali El-Khouli, flat and wide stone bowls were common in the first to third dynasties of ancient Egypt. But this particular bowl found in Sabu's tomb is unusual because of the three thinly carved and curving wings that rise from the edge of the disk. When viewed from above, this decoration is suggestive of a modern steering wheel, propeller or hubcap.

The Sabu Disk's unique design has led to numerous theories about the item's purpose, ranging from part of a water turbine to a piece of a hyperdrive from an alien spaceship. One recent theory even suggests the disk was used as a "mash tun," a vessel that holds grain and hot water for making beer.

But the most likely explanation is that the Sabu Disk had a similar purpose as other wide, flat bowls in ancient Egyptian culture: It probably held food or oil. The delicate nature of the metasiltstone and carving, though, suggests that the bowl was not for everyday use and may have been placed in Sabu's tomb as an offering for the afterlife.

Researchers have discovered a 4,000-year-old handprint on a tomb offering from ancient Egypt, providing a rare glimpse into the life of its maker.

The handprint was left on the underside of a "soul house" — a model dwelling that may have been intended to serve as a resting place for a dead person's soul. These models, which were commonly found with burials, also held food offerings such as bread, lettuce and ox heads, according to a statement from the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

The soul house dates to between 2055 and 1650 B.C. and came from a site called Deir Rifa, located around 174 miles (280 kilometers) north of the city of Luxor in southern Egypt, The Art Newspaper reported. Researchers at the Fitzwilliam Museum, part of the University of Cambridge, discovered the handprint while preparing for the museum's upcoming Made in Ancient Egypt exhibition.

Whoever made the soul house likely left a handprint behind by handling the clay before it had dried, the researchers said.

"We've spotted traces of fingerprints left in wet varnish or on a coffin in the decoration, but it is rare and exciting to find a complete handprint underneath this soul house," Helen Strudwick, the curator of Made in Ancient Egypt and a senior Egyptologist at the Fitzwilliam Museum, said in the statement.

Related: Ancient Egyptian rock art discovered near Aswan may be from the dawn of the first dynasty

Potters created soul houses by building a frame from wooden sticks and coating them with wet clay. The frame then burnt away when the potters fired the clay at a high temperature to turn it into ceramic.

Researchers still have a lot to learn about soul houses. English Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853 - 1942) coined the term and believed that the houses were used to provide provisions for the afterlife, according to the Egypt at the Manchester Museum blog. However, it's uncertain whether they were intended to act as houses for the spirit of the deceased or simply as symbolic offerings. The University of Cambridge statement noted that the houses may have served as both.

It's unclear whether the soul houses represented the deceased's house or a tomb. Strudwick told The Art Newspaper that soul houses were placed directly over burial shafts, suggesting that they were a cheaper alternative to elaborate tomb chapels that were built beside burial chambers, and thus were used by people who couldn't afford such luxuries. However, Strudwick noted that she thinks there's also a connection between soul houses and the idea of the dead being able to return to their homes.

The soul house with a handprint on its underside has two levels with a row of pillars on each. Researchers suspect that the handprint was left by someone moving the model out of a workshop to dry before firing, according to the statement.

This handprint is one of the relatively few glimpses of potters at work to have survived from ancient Egypt.

"I have never seen such a complete handprint on an Egyptian object before," Strudwick said. "You can just imagine the person who made this, picking it up to move it out of the workshop to dry before firing. This takes you directly to the moment when the object was made, and to the person who made it."

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

An ancient Egyptian rock engraving may have been carved at the dawn of the first dynasty, up to 5,100 years ago, a new study suggests.

The engraving depicts a boat that may have a royal figure seated in it, although only the person's head and right shoulder are visible. The engraving is stylistically similar to ancient Egyptian rock panels from the protodynastic period and early first dynasty — periods that aren't well known to archaeologists. These similarities hint that the newfound carving may hold clues about the formation of the Egyptian state, according to the study.

"Boats are among the most frequently recurring motifs in Egyptian iconography," study author Dorian Vanhulle, director and curator at the Musée du Malgré-Tout in Belgium, said in a statement. "During the Predynastic and Protodynastic periods (c. 4500-3085 BC), the periods which foreshadowed Pharaonic Egypt, the boat is ubiquitous and invested with complex ideological and symbolic meanings."

The "intriguing new" rock engraving was found on the west bank of the Nile River near Aswan in November 2022, during a survey that was documenting rock art in the region ahead of the construction of New Aswan City, Vanhulle wrote in the study, which was published Thursday (July 10) in the journal Antiquity.

The engraving shows an "ornate boat dragged by five figures to the right," Vanhulle wrote. At the back of the back, a standing person holds an oar. Next to this person is an enclosed area — possibly a cabin — that appears to hold a seated individual.

This person may be royalty, Vanhulle wrote. However, some details have not been preserved, making it difficult to interpret the individual. The seated person seems to have an elongated chin, which was "typical for depictions of early rulers that might designate the false beard worn by kings since the First Dynasty," Vanhulle wrote in the study.

The seated individual has a "vertical stroke" on their head, which "might be a headdress of some sort," he wrote.

Related: Oldest and most complete ancient Egyptian human genome ever sequenced reveals ties to Mesopotamia

To date the rock art, Vanhulle examined its style. The boat's sickle-like shape and figures pulling it resemble boat depictions from the protodynastic and early dynastic periods, he noted, adding that the cabin is similar to depictions of late predynastic boats. The boat also appears to have "horns" on the top of its second cabin — a feature that was common in the beginning of the first dynasty, he wrote.

However, Vanhulle does not think this individual is Narmer, who founded the first Egyptian dynasty around 3085 B.C. That's because the engraving lacks a serekh, a hieroglyphic symbol that portrays a palace facade carrying the king's name and has Horus, the falcon-headed god.

"This absence would suggest that the seated figure is not a First Dynasty king," Vanhulle wrote in the study. Rather, it's likely that the engraving was "produced at the dawn of the First Dynasty, perhaps shortly before the reign of Narmer," he wrote.

The lack of the serekh is "a relevant detail," Alejandro Jiménez Serrano, an Egyptologist at the University of Jaén in Spain who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "This could indicate that the seated figure predates the widespread use of this royal symbol in official rock art."

This engraving and others are well done and have many similarities, so it's possible that regional authorities commissioned rock-art specialists long before the first pyramids were built, Vanhulle noted.

There is a "limited corpus of Protodynastic rock art," making this engraving "particularly significant because it depicts a seated figure in a processional boat, interpreted as a possible representative of authority," Jiménez Serrano said.

But interpreting the rock art is difficult, and Vanhulle and Jiménez Serrano noted a number of limitations in the study. For instance, it's hard to know if the vertical stroke above the seated person's head is actually a headdress or if the elongated chin is a false beard. It's not even clear if the seated individual is male or female.

"The study acknowledges that 'it is not possible to determine the gender and status' of the figure, although its social importance as a potential member of the ruling class is recognized," Jiménez Serrano said.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

Workers at the Egyptian port city of Alexandria have recovered 22 massive stone blocks that were used thousands of years ago to build the city's famous lighthouse, one of the wonders of the ancient world.

The stone blocks were raised from the harbor floor at Alexandria, on the southeastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and will now be studied and digitally scanned. The results will be added to digital records of more than 100 stones discovered underwater over the past decade, according to a statement from the Dassault Systems Foundation, one of the project's sponsors.

The research is led by French archaeologist and architect Isabelle Hairy and brings together the expertise of historians, archaeologists, architects and engineers to create a virtual 3D model of the ancient lighthouse, which had already been badly damaged by earthquakes when it collapsed in the 14th century.

The recently recovered stones include pieces of a huge doorway that weighed "70 to 80 tons," according to the statement. The workers also recovered parts of a massive Egyptian-style "pylon," or ceremonial gateway, that may have been a monument.

Ancient wonder

The Lighthouse of Alexandria — also known as the Pharos of Alexandria, after a small island at the mouth of the harbor where it stood — was built in about 280 B.C. on the orders of the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus (who had been born in Macedonia) mainly to guide approaching ships safely to the harbor.

The city was founded by and named after the Macedonian king Alexander the Great, who seized Egypt from the Persian Empire in 332 B.C. Alexandria then became the Egyptian capital under the Hellenistic (Greek) Ptolemaic dynasty of pharaohs (the first, known as Ptolemy I Soter, had been one of Alexander's most trusted generals) and one of the wealthiest cities in the ancient world.

Related: Was Alexander the Great eaten by sharks? Inside the wild theories for what happened to the iconic ruler's body.

Alexandria's lighthouse was a technological marvel for its time. According to the statement, it was more than 328 feet (100 meters) high, making it one of the tallest structures in the ancient world, with a multitiered design of a square base, an octagonal middle section and a cylindrical top.

Its light was produced by a large fire, probably fueled by wood or oil, and it formed a concentrated beam that could be seen up to 30 miles (50 kilometers) away, according to ancient writers. The beam of light seems to have been created by reflecting the lighthouse fire with large, polished metal surfaces, perhaps of bronze or copper — although they have not survived, and little is known about them.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria was one of the ancient "wonders of the world" — a designation bestowed by ancient Greek writers. It was "highly celebrated" by the time of Pliny the Elder (lived A.D. 23 to 79) during the Roman Empire, who wrote about the lighthouse hundreds of years after it had been built.

Digital twin

The ruins of the Lighthouse of Alexandria were discovered underwater in 1994 by French archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur, and the latest work at the site is the third research project there by academics from France.

Instead of physically rebuilding the collapsed lighthouse, however, the researchers are making a virtual reconstruction, or "digital twin," based on what they can learn from the ruins and historical records.

The newly recovered stone blocks will be digitally scanned, and the data will be given to volunteer engineers from the Dassault Systems Foundation, who will attempt to position them correctly in the reconstruction — "like pieces of a giant archaeological puzzle," according to the statement.

In addition to testing theories about its construction and collapse, the virtual model will "revive the lighthouse's original grandeur, allowing visitors to explore it as if they were on site," the statement said.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

Scientists have sequenced the oldest and most complete genome from ancient Egypt — and the DNA reveals that a man who lived 5,000 years ago had roots in both Mesopotamia and North Africa, a new study finds.

The man — who lived during the Old Kingdom in the third millennium B.C., just a few centuries after Upper and Lower Egypt unified into one empire — provides researchers with a rare glimpse into the genetic roots of ancient Egyptians.

The individual's body was first recovered from a tomb in Nuwayrat, in Upper Egypt, in 1902 and now reveals new information about the genetic makeup of early Egyptians. Prior to this analysis, only three ancient Egyptian genomes had been sequenced, and all were partial.

"I was very surprised" by the success of the sequencing, study co-author Pontus Skoglund, who studies ancient DNA at The Francis Crick Institute in the U.K., said at a news conference Tuesday (July 1), before the paper's publication. "It was a long shot that it would work, as it is with many of these individuals."

An old potter

Radiocarbon dating found that the man had lived around 2855 to 2570 B.C., during the Old Kingdom, a period known for its stability, innovation, and the construction of the step pyramid and the Great Pyramid of Giza, according to a statement.

He was buried in a ceramic pot within a rock-cut tomb and was preserved well enough that two DNA extracts from the roots of his teeth could be sequenced. Researchers compared his genome against a library of thousands of known DNA samples.

Eventually, they found that most of the man's genome could be traced to North African Neolithic ancestry, according to the study, which was published in the journal Nature Wednesday (July 2). About 20% of his DNA was linked to the eastern Fertile Crescent, including ancient Mesopotamia and its neighboring regions.

This body was uniquely well preserved compared with those of other ancient Egyptians, which often degrade due to the high temperatures of the region. "The pot burial, in combination with the rock-cut tomb into which the pot burial was placed, provided a stable environment" that likely helped preserve the DNA, study co-author Linus Girdland-Flink, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen in the U.K., explained at the news conference.

Related: Why are so many ancient Egyptians buried at the Saqqara necropolis?

The man's remains provide clues about his life in ancient Egypt nearly 5,000 years ago. He lived to between 44 and 64 years old, which would have been considered an advanced age for his time. The high degree of osteoporosis and arthritis suggests he was on the higher end of that age bracket, study co-author Joel Irish, a bioarchaeologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K., said at the conference.

The man's ceramic-pot burial and rock tomb point to an elevated social status, which contrasts with the many signs of hard physical labor on his remains. Irish found evidence that the man had held his hands out and sat for extended periods of time — a clue that he may have been a potter.

Ancient Egypt's genetic roots

Because most of the man's genetic ancestry is linked to North Africa, it's likely that "at least part of the Egyptian population mainly emerged from local population," study first author Adeline Morez Jacobs, a biological anthropologist at the University of Padua in Italy, said at the conference.

More notably, the link to Mesopotamia "was quite interesting because we actually know from archaeology that the Egyptian and the eastern Fertile Crescent cultures influenced each other for millennia," she said. It was already known that the groups shared goods, domesticated plants and animals, writing systems and farming practices, but this genome is evidence that the populations intermixed more deeply.

However, Morez Jacobs cautioned that this man's DNA may not represent the broader Egyptian population of his time. "We need to remember, this is a single individual," she said. "We didn't capture the full diversity of the population."

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of multistory houses and a ceremonial building linked to the cobra-headed goddess Wadjet in the ancient Egyptian city of Imet.

Dense architectural remains indicate that Imet was a bustling urban center during Egypt's Late Period (circa 664 to 332 B.C.), or the last period of Egyptian rule before Alexander the Great and his general Ptolemy I Soter took over, according to a statement describing recent excavations in what is now Tell Nabasha (also spelled Tell Nebesha) — an archaeological site in the eastern Nile Delta.

"Imet is emerging as a key site for rethinking the archaeology of Late Period Egypt," Nicky Nielsen, a senior lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Manchester in the U.K. who directed the excavations, said in the statement.

The newly discovered multistory houses, or tower houses, were likely designed to accommodate a growing population in what was a prominent city in ancient times, particularly in the fourth century B.C., Nielsen said.

"These tower houses are mainly found in the Nile Delta between the Late Period and the Roman era, and are rare elsewhere in Egypt," he said. "Their presence here shows that Imet was a thriving and densely-built city with a complex urban infrastructure."

Nielsen and his team first spotted the tower-house remains on high-resolution satellite images, which revealed clusters of ancient mudbrick in Imet. The researchers traveled to the ancient city to excavate these structures, as well as the ruins of a paved area for grain processing and animal enclosures, which together point to an active local economy, according to the statement.

Related: 'Major' ancient Egyptian town discovered — and it has a jug stamped with the name of Nefertiti's daughter

Together with Egyptian archaeologists, the researchers also unearthed a large building with a limestone plaster floor and huge pillars dating to the Ptolemaic period (332 to 30 B.C.), when Ptolemy I Soter's dynasty ruled Egypt. The building sits on the ancient processional road to the temple of Wadjet — the patron goddess and protector of Lower Egypt, traditionally depicted as a winged cobra or as a woman with the head of a cobra — suggesting the building itself also held spiritual significance.

Evidence suggests the processional road fell out of use in the mid-Ptolemaic period, indicating a shift in religious culture, according to the statement.

In the ruins of buildings, the researchers found various stunning artifacts, including a green faience ushabti — or glazed ceramic funerary figurine — from the 26th dynasty (Late Period), a stone slab with engravings of the god Harpocrates and protective symbols and a musical instrument featuring the goddess of music and joy, Hathor.

The discovery of complex infrastructure and ancient religious artifacts from Imet "opens new doors to our understanding of daily life, spirituality and urban planning in the Delta," Nielsen said.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

For the past 100 years, Egyptologists thought that when the powerful female pharaoh Hatshepsut died, her nephew and successor went on a vendetta against her, purposefully smashing all her statues to erase her from public memory.

Now, a new study finds that's not quite the case. Although many statues of Hatshepsut were intentionally broken, the reason behind their destruction has nothing to do with her gender or even blotting out her existence, an Egyptologist says. Rather, Hatshepsut's statues were broken to "deactivate" them and eliminate their supposed supernatural powers, according to a study published Tuesday (June 24) in the journal Antiquity.

Hatshepsut (who ruled circa 1473 to 1458 B.C.) was a pharaoh known for commissioning a beautiful temple built at Deir el-Bahri, near ancient Thebes (modern-day Luxor), and for ordering a successful voyage from Egypt to a land known as "Punt," whose precise location is now a matter of debate. She was the wife and half sister of pharaoh Thutmose II (reign circa 1492 to 1479 B.C.) and was supposed to act as regent for her stepson Thutmose III. However, rather than serving as regent, she became a pharaoh in her own right, with Thutmose III acting as a co-regent who had limited power.

After Hatshepsut died, many of her statues were intentionally broken, including at the site of Deir el-Bahri, where archaeologists in the 1920s and 1930s found broken remains of her statues buried in pits. It was believed that these were broken on the orders of Thutmose III after Hatshepsut died, as a form of retribution. However, the new study suggests that these statues were in fact "ritually deactivated" in the same manner that statues belonging to other pharaohs were.

In the study, Jun Yi Wong, a doctoral candidate in Egyptology at the University of Toronto, examined archival records of the statues from Deir el-Bahri that were found in the 1920s and 1930s. Wong found that the statues were not smashed in the face and didn't have their inscriptions destroyed. Instead, they were broken at their neck, waist and feet — something seen in statues of other Egyptian pharaohs during a process that modern-day Egyptologists call "ritual deactivation."

The ancient Egyptians saw royal statues "as powerful and perhaps even living entities," Wong told Live Science in an email. When a pharaoh died, it was common for the ancient Egyptians to deactivate their statues by breaking them at their weak points, or the neck, waist and feet, Wong noted.

"Deposits of deactivated statues have been found at multiple sites in Egypt and Sudan," Wong said. "One of the best-known finds in the history of Egyptian archaeology is the Karnak Cachette, where hundreds of statues of pharaohs — from across centuries — were found in a single deposit. The vast majority of the statues have been 'deactivated.'"

Related: Why are the noses broken on so many ancient Egyptian statues?

This isn't to say that Hatshepsut wasn't a target of political persecution after her death. "There is no doubt that Hatshepsut did suffer a campaign of persecution — at many monuments throughout Egypt, her images and names have been systematically hacked out," Wong said. "We know that this campaign of persecution was initiated by Thutmose III, but we are not exactly sure why."

The fact that her statues at Deir el-Bahri were deactivated normally while images and inscriptions of her at other sites were violently attacked suggests that the persecution she experienced may not have been for personal reasons.

Statues of other pharaohs also underwent ritual deactivation, Wong wrote. The fact that the statues of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri were deactivated normally while statues of her at other sites were more violently attacked suggests that Thutmose III may have felt that he had to persecute Hatshepsut for political reasons, such as concerns about her reign from his supporters.

"Early Egyptologists assumed that Thutmose III must have harboured intense hatred towards Hatshepsut, but this is unlikely to be accurate," Wong said. "The treatment of the statues, for example, suggests that Thutmose III was motivated by ritualistic and practical factors, rather than any personal animosity."

Thutmose III "would have been influenced by political considerations — such as whether Hatshepsut's reign was detrimental to his legacy as a pharaoh," Wong said.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

The pharaoh Ramesses II is one of the best known warrior rulers of ancient Egypt, famous for his military victories and great public works. He ruled Egypt for two-thirds of a century (roughly 1279 to 1213 B.C.) during the New Kingdom period, and died when he was around 90 years old, an astonishing age for the time.

But how did Ramesses II die and what happened following the celebrated pharaoh's death?

First, let's start with Ramesses II's ascension to the throne. He became pharaoh after his father Seti I (ruled circa 1294 to 1279 B.C.) died. At the start of his reign, Ramesses II was at war with the Hittites, a kingdom based in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), and fought a major battle against them, now known as the "Battle of Kadesh", in what is now Syria around 1275 B.C. While Ramesses II claimed victory, modern-day historians tend to believe that neither side won the battle.

Ramesses II made peace with the Hittites around 1258 B.C. and took a Hittite princess as one of his wives. Like other Egyptian pharaohs, he practiced polygamy and had many wives and concubines. Toby Wilkinson, an Egyptologist at the University of Cambridge, estimates in his book "Ramesses the Great: Egypt's King of Kings" (Yale University Press, 2023) that he had around 100 children.

The pharaoh also built a new capital called "Pi-Ramesses" (also known as "Per-Ramesses") in the eastern Nile delta near the modern-day village of Qantir. The "entire city bore the unmistakable footprint of its pharaonic foundation," Wilkinson wrote, noting that it had at least 50 colossal statues of Ramesses II, most of which were built during his lifetime.

When Ramesses II died, he was buried in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings. After this tomb was plundered, his mummy was placed, along with other royal mummies, in a cache at Deir el-Bahari. His mummy is now located in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo.

Analyses of Ramesses II's mummy have provided insights into his cause of death.

Sahar Saleem, a professor of radiology at Cairo University who has studied the mummy of Ramesses II extensively, told Live Science in an email that "Ramesses II was likely crippled by arthritis and walked with a hunched back for several years in later life. He also suffered from severe dental disease, which may have caused chronic pain or infection. However, no definitive cause of death was identified on CT (computed tomography) scans." In all likelihood he died of natural causes, Saleem said.

The fact that Ramesses II lived to around age 90 was, in itself, quite a feat in ancient Egypt. At the time "most people died well before their 40th birthday and he was on the throne for two or three generations," Susanna Thomas, an Egyptologist who works at the Grand Egyptian Museum, told Live Science in an email.

Ramessees II outlived many of his wives and children and it was Merneptah, his 13th-oldest son, who succeeded him as pharaoh. Thomas noted that there is no evidence of any fighting over the throne when Merneptah became pharaoh.

"Twelve of his elder brothers had died before him and frankly he [Merneptah] was just next in line," Thomas said. Merneptah was probably already in his sixties when he became pharaoh and he launched a program of building new palaces and other buildings, Thomas said.

While Merneptah's accession occurred without incident, his successors did face internal strife. "Ramesses II grandson Seti II has to deal with an usurper [named Amenmesse] who seems to have been successful in ruling over Upper Egypt for a couple of years" Henning Franzmeier, a senior research affiliate at the Cyprus Institute who is the field director of excavations at Pi-Ramesses, told Live Science in an email.

Some of Seti II's successors also faced quarrels over the throne. The vast number of children that Ramesses II had complicated questions over succession as his descendants vied for power. There were "hundreds of members of the royal family who might have felt inclined to seek for power," Franzmeier said.

In addition to internal turmoil, Egypt experienced invasions from a group known as the "Sea Peoples." One invasion occurred during Merneptah's reign while another occurred during the reign of Ramesses III (reign circa 1184 to 1153 B.C.).

The internal quarrels over the throne, along with problems dealing with the Sea Peoples invasions, "ultimately led to the decline of royal power in Egypt," Franzmeier said.

Legacy

Ramesses II was so powerful, he was worshipped in life as a living god. And even after death, his cult continued to some degree.

"Surprisingly his cult is not attested widely after his death — although bits and pieces of evidence do appear," Campbell Price, a curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, told Live Science in an email.

A sarcophagus mentions a priest devoted to the worship of Ramesses II who lived at the site of Abydos during the Ptolemaic period (circa 304 to 30 B.C.) Price said. This means that some people were still worshipping Ramesses II 1,000 years after he died.

Price noted that pharaohs named themselves "Ramesses" or "Usermaatre" (his throne name) for centuries after Ramesses II's death. Pharaohs also treated items of his with great respect. "Objects from his robbed tomb were clearly prized heirlooms and were incorporated into later royal burials at Tanis [an ancient city], surely with a sense of reverence for their illustrious ancestor," Price said.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

More than five millennia ago, an Egyptian weaver created a simple, tailored linen dress, likely not realizing just how long it would stick around. The Tarkhan Dress, carbon-dated to 3482 to 3102 B.C., is the world's oldest known complex woven garment — meaning an item of clothing that was cut and fitted rather than draped or wrapped.

The dress was found by Sir Flinders Petrie in 1913 as he excavated a mastaba — a large, rectangular, flat-topped Egyptian tomb — near the town of Tarkhan, about 37 miles (60 kilometers) south of Cairo. Petrie found more than 2,000 tombs in the Tarkhan necropolis, many of which dated to the late Protodynastic and Early Dynastic periods (around 3100 B.C.) when pharaohs first ruled a unified Egypt.

Within the mastaba, Petrie found what he called a "great pile of linen cloth" that past tomb raiders appear to have chucked to the side. Although Petrie brought the cloth back to the U.K., the Tarkhan Dress sat in a pile until 1977, when conservators at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London realized what it was.

Related: Sun Chariot: An ornate Bronze Age treasure that may have featured in an ancient Nordic religious ceremony

Sporting a modest V-neckline, the dress was made from three pieces of linen hand-woven from flax (Linum usitatissimum), according to the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London (UCL), where the Tarkhan Dress is on display. The sleeves and bodice have a knife-pleat decoration made from sharp, narrow folds in the fabric. The bottom of the garment is missing, so it is unclear whether it was a shirt, a tunic or a dress. But museum experts think it was made for a young, slim woman.

"The survival of highly perishable textiles in the archaeological record is exceptional," Alice Stevenson, now a professor of museum archaeology at UCL, wrote in a 2016 study, and "the survival of complete, or almost complete, articles of clothing even more so."

In the 2016 study, Stevenson and Michael Dee, now an isotope chemist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, confirmed the antiquity of the Tarkhan Dress, revealing that it was made "at the cusp of the First Dynasty."

The dress was probably en vogue, Stevenson and Dee noted in the study, as funerary art from this time period shows deceased people wearing similar garments. But it wasn't made solely for a funeral — the Tarkhan Dress has evidence of wear, suggesting an elite person wore it before it became "funeral rags."

The Tarkhan Dress is the earliest surviving example of a cut, fitted and tailored garment, Stevenson and Richards noted, and is helping researchers better understand textile manufacturing during the rise of the ancient Egyptian civilization.

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered three New Kingdom tombs dating to more than 3,000 years ago. The burials were found within a cemetery now known as Dra Abu el-Naga, which is near modern-day Luxor (ancient Thebes).

The three deceased individuals, all men, each held important roles in ancient Egypt's temples and grain silos. So it's no surprise they were buried at the Dra Abu el-Naga cemetery, which is located near the Nile and is a necropolis for important non-royal people.

One of the tombs belongs to a man named "Amun-Em-Ipet" who served in a temple or estate that was dedicated to Amun, a god associated with ancient Thebes, Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a translated statement. The man lived during the 19th dynasty (circa 1295 to 1186 B.C.), a time when Egypt controlled an empire that stretched from Syria to Sudan.

The tomb contains a small courtyard, a hallway and a burial chamber. The surviving wall paintings depict banquets, funerary offerings and a funerary procession. At a later time, his tomb was re-occupied by other individuals and another hallway was built.

The two other tombs date to the early part of the 18th dynasty (circa 1550 to 1295 B.C.). One is of a man named Baki, who was a supervisor of grain silos. His tomb has a corridor-shaped courtyard that connects to a second courtyard, which in turn has an entrance that leads to an unfinished chapel with a burial shaft.

The other early 18th-dynasty tomb belongs to a man named "Es," who had a number of different titles that indicate he was a scribe and a supervisor in a temple of Amun. The tomb has an entrance hall, a small courtyard and a series of unfinished chambers along with a burial shaft.

Related: Archaeologists unearth tree-lined walkway that led to ancient Egyptian fortress in Sinai Desert

The fact that all three tombs have courtyards is not unusual.

"Courtyards are common elements of the New Kingdom tombs of the non-royal Theban necropolis, and they are present throughout Dra Abu el-Naga," Katherine Slinger, a lecturer in Egyptian archaeology at the University of Manchester in the U.K. who was not involved with the excavation, told Live Science in an email.

"These courtyards had a ritual purpose, particularly during the funeral of the deceased and necropolis festivals," and were sometimes shared with adjacent tombs, Slinger said. "These newly discovered courtyards may contain evidence of this ritual activity," she noted.

Felix Arnold, an archaeologist with the German Archaeological Institute who was not involved in the excavation, told Live Science in an email that "courtyards are typical elements of New Kingdom tombs. The study of these exterior elements of tomb precincts tend to be neglected [and] their careful study will offer new insights."

A team made up entirely of Egyptian archaeologists discovered the tombs, the statement noted. Excavations of the site are ongoing, as is analysis of the tombs.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

This amulet, shaped like a scarab beetle, was discovered in the tomb of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman named Hatnefer. But the charm, which was intended to assist her journey to the afterlife, was not originally made for her.

The scarab was carved from serpentinite, a greenish-gray metamorphic rock, and measures roughly 2.6 inches (6.6 centimeters) long. It was set in gold and suspended on a 30.5-inch-long (77.5 cm) plaited gold chain. This exquisite necklace was excavated in the 1930s from the tomb of Hatnefer and her husband Ramose and is on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Hatnefer's mummy and tomb contents suggest she was powerful in her own domain. She was about 60 years old when she died, and she was buried with bronze and silver mirrors, cosmetics and wood chests full of high-quality linen.

According to The Met, Hatnefer's scarab includes a version of the Book of the Dead chapter on heart weighing, and her name has been inserted over text that was previously erased, suggesting that the amulet was not originally intended for her.

Related: Hårby Valkyrie: A 1,200-year-old gold Viking Age woman sporting a sword, shield and ponytail

The Book of the Dead passage engraved on the bottom of the scarab discusses the weighing of the heart. In ancient Egypt, the heart was considered the most important organ, as it was thought to be the location of a person's intelligence and memory. After a person died, their heart was weighed by Ma'at, the goddess of truth and justice, to determine if the person led a life worthy of entering the Duat, or the underworld. The "heart scarab" was meant to silence the heart of the deceased so that it could not lie about or misrepresent its owner. Peter Dornan, former curator of Egyptian art at The Met, translated the cuneiform script on Hatnefer's heart scarab as follows:

The Mistress of the House, Hatnefer, says: "Heart of my mother, heart of my mother, heart of my (actual) being, do not rise up against me as a witness; do not contend against me in the court of judgment; do not make opposition against me in the presence of the keeper of the balance. You are my bodily ka, a Khnum who has invigorated my limbs. When you ascend to the perfection from which we have come, do not cause our names to stink to the entourage who create mankind in their proper stations, but rather may it go well with us and with the listener, so that the judge may rejoice. Do not devise lies against me in the presence of the god, for your reckoning is at hand."

A large ancient Egyptian fortress in the northern Sinai Desert had an elaborate landscape of 500 trees leading to its entrance more than 2,000 years ago, new excavations reveal.

Archaeologists made the finding while uncovering more of a fortress that was rebuilt and modified over several centuries. The existence of the fortress has been known for decades. However, new finds by archaeologists from Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities shed light on what the fortress was like more than two millennia ago.

Located at the site of Tell Abu Saifi, the fortress was in use during the Ptolemaic period (circa 304 to 30 B.C.), when Ptolemy I — a general of Alexander the Great — and his descendants ruled Egypt, and the Roman period (circa 30 B.C. to A.D. 642), when Egypt was a province in the Roman Empire.

They found that during the Ptolemaic period, there were 500 planting circles surrounded with clay on both sides of a road that led to the entrance of the fortress. These would have contained trees, the ministry said in a translated statement. It’s not clear what exactly the climate was like in the Sinai Desert around 2,000 years ago.

They also found that, during Ptolemaic times, the fortress was surrounded by a trench (a moat) that was more than 6.6 feet (2 meters) deep. This trench would have helped soldiers defend the fortress. The Ptolemies faced a number of adversaries at different times, including the Seleucid Empire, the Roman Republic and rebel groups operating in Egypt.

Related: Ancient Egyptians drew the Milky Way on coffins and tombs, linking them to sky goddess, study finds

The planting circles are an interesting find, Elizabeth Macaulay, a classics professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center who was not involved in the excavation, told Live Science in an email.

"It is certainly possible that clay planting circles could have been used to plant trees," Macaulay said. "500 trees would have been a lot, but we have evidence from papyri and archaeology for the large-scale cultivation of plants — vines, fruits, trees — in Ptolemaic Egypt." She noted that if the excavation team uncovers the remains of roots, it would help confirm that these circles were used for planting. It might also allow for the identification of the tree species.

The archaeologists made several other finds, including living quarters of soldiers and perhaps their families. In addition, they unearthed a stretch of road that was 328 feet (100 m) long, 36 feet (11 m) wide, and paved with limestone slabs. It would have been used for military units traveling to the fortress.

In an unexpected finding, archaeologists unearthed four corners of a structure that may be from an even earlier period. It's possible that this structure is also a fortress, but the team has not been able to date it or verify its purpose.

Live Science contacted the archaeologists who excavated the site but did not hear back by the time of publication.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

Starry paintings found on ancient Egyptian coffins and tombs indicate that the sky goddess Nut was closely associated with the Milky Way galaxy, according to a new study by an astronomer.

While Egyptologists have long believed Nut was connected with the Milky Way, this new study helps support the idea.

Or Graur, an associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., examined 125 depictions of the goddess Nut (pronounced "Noot") on coffins and tomb walls that are up to 5,000 years old. A few of these paintings were unusual in their detail, Graur reported in a study published April 30 in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage.

In many depictions of Nut, the goddess is shown naked and arched over the sky, sometimes with stars and solar disks over her body. This posture shows her connection with the sky and her protection of Earth below, according to a statement from the University of Portsmouth. But the unusual paintings showed another aspect of her identity.

For instance, on the outermost coffin of a chantress (a person who performs religious prayers) named Nesitaudjatakhet, there is a depiction of Nut lying down. Her body is covered in stars, and there is "a thick, undulating black curve that bisects Nut's star-studded body and recalls the Great Rift that cleaves the Milky Way in two," Graur wrote in the study.

"I think that the undulating curve represents the Milky Way and could be a representation of the Great Rift — the dark band of dust that cuts through the Milky Way's bright band of diffused light," Graur said in the statement.

Related: 'Everything we found shattered our expectations': Archaeologists discover 1st astronomical observatory from ancient Egypt

Graur noted that similar undulating waves appear along with images of Nut in the decorations of four tombs in the Valley of the Kings. For instance, the ceiling of Ramesses VI (who ruled circa 1143 to 1136 B.C.) has two back-to-back images of Nut that are "separated by thick, golden undulating curves that issue from the base of Nut's head and travel above her back all the way to her rear," Graur said.

The fact that some paintings depict Nut with these undulating waves suggests a close association with the Milky Way, Graur said. The ancient Egyptians may have believed that this association helped her protect the Earth, Graur wrote. Geb, an Egyptian god who represents the Earth, is sometimes seen underneath the arched Nut, he wrote in the study.

Nut was also associated with all other aspects of the day and night sky. "We should not think of the Milky Way as a representation of Nut," Graur wrote in the study. "Instead, we should think of the Milky Way as one more astronomical phenomenon that, like the stars and the Sun, are part of the sky and hence a part of Nut."

The finding is not new to Egyptologists, but it's important to have the same interpretation from an astronomer's point of view, said Rogério Sousa, a professor of Egyptology and ancient history at the University of Lisbon in Portugal.

"I can say that I agree with the identification between Nut and the Milky Way proposed by Or, which has always been implied by Egyptologists," Sousa told Live Science in an email. "But Or being an astronomer [gives it an] astronomical input."

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

The famous ancient Egyptian obelisk in Paris may contain a series of hieroglyphic messages aimed at Egypt’s nobility that praise the pharaoh Ramesses II and say he was divinely chosen by the gods, an Egyptologist claims.

However, scholars who were not involved with the research expressed caution about this interpretation.

The approximately 3,300-year-old obelisk was built at Luxor Temple on orders of Ramesses II (who reigned circa 1279 to 1213 B.C.) at the beginning of his rule. In 1830, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Egypt at the time, gifted it to France. It was moved to Paris, where it now sits in a plaza known as the Place de la Concorde.

Previous studies revealed that hieroglyphics on the obelisk discuss Ramesses II. They also discuss the god Amun (also referred to as Amun-Ra) who was the chief god of Thebes (now known as Luxor), and Horus, who was the son of the god Osiris and goddess Isis.

The newfound messages, however, would have been understood only by those who had a high level of literacy, particularly the nobility, Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier, an Egyptologist from the Institut Catholique de Paris, told Live Science in an email. During restoration work on the obelisk and surrounding area carried out in 2021, Olette-Pelletier was given permission to climb scaffolding erected around the obelisk and study the granite artifact in greater detail than can be seen from the ground.

During his study, Olette-Pelletier found what he believes are messages that would have been noticed only by certain people under certain circumstances.

For instance, he noted that when the obelisk was built, its western side faced the Nile River and those traveling on the river by boat would have had a good view of a series of inscriptions and imagery located near the top of the 75-foot-tall (23 meters) obelisk. These inscriptions say Ramesses II "had been chosen by the gods, that he was of divine essence and therefore entitled to rule Egypt," Olette-Pelletier said. It also shows a scene of Ramesses II making offerings to the god Amun.

He noted that the Opet festival, an annual event that honored Amun, prompted the nobility to arrive at Luxor by boat. These travelers would have had a good view of these inscriptions, helping to reinforce the pharaoh's political power. "It was propaganda aimed at the very high intellectual elite," Olette-Pelletier said.

Olette-Pelletier thinks he's found other hidden messages on the obelisk. For instance, he noted that there are two rows of hieroglyphs that, depending on the direction in which they are read, could give different messages — such as spelling out the full throne name of Ramesses II or saying he had eternal life.

Olette-Pelletier is preparing a report of his findings that will be published (in French) in the journal Égypte Nilotique et Méditerranéenne (also known as ENiM).

Scholars who were not involved with the research urged caution in interpreting the findings; they said that, until the research is published, they will not be able to review it in depth.

Filip Taterka, an Egyptology professor at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences, told Live Science that he doesn't think the inscriptions and imagery near the top of the obelisk would have been visible to a noble person traveling by boat on the Nile because of the distance.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

Archaeologists in Jordan have documented a carved inscription bearing the name of Ramesses III, an Egyptian pharaoh who reigned around 3,200 years ago, Jordan's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a translated statement.

Ramesses III (reign circa 1184 to 1153 B.C.) ruled at a tumultuous time in the region's history. A number of major powers in the region — such as the Mycenaeans (who were based in Greece and the Aegean islands) and the Hittites (who were based in Turkey) — collapsed, and a group known as the "Sea People" invaded parts of the Middle East, including Egypt. Historical records say Ramesses III defeated the Sea People's invasion of Egypt and campaigned in the eastern Mediterranean, maintaining Egypt's empire.

The inscription, which would have been carved by Ramesses III's army, is in the Wadi Rum protected area, a desert in southern Jordan that contains numerous archaeological remains. Although the existence of the inscription was known to a few people, it wasn't until the past year that it was scientifically documented.

The inscription is "near a natural spring, in a location that is extremely difficult to access," archaeologist Ali Al-Manaser told Live Science in an email. He is the head of the Department of Cultural Resources Management and Museology at Hashemite University in Jordan and helped document the inscription.

"This discovery is particularly significant as the inscription is the first of its kind found in Jordan — a royal Egyptian inscription carved into a fixed, large stone that is part of a mountain formation," Manaser said. "Previously, another Egyptian inscription was discovered in the northern region of Jordan; however, it was inscribed on a moveable rock. In contrast, this newly documented inscription is on an immovable, prominent rock face."

Zahi Hawass, a former minister of antiquities in Egypt who is working with researchers in Jordan, said the inscription gives the name of Ramesses III and calls him "Sa-Re," which means "son of Re" (also spelled Ra), a sun god of Egypt. The name was inscribed when Ramesses III led an army that passed by the area, Hawass told Live Science in an email.

He noted that the army of Ramesses III also carved an inscription with the pharaoh’s name at Tayma, a settlement in what is now northwestern Saudi Arabia.

Ramesses III likely went through Jordan to maintain access to precious goods, Manaser said. The pharaoh "would have sought to secure these trade routes to maintain Egypt's access to resources like copper, which was abundant in the southeast of Jordan," Manaser said.

No related artifacts were found beside the inscription. However, the archaeological exploration of nearby areas is ongoing, and it's possible that more evidence of Ramesses III's campaigns in the region will be found in the future, Manaser said.

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered the 4,400-year-old tomb of a prince whose burial has a giant "false" pink door to enable souls to enter and exit.

The tomb belongs to Prince Userefre, also spelled Waser-If-Re, the son of King Userkaf, also spelled Wserkaf a pharaoh who reigned around 2465 to 2458 B.C. during Egypt's fifth dynasty (circa 2465 to 2323 B.C.).

The newly discovered false door has inscriptions that say that he was a "hereditary prince," as well as a "judge," a "minister," a "governor" of two regions, and a "chanting priest," the statement said.

"Previous to this discovery, we didn't even know he existed," Ronald Leprohon, professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Toronto who was not involved with the excavation, told Live Science in an email. Leprohon noted that the prince's name may have meant "Re is powerful." Re (also spelled Ra) was a sun god in ancient Egypt.

The giant false door, which is made of pink granite, is about 14.8 feet (4.5 meters) high and 3.8 feet (1.2 m) wide, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement. In ancient Egypt, false doors are commonly seen in tombs, as the Egyptians believed that the souls of the deceased could enter and exit through them, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The door's immense size and construction from pink granite is remarkable, experts said.

"This is the first time that a false door like this was found in Saqqara" Zahi Hawass, a former antiquities minister who is leading excavations at the tomb, told Live Science in an email. The man's status as a prince with important titles explains why a false door like this was built for him, Hawass said.

Melanie Pitkin, a senior curator at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney who was not involved with the excavation, said in an email that "at this time, false doors are most commonly made from limestone, which was a ubiquitous resource in Egypt. Since pink and red granite was quarried and transported from Aswan [about 400 miles or 644 km south], it was more expensive and reserved for royalty and the high elite."

A red granite offering table was found near the false door. Leprohon noted that in ancient Egypt, people sometimes left food offerings on offering tables and believed that the deceased could "magically" eat "the offerings deposited on the so-called offering table in front of it." In reality, it was the funerary priests and their families that actually ate the food, he noted.

Statue of an old king

The tomb appears to have been reused at some point during the 26th dynasty (circa 688 to 525 B.C.). At this time, a statue depicting King Djoser (reign circa 2630 to 2611 B.C.) along with his wife and children was placed within it, the statement said. Djoser ruled during the third dynasty (circa 2649 to 2575 B.C.) and built ancient Egypt's first known pyramid, the step pyramid at Saqqara. Analysis of the statue and its design indicates that the statue was made during king Djoser's rule and may have been from the step pyramid itself or a building near it. Why it was moved into the tomb at that time is unclear, the statement said.

The statue shows a seated Djoser putting his right "hand with love on one of his daughters," while his queen is to his left and "is also putting her hand on one of her daughters," Hawass said. In front of them is a black granite statue that also dates to the third dynasty, Hawass said.

Ann Macy Roth, a clinical professor of Egyptology at New York University who was not involved with the excavation, said that the sculptures from the third dynasty are remarkable as "there is very little sculpture from that era." Roth noted that prior to this discovery, "I can only think of one piece that represents a woman," so the statue depicting Djoser's wife and daughters is extraordinary.

Excavations are ongoing, and the prince's burial chamber has not yet been found. "We only found a part of the tomb," Hawass noted.

Lara Weiss, the CEO of the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum in Germany who was not involved with the excavation, said that the discovery of the tomb "adds to the growing evidence that Saqqara remained a prestigious burial site during the Fifth Dynasty, even as royal tombs moved to Abusir."

She told Live Science in an email that "it's "a nice puzzle piece for understanding a transformative moment in ancient Egypt's political and religious history — between the centralized power of the Fourth Dynasty and the perhaps more diversified elite power structures of the Fifth."

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

The "Eye of Horus," a depiction of a single stylized eye looking straight ahead, is found throughout ancient Egypt. The symbol is frequently seen in ancient burials — especially on a type of amulet known as the wedjat (or udjat). Sometimes, the Eye of Horus is also featured on coffins and inside tomb chapels.

But what is the Eye of Horus and what did it mean to the ancient Egyptians?

According to Egyptian mythology, Horus was the son of Osiris, the god of the underworld. Horus fought his uncle Seth to see who would be ruler of Egypt. During the fight, Seth mutilated the left eye of Horus. But Horus ultimately won the fight, became ruler of Egypt and, eventually, regained his left eye. It was restored "by the ibis-headed Thoth, the god of wisdom," Emily Teeter, a research associate at the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, told Live Science in an email.

Depictions of this left eye became the powerful Eye of Horus symbol.

"The wedjat is one of the most iconic amulets from ancient Egypt," Kei Yamamoto, an Egyptologist at the University of Toronto, told Live Science in an email. "The wedjat amulet is associated with healing and protection. That is probably why this type of amulet is found in many burials, often included in the mummy wrappings."

Related: How many ancient Egyptian pyramids are there?

The ancient Egyptian civilization lasted more than 3,000 years, and practices surrounding the Eye of Horus changed over time.

"In later periods, a large wedjat made of wax was placed over the left abdomen, where the embalmer made the incision during the mummification process, in order to invoke healing and protection of the vulnerable area," Yamamoto said. This was done during the first millennium B.C.

The eye was such an "instantly recognisable" sign of protection and health that it "became a metaphor for pragmatic 'wholeness' and well-being," Penny Wilson, an associate professor of archaeology at Durham University in the U.K., told Live Science in an email.

The Eye of Horus' associations with well-being "could be applied to a range of other concepts about the Nile waters, Egypt as a whole, healing and whole-food offerings," Wilson said.

The Eye of Horus was also associated with the waxing and waning of the moon, which may have helped increase its appeal, said Gyula Priskin, an ancient historian at the University of Szeged in Hungary. The story of the left eye of Horus being mutilated and restored was compared to how the moon waxes and wanes, especially during the second and first millenniums B.C.

"Although the Eye of Horus was a complex symbol with many connotations and appearing in many roles, its association with the moon very probably contributed to its popularity," Priskin told Live Science in an email.

When did the Eye of Horus first appear?

Wedjat amulets first appeared around 2200 B.C. and the Eye of Horus was also drawn on coffins and tomb chapels around that time, Yamamoto said. "In those cases, scholars believe that the eyes not only provided magical protection for the deceased but also allowed them to look out toward the world of the living."

It's not clear why the Eye of Horus emerged around the time of the sixth dynasty. Yamamoto noted that at that time, ancient Egyptians started writing a series of religious texts on the walls of pyramids. This suggests that ancient Egyptians were starting to "canonize" their religious beliefs, Yamamoto said. This may have "led to the development and spread of new religious motifs" such as the Eye of Horus.

Wilson noted that the Eye could be related to religious cosmetics. "We know from early times galena and malachite were powerful protective eye cosmetics applied to the eyes, so the wedjat-eye may be a way of visualising the protected eye," Wilson said.

Whatever the reason was for its creation, the Eye of Horus became a symbol associated with ancient Egypt. According to Wilson, it's "very versatile. Very Egyptian style. Very powerful."

Editor's note: This story was first published on April 13, 2025.

Mummy quiz: Can you unwrap these ancient Egyptian mysteries?

Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered the remains of a "major" 3,400-year-old town dating to the New Kingdom that was possibly built by King Tutankhamun's father and later added to by Ramesses II, a new study finds.

The settlement was found at the site of Kom el-Nugus in northern Egypt, about 27 miles (43 kilometers) west of Alexandria on a rocky ridge between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mariout. Previously, Egyptologists thought the site was not inhabited until later times, when the Greeks founded their own settlement and necropolis there around 332 B.C., during Egypt's Hellenistic period.

Researchers found the older ancient Egyptian settlement while they were studying the Greek one. An unexpected discovery of mudbrick dating to the New Kingdom (circa 1550 to 1070 B.C.) revealed the earliest known Egyptian settlement north of Lake Mariout, according to the study, which was published Jan. 23 in the journal Antiquity.

It's not clear exactly how large the settlement was, "but the quality of the remains, their planned organization around a street, could suggest a fairly large-scale occupation," study author Sylvain Dhennin, an archaeologist with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), told Live Science in an email. The street was designed to drain surface water and protect buildings from water erosion.

"There was a temple, built by King Ramses II, as well as private funerary chapels, which mention military personnel," said Dhennin, who is leading excavations at the site. "If the settlement was indeed military in nature, it's possible that there was also a fortified wall and administrative buildings."

Related: What did King Tut look like?

One particularly interesting find is a stamp on part of an amphora jar that has the name of Merytaton (also spelled Meritaten) on it. Merytaton was the daughter of the pharaoh Akhenaten (reign 1349 to 1336 B.C.) and his wife Nefertiti. Akhenaten unleashed a religious revolution that tried to focus Egypt's religion around the worship of Aten, the sun disk. His son, King Tutankhamun (ruled circa 1336 to 1327 B.C.), later brought back Egypt's traditional polytheistic religion.

"The presence of this stamp probably indicates the production of wine belonging to a royal estate" that dates back to the time of Merytaton, Dhennin said. "The vineyards on the margins of Egypt were probably protected by the military and formed part of a pioneering front to occupy this region towards the desert," he said, noting that it's possible that this settlement was founded during the reign of Akhenaten.

Roger Forshaw, an honorary lecturer at the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at the University of Manchester who was not involved with the research, praised the team's work and noted that the "the presence of a temple underscores its strategic and cultural importance."

Forshaw also noted the sophisticated design of the street. "This street was ingeniously designed with a water-collecting system to drain surface water and protect the fragile mudbrick walls," Forshaw said.

Excavations at the site are ongoing, and Dhennin said they may help reveal how large the settlement was and when exactly it was founded. Another question is what Egyptians called the settlement in ancient times.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

Ancient Egypt in North Africa was one of the most powerful and influential civilizations in the region for over 3,000 years, from around 3100 B.C to 30 B.C. It left behind numerous monuments, documents and works of art that continue to be studied by scholars today.

However Egyptian civilization existed long before this period, and it has survived and flourished since. While the civilization's rulers, language, writing, climate, religion and borders have changed many times over the millennia, Egypt still exists as a modern-day country.

Ancient Egypt was closely connected with other parts of the world, bringing in and exporting goods, religions, food, people and ideas. At times ancient Egypt ruled territory outside the modern-day country's border, controlling territory in what is now Sudan, Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Palestine.

The country was also occupied by other powers in ancient times — the Persians, Nubians, Greeks and Romans all conquered Egypt at different points.

A number of names were used for Egypt. A popular ancient name for Egypt was "Kemet," which means the "black land." Scholars generally believe that this name derived from the fertile soil that was left over when the Nile flood receded in August.

The Nile flooded between June and August each year, and the fertile soil it created was vital to ancient Egypt's survival, with fertility playing an important role in Egyptian religion. The burial of Tutankhamun — in which his penis was mummified — is but one example of how important fertility was in the rituals and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.

The country's ancient rulers are referred to today as "pharaohs," although in ancient times they each used a series of names as part of a royal titular, wrote Ronald Leprohon, a professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Toronto, in his book "The Great Name: Ancient Egyptian Royal Titulary" (Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). The word pharaoh originates from the Egyptian term "per-aa," which means "the Great House," Leprohon wrote. The term was first incorporated into a royal title during the rule of Thutmose III (reign circa. 1479 to 1425 B.C.), Leprohon wrote.

Egypt's prehistory

When exactly early hominids first arrived in Egypt is unclear. The earliest migration of hominids out of Africa took place almost 2 million years ago, with modern humans dispersing out of Africa about 100,000 years ago. Egypt may have been used to reach Asia in some of these migrations.

Villages dependent on agriculture began to appear in Egypt about 7,000 years ago. The civilization's earliest written inscriptions date back about 5,200 years and reveal information about the early rulers of Egypt. These early rulers include Iry-Hor, who, according to the inscriptions, founded Memphis, a city that served as Egypt's capital for much of its history. The inscriptions also document a queen named Neith-Hotep, who ruled as a regent for a young pharaoh named Djer sometime In the late predynastic period.

Related: How old is ancient Egypt?

How and when ancient Egypt was united into one kingdom is a matter of debate among archaeologists and historians. One possibility is that a number of smaller states coalesced into two kingdoms — Upper and Lower Egypt — and then these two kingdoms united. After Egypt was united pharaohs were often depicted wearing two crowns — one for Lower Egypt and another for Upper Egypt.

Egypt's climate was much wetter in prehistoric times than it is today, and some areas that are now barren desert were once fertile. One famous archaeological site where this can be seen is at the 6,000- to 9,000-year-old rock art at the "cave of swimmers," as it is called today, on the Gilf Kebir plateau in southwest Egypt. The cave is now surrounded by miles of barren desert; however, it has rock art showing what some scholars interpret as people swimming. After this wet period ended around 5,000 years ago, the deserts of Egypt have remained pretty similar to how they are now, Joseph Manning, the William K. and Marilyn Milton Simpson professor of classics at Yale University, previously told Live Science.

Egypt's dynasties and pharaohs

Ancient Egypt's history has traditionally been divided into 30 (or sometimes 31) dynasties. However, "the 'dynasties' of Egypt are really just retrospective constructs," Michael Dee, an associate professor of isotope chronology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, previously told Live Science in an email.

The Egyptian priest Manetho, who lived during the third century B.C., started the dynasty construct. His accounts of ancient Egyptian history were preserved by ancient Greek writers and, until hieroglyphic writing was deciphered in the 19th century, were among the few historical accounts that scholars could read.

Modern-day scholars often group these dynasties into several periods. Dynasties one and two date back around 5,000 years and are often called the "Early Dynastic" or "Archaic" period. The first pharaoh of the first dynasty was a ruler named Menes (or Narmer, as he is called in Greek). He lived over 5,000 years ago, and while ancient writers sometimes credited him as being the first pharaoh of a united Egypt, however archaeological research suggests that this is not true. Recently found inscriptions tell of rulers — such as Djer and Iry-Hor — who appear to have ruled earlier and other finds have been made which suggest that there were pharaohs before Menes who ruled a united Egypt. Scholars sometimes refer to these pre-Menes rulers as being part of a "dynasty zero."

Dynasties three to six date from roughly 2650 to 2150 B.C. and are often grouped together into a time period called the "Old Kingdom" by modern-day scholars. During this time pyramid-building techniques were developed and the pyramids of Giza were built. Papyri that are still being deciphered suggest that groups of professional workers — sometimes translated as "work gangs" — played a major role in the construction of the pyramids, as well as other structures.

From 2150 to 2030 B.C. (a time period that encompassed dynasties seven to 10 and part of 11) the central government in Egypt was weak and the country was often controlled by different regional leaders. Why the Old Kingdom collapsed is a matter of debate among scholars, with research indicating that drought and climate change played a significant role. During this time, cities and civilizations in the Middle East also collapsed, with evidence at archaeological sites indicating that a period of drought and arid climate hit sites across the region.

The 12th, 13th and part of the 11th dynasties are often called the "Middle Kingdom" by scholars and lasted from around 2030 to 1640 B.C. At the start of this dynasty, a ruler named Mentuhotep II (who reigned until about 2000 B.C.) regained control of the whole country. Pyramid building resumed in Egypt, and a sizable number of texts of literature and science were created. Among the surviving texts is a document now known as the Edwin Smith surgical papyrus, which records a variety of medical treatments that modern-day medical doctors have hailed as being advanced for their time.

Dynasties 14 to 17 are often grouped together as the "Second Intermediate Period" by modern-day scholars. During this time, the central government again collapsed in Egypt, and a group called the "Hyksos" rose to power, controlling much of northern Egypt. While the Hyksos may have originally been from the Levant (an area that encompasses modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria), research indicates that they were already in Egypt at the time the government collapsed. One gruesome find from this time period is a series of severed hands, which were found at a palace at the city of Avaris, the capital of Hyksos-controlled Egypt. The severed hands may have been presented by soldiers to a ruler in exchange for gold.

Scholars often refer to dynasties 18 to 20 as encompassing the "New Kingdom," a period that lasted around 1550 to 1070 B.C. This period took place after the Hyksos had been defeated by a series of Egyptian rulers and the country reunited. Perhaps the most famous archaeological site from the New Kingdom is the Valley of the Kings, which holds the burial sites of many Egyptian rulers from this period, including Tutankhamun (reign circa 1336 to 1327 B.C.), whose rich tomb was found intact in1922. The pharaohs stopped building pyramids during the New Kingdom for a variety of reasons — one of which was to provide better security against tomb robbers.

The 21st to 24th dynasties (a period from around 1070 to 713 B.C.) are often called the "Third Intermediate Period" by modern-day scholars. The central government was sometimes weak during this time period, and the country was not always united. During this time cities and civilizations across the Middle East had been destroyed by people from the Aegean, whom modern-day scholars sometimes call the "Sea Peoples." While Egyptian rulers claimed to have defeated the Sea Peoples in battle, it didn't prevent Egyptian civilization from collapsing. The loss of trade routes and revenue may have played a role in the weakening of Egypt's central government.

Dynasties 25 to 31 (from around 712 to 332 B.C.) are often referred to as the "Late Period" by scholars. Egypt was sometimes under the control of foreign powers during this time. The rulers of the 25th dynasty were from Nubia, an area located in modern-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan. The Persians and Assyrians also controlled Egypt at different times during the Late Period.

In 332 B.C. Alexander the Great drove the Persians out of Egypt and incorporated the country into the Macedonian Empire. After Alexander the Great's death, a line of rulers descended from Ptolemy Soter, one of Alexander's generals, came to power. The last of these "Ptolemaic" rulers (as scholars often call them) was Cleopatra VII, who died by suicide in 30 B.C after the defeat of her forces by Octavian, who would later be named the Roman emperor Augustus, at the Battle of Actium. After her death, Egypt was incorporated into the Roman Empire.

Although the Roman emperors were based in Rome, the Egyptians treated them as pharaohs. One excavated carving shows the emperor Claudius (reign A.D. 41 to 54) dressed as a pharaoh, Live Science reported. The carving has hieroglyphic inscriptions saying that Claudius is the "Son of Ra, Lord of the Crowns," and "King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands."

Neither the Ptolemaic or Roman rulers are considered to be part of a numbered dynasty.

Ancient Egyptian Religion and Gods

Throughout much of Egypt's ancient history its people followed a polytheistic religion in which a vast number of gods and goddesses were venerated. One of the most important was Osiris, god of the underworld. Abydos was an important cult center for him, and numerous temples and shrines were constructed at the site in his honor.

Amun-Ra — a god associated with the sun — became particularly important during the New Kingdom and was associated with the city of Luxor (ancient Thebes). The Karnak Temple complex was built near Luxor in honor of this god.

Navigating the underworld was vital to the ancient Egyptians, who believed that the dead could reach a paradise of sorts, where they could live forever. Egyptian dead were sometimes mummified, preserving the body, and were sometimes buried with spells to aid them in navigating the underworld. These spells included excerpts from what are sometimes called the "Book of the Dead" — a 52-foot-long (16 meters) copy of which was recently found in a tomb at Saqqara.

In ancient Egyptian mythology, one of the first steps in navigating the underworld was to weigh a person's deeds against the feather of Maat, who was a god associated with truth, justice and order. If the person had committed a great deal of wrong, the person's heart would be heavier than the feather and the person's soul would be obliterated. On the other hand, if their deeds were generally good, they passed forward and had the opportunity to successfully navigate the underworld.

Figurines called shabti were often buried with the deceased. Their purpose was to do the deceased's work in the afterlife for them.

Egyptian religion did not remain static but changed over time. One major change occurred during the reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten (circa 1353 to 1335 B.C.), a ruler who unleashed a religious revolution that saw Egyptian religion become focused around the worship of "Aten" the sun disk. Akhenaten built an entirely new capital in the desert at Amarna and ordered the names of some of Egypt's deities to be defaced. After Akhenaten's death his son, Tutankhamun, denounced him and returned ancient Egypt to its previous polytheistic religion.

When Egypt came under Greek and Roman rule, the new rulers' gods and goddesses were incorporated into Egyptian religion. Another major change occurred after the first century A.D. when Christianity spread throughout Egypt. At this time Gnosticism, a religion that incorporated some Christian beliefs, also spread throughout Egypt, and a large corpus of Gnostic texts were discovered in 1945 in southern Egypt near the city of Nag Hammadi.

Islam spread throughout the country after A.D. 641, when the country was captured by a Muslim army. Today, Islam is practiced by the majority of Egypt's inhabitants, while a minority are Christian, many being part of the Coptic Church.

Egyptian writing

The earliest inscriptions date back about 5,200 years and were written in a hieroglyphic script.

"Ancient Egyptian was a living oral language, and most hieroglyphs represent the sounds of consonants and certain emphatically expressed vowels," wrote Barry Kemp, a professor of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge, England, in his book "100 Hieroglyphs: Think Like an Egyptian" (Granta Books, 2005). Kemp noted that the ancient Egyptians also developed "an abbreviated 'long hand' form of writing which we call 'hieratic.'" During the first millennium A.D. this abbreviated hieratic script was supplanted by a new form of short-form writing called "Demotic."

Egyptian language changed over the millennia, with scholars often subdividing the surviving writings into categories such as "Old Egyptian," "Middle Egyptian" and "Late Egyptian."

The Greek language became widely used in the time after Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great. In the late 19th century, archaeologists excavated half a million papyri fragments, most of which were written in Greek, at the ancient Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus in southern Egypt, dating to the early centuries A.D.

Coptic, an Egyptian language that uses the Greek alphabet, was widely used after Christianity spread throughout Egypt. As Greek and Coptic grew in popularity, the use of the hieroglyphic writing style declined and became extinct during the fifth century A.D. After A.D. 641 the Arabic language spread in Egypt and is widely used in the country today.

Additional resources

• In this History Channel documentary, you'll learn how the ancient Egyptians harnessed the power of engineering to build an empire. The video is about 1.5 hours long.
• The Australian Museum put together a timeline of historic and other events in ancient Egypt, including a breakdown of each dynasty and the significant dates within that dynasty.
• This DK book "Ancient Egypt: The Definitive Visual History" could be a fun way to teach kids about the marvels of ancient Egypt.