I stumbled upon this today and thought it was massively cool:
http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/Edfu-Projekt//Edfu-Projekt%20-%20Official%20Homepage.html
A good deal of what we know about Egyptian temples comes from Edfu, so I’m pleased to see that this German team is making an effort to make the inscriptions more accessible.
The blogosphere has produced some good commentary on the recent JAMA article I discussed here.
The improbably-named Shoveling Ferret blog has a four-part series discussing the article:
Part 1:
http://shovelingferret.blogspot.com/2010/02/commentary-on-recent-tutankhamun.html
Part 2:
http://shovelingferret.blogspot.com/2010/02/commentary-on-recent-tutankhamun_18.html
Part 3:
http://shovelingferret.blogspot.com/2010/02/commentary-on-recent-tutankhamun_19.html
Part 4:
http://shovelingferret.blogspot.com/2010/02/commentary-on-recent-tutankhamun_8728.html
The author has an MA in Egyptology from Chicago and her commentary is often quite amusing, so I highly recommend checking it out.
Of course not everyone agrees with the conclusions of the JAMA article. This blogger has posted an in-depth refutation of the idea that the KV55 mummy could be Akhenaten: http://www.kv64.info/2010/03/dna-shows-that-kv55-mummy-probably-not.html
I’m not a geneticist (I don’t even play one on TV), so I can’t comment on the scientific accuracy of her conclusions. But I think there’s a very strong possibility that the ancient Egyptians at least thought the KV55 mummy was the body of Akhenaten, given its desecrated state. There’s also the circumstantial evidence of the presence of some of his grave goods in the tomb. If the mummy is in fact NOT Akhenaten, how do we explain these things?
The Quote of the Day though comes from Justine over at Shoveling Ferret. She has this to say about the intricacies of Amarna-period royal genealogy:
Pedigree charts are annoying enough, but add in a heaping helping of incest and I’m just like “dude, they were all fucking each other and then they died, the end!”
I promise I won’t turn this into Jason’s Boring Ass Egyptology Blog, but I encourage any of you who have even a passing interest in ancient Egypt to check out the website of the Theban Mapping Project: http://www.thebanmappingproject.com/.
While you’re there, I suggest you try out the Atlas of the Valley of the Kings. It’s an interactive map that shows you every tomb in the valley and, in many cases, there’s a little video narrated by Kent Weeks (Director of the TMP) giving a bit of info about the tomb. The 3D reconstruction of KV 14 (Taworset and Setnakt) is also worth a look.
By now many of you have probably heard about the recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association about Tutankhamen. What was fascinating to me was not so much his cause of death, but the revelations concerning his family tree.
At long last, we can now ascribe mummies to Tutankhamen’s relatives. The mysterious body found in KV55 was found to be Tutankamen’s father and, given its genetic relationship to Amenhotep III, it’s almost certainly Akhenaten. The Elder Lady found in KV35 is Queen Tiye, wife of Amenhotep III and mother of Akhenaten. The Younger Lady who was found next to her is Tutankamen’s as-yet-unnamed mother. Even more intriguingly, one of the mummies found in KV21 can be identified as the mother of the two embalmed fetuses placed in Tutankhamen’s tomb, which suggests that it’s the mummy of his wife, Ankhesenamen (though that can’t be proven yet).
Perhaps someday we’ll be able to learn more about the posthumous journeys made by Tiye, the Younger Lady, and Ankhesenamen. Clearly, they were moved out of their original tombs at some point and taken to places of relative safety. But none of them seem to have been treated well. Ankhesenamen was left in a small uninscribed tomb with some other woman, while Tiye and the Younger Lady were found unwrapped on the floor of the tomb of Amenhotep II. I can see why the Younger Lady and Ankhesenamen might get shitty treatment given their relationship to the Heretic King, but surely Tiye should have been treated better.
Codex Lochianus 
