King Tut's case is closed, top Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass has told Discovery News. Other, new exciting findings are waiting to be uncovered from the Egyptian sands. "The mystery of his life still eludes us — the shadows move, but the dark is never quite dispersed." was how Howard Carter, the British archaeologist who discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922, described his fascination with the 3,300-year-old boy pharaoh.In an exclusiveinterview with Discovery News, Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities and one of the most famous Egyptologists in the world, said some shadows surrounding King Tut have now totally disappeared.

Yet, he said, the the dark will never be quite dispersed."We have carried out the deepest investigation on King Tut. We have to accept that some questions will never be answered," Hawass told Discovery News. The best-known pharaoh of ancient Egypt, King Tut has been puzzling scientists ever since Carter discovered his mummy- and treasure-packed tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Only a few facts about his life are known. Tut.ankh.Amun, "the living image of Amun," ascended the throne in 1333 B.C., at the age of nine, and reigned until his death in 1325 B.C., aged 19. As the last malein the family, his death ended the 18th dynasty — probably the greatest of the Egyptian royal families — and gave way to military rulers. Speculation about his parentage, his short reign and his early death abound. Hawass believes he has answered all the possible questions about Tut after a CT scan was carried out on the boy king last year "The CT scan is the most important thing we have done. No one else can do anything on this mummy after this investigation," Hawass said. More than 1,700 3-D images produced the most accurate picture of the boy pharaoh, including a facial reconstruction of how he may have looked. Tutankhamun was about 1.70 meters tall (5' 6"), had a slight cleft palate, large front teeth and the overbite characteristic of other kings in hisfamily. ......

Excavations at an ancient Egyptian shipyard have unearthed remains of the world's oldest seafaring ships. The 4,000-year-old timbers were found alongside equally ancient cargo boxes, anchors, coils of rope and other naval materials just as old, at what archaeologists are calling a kind of ancient military administration site.The massive complex, made up of six human-made caves, is located at Wadi Gawasis, a small desert bluff on the Red Sea near the modern city of Port Safaga. According to Cheryl Ward, Florida State Universityarchaeologist and part of the excavation team, the age of the finds is remarkable."Older watercrafts, like dugout canoes, have been found throughout the world, but these are the oldest seagoing ships.

More significantly, the next-oldest [ships ever discovered] in Egypt are 700 years younger," Ward told LiveScience in a telephone interview. Just as crucial, however, is what the find says about ancient Egypt's naval capacity.

Prolific seagoers According to Ward, it was widely thought that while ancient Egyptians often traveled along the Nile in smaller river boats, they did not have the technological ability to voyage long distances. Evidence at Wadi Gawasis seems to suggest that they were, in fact, prolific seagoers like later civilizations inGreece and Rome. Specifically, hieroglyphs inscribed on some of the cargo boxes indicate that many came from a single origin: the almost mythical city of Punt, whose exact location is still unknown but is thought to lie nearly 1,000 miles away in the southern reaches of the Red Sea. "Egyptians obviously went to sea frequently during this time, despite the fact that it was a huge undertaking. It required several thousand people trekking supplies across the desert," Ward said. Before setting out to sea, Egyptians needed to transfer shipping materials, tools and goods from the main cities along the Nile to the shore, where they were assembled. The caves, measuring 60 to 70 feet (20 meters) on average, were likely created specifically for the task, Ward theorizes.

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A giant crater made by a meteorite impact millions of years ago has been discovered in Egypt's western desert. Boston University experts found the 31km (19 mile) wide crater while studying satellite images of the area. It is more than twice the size of the next largest Saharan impact depression and more than 25 times the size of Arizona's famous Meteor Crater. The American team that found it says its sheer size may have helped it escape detection all these years. The structure, which hasan outer rim surrounding an inner ring, has been named "Kebira", which means "large" in Arabic and also relates to the crater's physical location on the northern tip of the Gilf Kebir region in southwest Egypt.

"Kebira may have escaped recognition because it is so large," said Dr Farouk El-Baz, director of the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing, where the find was made. "Also, the search for craters typically concentrates on small features, especially those that can be identified on the ground. The advantage of a view from space is that it allows us to seeregional patterns and the big picture." Water and wind erosion may also have helped hide its extra-terrestrial origin. The heat from this impact may be responsible for the extensive field of "Desert Glass", yellow-green silica glass fragments found on the desert surface between the giant dunes of the Great Sand Sea in southwestern Egypt.

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The 27-year-old British archaeologist was making his first trip to Egypt, on a mission to uncover the truth about the Great Pyramid. When he moved into an abandoned tomb at Giza and slept on a hammock, everyone noticed the unconventional William Matthew Flinders Petrie.Petrie became even harder to ignore after his 1880 adventure as he brought a scientific approach to excavations and, as a result, changed what the world knew about the ancient civilization.Some of his best discoveries from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London are currently touring the United States. "Excavating Egypt" is at the Albany Institute of History & Art through June4. Known as the father of Egyptian archaeology, Petrie got his start by measuring the Great Pyramid and dispelling the popular notion that the structure contained mystical secrets.

He determined it was only a monument to a pharaoh. "That really placed him on the archaeological map," said Tammis Groft, the Albany Institute's deputy director for collections and exhibitions. "It really helped the beginnings of the rewriting of Egyptian history." Trained as a surveyor, Petrie was involved with digs at some 50 sites during his career. The exhibit contains 221 artifacts, many that are among the earliest examples of their kind. "It's really highlighting his work and the contributions that he made to the field of archaeology, which were extraordinary in their day as well as today," Groft said. "The thing I'm really struck byis the range of materials. ... Each piece in itself has a wonderful story to tell." Like the bead-net dress that is one of two such garments that have survived from the Old Kingdom period, about 2400 B.C. Worn over another garment, it would have rattled with movement. One of Petrie's students found a box containing thousands of beads and shells in the previously robbed tomb of a girl, and they were restrung based on pictures from the period. "Sometimes he would go back to sites that had already been excavated and he would use his own methodical methods and discover great new things that people had just really overlooked," Groft said. Petrie was a pioneer in using small, everyday items to piece together a historical record. He saw sites as time capsules and relied on variations in pottery, for example, in the dating process. One "tomb group" in the exhibit,from......

Statues weighing up to five tonnes andthought to be of one of ancient Egypt's greatest pharaohs, Ramses II, have been found northeast of Cairo, Egypt's Supreme Antiquities Council said in a statement on Sunday.Ramses II ruled Egypt from 1304 to 1237 BC, and presided over an era of great military expansion, erecting statues and temples to himself all over Egypt.

He is traditionally believed to be the pharaoh mentioned in the biblical story of Moses."Many parts of red granite statues were found, the most important of which had features close to Ramses II ... The statue needs some restoration and weighs between four and fivetonnes," the statement quoted the Council's Zahi Hawass as saying. A royal head weighing two to three tonnes and a seated 5.1 meter (16.7 foot) statue were also found, with cartouches, or royal name signs, of Ramses II on the side of the seated statue. The discoveries were made at a sun temple northeast of Cairo in ancient Heliopolis, a region known in ancient times for sun worship and where the Council says a calendar based on the solar year was invented. Article Source

Earl Ertman brought a pair of swimming trunks with him to Egypt but, sadly, he won't have time to use them. While the uproar from last week's announcement of a newfound tomb has subsided, the Tallmadge Egyptologist is working long days unraveling the mysteries that lay within it."I'm dead tired," he said last week. "I haven't had any time off for a while." After years of being thrilled finding mere pottery shards, the retired art professor at the University of Akron is part of an epochal find -- the first tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings since King Tutankhamen's in1922.It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of the discovery to Egyptologists, said Patricia Podzorski, curator at the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. It sponsored the years of field work at King Amenmesse's tomb that led to the new discovery. "There is the most precious piece of real estate in Egypt," she said.

"The value of any objects in the new tomb is priceless." Ertman, 73, and the others stumbled upon the tomb while clearing the huts of workers who built Amenmesse's grave. Ertman is associate director of the project, and his job is to identify objects. The team realized something was up when it found fill at the bottom of the huts. "We weren't going tostop until we were sure we weren't missing something," Ertman said. Unfortunately, finding a shaft may not mean anything, he said. "There are shafts that are empty, that lead nowhere," he said. The one they found was the rare exception -- it led to a drywall door, blocked by limestone chips, undetected by centuries of tomb raiders. From the door, Ertman can see there are at least five mummies. One sarcophagus visible from the door is decorated with the funeral mask of a woman with long black hair, thin eyebrows and a broad golden collar. There also are about 20 large storage vessels that probably stored food for the afterlife. The new tomb is only 15 feet or so from King Tut's and is from the same period as his -- the 18th Dynasty, about 3,200 to 3,500 years ago. Now, Ertma......

The first tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings since King Tut’s in 1922 contains five sarcophagi with mummies, breaking the nearly centurylong belief that there’s nothing more to find in the valley where some of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs were buried.The tomb’s spare appearance suggests it was not dug for a pharaoh, said U.S. archaeologist Kent Weeks, who was not involved in the University of Memphis team’s find but has seen photographs of the site. “It could be the tomb of a king’s wife or son, or of apriest or court official,” he told The Associated Press on Thursday.So far, authorities haven’t had a close enough look to know who is in the tomb.

Workers have been clearing rubble to allow archaeologists to examine it. Egypt’s antiquities authority has said only that the single-chamber tomb contains five wooden sarcophagi, in human shapes with colored funerary masks, surrounded by 20 jars with their pharaonic seals intact — and that the sarcophagi contain mummies, likely from the 18th Dynasty, some 3,500-3,300 years ago. Further details were expected Friday, when antiquities chief Zahi Hawass was to unveil the tomb. Officials were tightlipped Thursday, a day after announcing the find. Calls to Hawass and other officials were not answered. American archaeologist Otto Schaden,who headed the team that uncovered the site, declined to answer any questions when contacted by The Associated Press. Photos released by the Supreme Council of Antiquities showed the interior of the tomb — the bare stone walls undecorated — with at least five sarcophagi of blackened wood amid white jars, some apparently broken. What appeared to be a sixth sarcophagus was set on top of two of the other coffins, though the council’s statement mentioned only five. The tomb may provide less drama than the famed opening of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter, a discovery which revealed a treasure trove of gold artifacts along with the boy-king’s mummy. But it raises hopes that even more burial sites will be found in the Valley of the Kings, which experts believed held only 62tombs, l......

They have lain undisturbed in their pitch black resting place 16ft underground for more than three millennia. The five mummies in wooden sacrcophagi and coloured funeral masks from the 18th pharaonic dynasty were found in the first tomb to be unearthed in Egypt's Valley of the Kings since that of King Tutankhamun was discovered in 1922.Entombed around them in the underground chamber measuring 13ft by 17ft are 20 sealed clay jars probably containing food and wine.Yesterday journalists were allowed a first peek around a partially opened door at the scene, frozen in time for around 3,000years.Remarkably the first discovery of a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor for 84 years was made by accident at the end of last year while American archaeologists were investigating the previously known tomb of 19th-dynasty pharaoh King Amenmesses.Beneath workmen's huts from this tomb they found a deep pit leading to a narrow shaft which in turn led to the stone doorway.The door was partially opened last week to reveal the simple burial place believed to be from the first dynasty of the New Kingdom which ruled between 1539BC and 1292BC and had its capital in Thebes, the present city of Luxor.One of the coffins has toppled towards the door showing its white painted face while another ispartially open, showing a brown cloth covering the mummy inside.The tomb, the 63rd discovered since the valley was first mapped in the 18th century, was found just yards from that of Tutankhamun, the boy king who became the best known of ancient Egypt's pharaohs despite dying in his teens, and whose resting place was discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter in November 1922.

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