Tutankhamun's tomb

The death of a king

Tutankhamun died young, probably during his ninth regnal year. Evidence for this is twofold. First, forensic analysis of his mummy has put his age at death at about 17. Secondly, clay seals on wine jars found in his tomb record not only the type of wine, the vineyard and the name of the chief vintner, but also the king's regnal year when each wine was laid down. The highest recorded date is Year 9, suggesting that Tutankhamun died in that year. 

There is no positive evidence on Tutankhamun's mummy as to how he met his death: he certainly did not die of consumption as was once thought. However, autopsies and Xrays have located a small sliver of bone within the upper cranial cavity. It may have arrived there as the result of a blow, but whether deliberately struck, to indicate murder, or the result of an accident, such as a fall from a chariot, it is not possible to say. 

The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb

Several finds made in the Valley of the Kings over the years led Howard Carter to believe that the king was still somewhere in the Valley: a small faience cup bearing Tutankhamun's name (1905-6 season), the remnants of materials used in the king's embalming and of a funerary feast or wake (1907), followed two years later in 1909 by a cache of gold fragments from chariot and furniture fittings with the king's name and that of Ay as a commoner. The story of Carter's quest and his understanding patron, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, is well known.

Of the nest of three coffins in the sarcophagus, the innermost was of solid gold, the outer two of wood overlaid with gold. The king's mummy lay in the midst of all this splendour with its famous gold mask but, by comparison, the actual remains of the king himself were pitiful, the result of poor embalming. Beyond the painted burial chamber (the only decorated room in the tomb), through an open doorway guarded by a large recumbent wooden figure of the jackal Anubis, lay the Treasury. Here stood the great canopic wooden shrine enclosing the calcite canopic chest. The chest held four jars containing Tutankhamun's viscera, whose human-headed lids were modelled in the likeness of the king.

The succession in question Tutankhamun's early death left his wife Ankhesenamun a young widow in a very difficult situation. Obviously hemmed in on all sides by ambitious men much older than herself, she took an unprecedented step and wrote to Suppiluliumas I, king of the Hittites, explaining her plight. The evidence comes not from the Egyptian records but from excavations at Hattusas (Boghazkoy) in Turkey, the Hittite capital, where a copy was found in the archives. She told him her husband had died and she had no sons while he had many, so would he send one to marry her and continue the royal line. The Hittite king was highly suspicious and made enquiries; messengers were sent to check the details and reported back that such was the case. A Hittite prince, Zannanza, was therefore sent to Egypt to take up the queen's offer. It seems that he got no further than the border before he was murdered, and the deed can easily be laid at the door of Horemheb: he had the means as commander-in-chief of the army, the opportunity and certainly the motive.

The Oldest Evidence of Divination

The Venus of Dolni.

The oldest ceramics in the world are small prehistoric sculptures dug up at an archeological site in the modern Czech Republic. The most famous piece is a four-and-a-half-inch high abstract female nude known as the Venus of Dolni that was discovered in 1925 and was created between 29,000-25,000 bce, in other words, up to 31,000 years ago. The Venus figure was made out of clay and thrown into a fi re where it became hard and burned black. 

People have found other prehistoric figures sculpted from clay and preserved because they were placed in caves, but before the Venus of Dolni and the related Czech finds it seems no one had ever thought of making the clay hard by firing it. But why did this prehistoric sculptor think of throwing the figure into the fire in the first place? No one can know for sure, but one theory that some archeologists propose is that throwing the figure into the fire was a type of divination. Perhaps, the artist wanted to see how the figure would react in the flames and different reactions would have had different meanings, something like the Chinese method of divination in which they threw bones into a fire and interpreted the cracks that formed. Balls of clay might have been used first and then the figures were used to get a clearer message from or about that particular figure. If this is true, then these prehistoric figures are not only the oldest known ceramics but also the results of the oldest known divinatory practice and a type of interpretive divination. 

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Part of meteor that hit Russia in February pulled from lake in Urals



Divers have pulled a half-tonne suspected meteorite from a Russian lake, said to have been part of a meteor whose ground-shaking shockwave hurt 1,200 people in February.

 

The dramatic recovery operation came eight months after a piercing streak of light lit up the morning sky in the central Russian region of Chelyabinsk, in scenes some locals said made them think of the onset of a nuclear war.

The meteor broke up into myriad pieces, some no bigger than the size of a fingernail, that scientists are still finding across the remote region.

Much of the debris landed in a local lake called Chebarkul that the divers entered on Wednesday, in an operation covered live on national television.

Broadcasts showed a team pull out a 1.5-metre long rock from the lake, after first wrapping it in a special casing while it was still underwater.

The boulder was then pulled ashore and placed on top of a massive scale for the all-important weighing, an operation that quickly went partially wrong.

The rock crumbled into several chunks as scientists began lifting it from the ground with the help of levers and ropes.

Video: YouTube: Meteorite crash in Russia

"The rock had a fracture when we found it," one unnamed scientist told the lifenews.ru website in a live broadcast.

"It weighed 570 kilograms before the pieces fell off. And then the scale broke.

"We think the whole thing weighs more than 600 kilograms."

Experts warned it will take time before scientists can certify that the rock they pulled from the lake did indeed come from outer space.

But Sergei Zamozdra, a lecturer at Chelyabinsk State University, told the Interfax news agency he is confident in the find.

"Based on our initial observations... this is a part of the Chelyabinsk meteor," he said.

"This is the largest fragment of that meteor, and most likely, it will be one of the 10 largest meteorites ever found."

The meteor weighed a whopping 10,000 tonnes when it exploded a few kilometres up in the air with the force equivalent to 30 of the nuclear bombs dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II.

United States scientists said an object that large usually approaches Earth only once every four decades.

AFP

THE PLAN OF SAINT-GALL AND THE CLOISTER.

Architectural model showing towers and transept of the 9th-century Benedictine Monastery at Saint-Gallen, Switzerland.

The Carolingians translated the framework for monastic life envisioned by St. Benedict into architectural form in the ninth century. With the same view toward uniformity that guided the reform of imperial administration, the development of a more legible script for copying the Bible, and the planning of architectural monuments, Charlemagne commanded all monasteries in his realm to adopt the Benedictine Rule and convened assemblies in Aachen in 816-817 to consider policies that directly affected the layout of the proposed structures. At about the same time, a large plan, drawn on five sheets of parchment and measuring about 44 by 30 inches, was sent to the abbot of Saint-Gall, apparently portraying an ideal scheme of what buildings a monastery should contain and how to arrange them. A model built from the plan shows the monastery's appearance. The multiplex, dominated by the large "double-ended" church, is organized in a series of concentric zones like an onion. Animal pens, industrial buildings employing secular artisans, guest quarters, and the school formed an outer ring. At the heart of the plan lay the cloister, the focus of monastic life. With a fountain at its center, the square courtyard was surrounded by covered and arcaded walkways that provided sheltered circulation between the primary spaces of monastic activity: church, dormitory, refectory (dining hall), cellar, and scriptorium (book production center). Chapter rooms, for general meetings, became standard features in Cistercian abbeys and were always located in the east gallery of the cloister under the dormitory. They were the most important structure of a monastery, after the church, and served as places where the monks assembled after morning Mass to receive spiritual advice or discipline from the abbot, read chapters of the Rule of St. Benedict, and discuss the internal affairs of the community. Because the new orders of the Franciscan and Dominican friars established themselves in cities during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and were not cloistered, they did not need the large cellars, barns, animal pens, and industrial buildings required by monks living in remote rural areas. Further, each Franciscan or Dominican friar lived in his own small cell in the convent-as the houses of friars were called- rather than together in a dormitory. Nevertheless, despite these additions and modifications, the scheme created in the ninth century and represented by the Saint-Gall plan remained the essential template for the cloister for the rest of the Middle Ages.