Ever think about the people who lived in your neighborhood thousands of years ago? Their culture was vastly different from ours, yet humans through the ages have been remarkably the same in many ways. They worked hard to feed and clothe their families. They looked to their leaders for protection from potentially hostile forces. They prayed for peace and prosperity. They engaged with their neighbors in communal events and sometimes in heated disputes. They toiled under the same sun and slept under the same moon as we do. They did all of this without the technological innovations we take for granted, with different belief systems, and with no idea how our world would evolve into what is has become today.
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A team of Egyptian and German archaeologists recently uncovered a 26-foot-tall statue of an ancient Egyptian ruler beneath the streets of Cairo. The find was made in a congested working-class area that was built over the ancient city of Heliopolis, the center of worship for the ancient Egyptian sun god Ra. Heliopolis is currently located about 49–66 feet below the streets of Cairo suburbs. During the Middle Ages, the ruins of Heliopolis were massively scavenged for building materials, and the city was eventually buried under sprawling new developments.
They first thought it was Pharaoh Ramses II, also known in Greek as Ozymandias or Ramses the Great, who ruled Egypt from 1279 to 1213 B.C.E. He is believed by many to be the pharaoh who had that little run-in with Moses involving some plagues and a mass exodus from Egypt. In 2006, archaeologists digging under a Cairo marketplace discovered one of the largest sun temples ever found that contained statues of Ramses II weighing as much as five tons. One of them showed the pharaoh seated and wearing a leopard’s skin, leading researchers to believe that he might have been a high priest of Ra.
As more pieces of the colossal statue were recovered, closer examination revealed more clues. Egyptian antiquities officials believe it may be Psamtik I, who ruled Egypt from 664 to 610 BC. Psamtik is notable for uniting all of Egypt and freeing it from Assyrian control within the first ten years of his reign. An inscription and other characteristics indicate that the artifact comes from Egypt’s Late Period and may be the largest statue from that era ever discovered.
The quartzite statue was submerged in groundwater in a dig that had begun in 2012 and was about to be concluded. The area had been almost completely investigated and archaeologists were quite surprised when it was found. Pulling the pieces of the statue from the pit where it was mired in mud wasn’t easy. The Egyptian Antiquities Ministry asked for assistance from the army and used a forklift truck to extract it. The significant discovery is being hailed as one of the most important ever. The statue’s pieces were moved to the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir for restoration and exhibition.
So think about the monuments we are building. In a few thousand years, after civilizations more advanced than ours have come and gone, someone might dig up remnants of what we leave behind. I wonder how perplexed they’ll be, trying to figure us out.
Sources:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/egypt-pharaoh-ramses-statue-discovered-cairo/
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ramses-ii-statue-found-cairo
http://www.archaeology.org/news/5384-170317-cairo-psammetich-colossus
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/world/middleeast/egypt-pharaoh-statue-ramses.html?_r=0
http://observer.com/2017/03/archaeologists-discover-3000-year-old-statue-pharaoh-ramses-ii-egypt/
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/10/africa/ramses-ii-ozymandias-statue-cairo/
http://www.history.com/news/stunning-statue-discovered-in-egyptian-mud-pit-may-depict-ramses-ii
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are as easy to recognize as the Great Pyramids or King Tut’s infamous Death Mask. They became recognizable to most of us because popular culture was fascinated by wild stories of ancient curses. Those spine-chilling tales found a perfect medium in motion pictures, spawning a long list of terrifying (and sometimes amusing) films featuring a reanimated corpse wrapped in dusty bandages. But without the wise old Egyptologist scholar character to translate the strange hieroglyphics and tell the story of how the Mummy came to be cursed, the story wouldn’t be half as interesting.
Serious Egyptologists are too busy with the real-life challenges of studying an ancient, difficult-to-decipher language to lament the popularity of iconic movie monsters presenting a distorted image of a complex and fascinating advanced culture. The key to cracking the code of hieroglyphic script was the Rosetta Stone. Discovered by French soldiers in 1799, the Rosetta Stone contains text written in Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphics by Egyptian priests in 196 B.C.E. to honor the pharaoh. But it wasn’t until 1822 that Jean-François Champollion made the first significant breakthrough, setting the stage for later scholars and linguists to gradually unravel the mysteries of the pictorial written language.
The last two centuries have seen steady progress in scholarly understanding of the texts that cover the walls and monuments of ancient Egypt. And yet, the general public is still much more familiar with ancient Greek and Roman culture through the study of their mythologies and the writings of their scholars. Who doesn’t know at least a little about Hercules, Socrates, Plato, Aesop’s fables, Julius Caesar, Emperor Nero, the destruction of Pompeii, and countless other peoples and events of antiquity? These have also found their way into our popular culture, but we have a general understanding of the daily lives of those people that we don’t have of the ancient Egyptians.
Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson, a fellow of Clare College at Cambridge University, has published Writings from Ancient Egypt, the first literary English translation of some of the texts that cover thousands of square feet of monuments and tomb walls. Wilkinson’s book explains that hieroglyphs are a complex collection of symbols that represent a mixture of objects, ideas and sounds, telling stories just as compelling and layered as any written by the Romans, not merely decorations to be used as wallpaper.
Cats and people began interacting as humans developed agriculture. As rodents and other small prey were drawn to stockpiles of grains and other food, cats were drawn to human settlements. Hungry felines were a boon to hardworking farmers, helping to dispose of critters who wanted to consume the harvest. At one time, researchers had believed that cats were domesticated by the Egyptians between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago. The recent discovery of a human and a cat buried together on the island of Cyprus dating back 9,500 years has overturned that theory.
Chinese villagers 5,300 years ago may have had domesticated cats. Researchers excavating a village called Quanhucun found that both the humans and cats dwelling there ate a diet heavy in the grain millet. The cats most likely consumed rodents that fed on the humans’ stores of millet.
A DNA analysis of cat remains found at a Viking archaeological site in northern Germany dating to between 700 CE and 1000 CE shows that the seafaring warriors kept felines that had originated in Egypt. Cats were the most efficient way to get rid of rats and mice on board ships.
S.D. McPhail 