Khazar-khum Wrote:
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> And absolutely NO ONE noticed until NOW???
>
> Am I alone in wondering what the hell????

Hey, you have to recall what was the purpose of 19th and early 20th century Egyptologists. Recall that most 19th century excavators were in for the "big haul" - gold, silver, and that sort of thing. Items of everyday life certainly didn't interest them at all - and that apparently included Carter.

This reminds me of what was one of the "greatest" finds of 1992 in Egyptology: The finding of am image of the goddess Imentet (a variant of Hathor of the West), on the back of a coffin. The image is rare on elite coffins.

How was this image wondrously found? When Atlanta's Michael Carlos Museum officials decided to rearrange their Egyptian collection in 1992, the moved a New Kingdom coffin when had lain on the floor of the Carlos Museum for well over 40+ years, having been found on an excavation in Egypt some 20+ years prior to that.

As the coffin was fragile, they use a series of forklifts and pulleys to raise it -- and when they did, they peered under the coffin to see that it was secured properly: and voila! The greatest find of 1992!!

Sometimes the greatest find in Egyptian artefacts will be within something that was thought insignificant or mundane in the past by its excavators.

There's also the "end of the Raider's of the Lost Ark" type of problem: there are well over 2 million boxes in the Cairo Museum which have never been opened; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it's estimated that over 10,000-30,000 boxes of artefacts from their various Egyptian excavations have never been opened and/or sufficiently catalogued. I know, for a fact, there are well over 100,000 Egyptian artefacts to be openly found in the vaults of the British Museum (as I've seen many of them). Some items are tiny objects, which would likely not interest a casual visitor to the Museum: some items are so huge I doubt the floors of the main floor could hold them.

For example: most people have heard about "Ginger", the perfectly preserved predynastic male(EA 32751) which can be found in Room 64 (Early Egypt) on the Second Floor of the British Museum, as an example of the "natural mummification" which eventually led the Egyptians to develop the mummification process. But how many know about his counterpart, "Gingerella"? Not many, I should think, but she does exist, although not in the greatest of condition; yet, she can be found in the vaults at the British Museum, as well as the controversial statuette of Queen Tetisheri, once the prize of the British Museum, but determined in 1984 by W.V. Davies, one of the curators of the Egyptian collection, to be a 19th century forgery.

In the vault, popular Egyptin pieces are often moved there to circulate other Egyptian objects to the main floor, or to effect restoration work. For example, during my last visit in 2002, the Fowling Scene of Nebamun was being restored, but is now back on display.

So, when you hear about "finds" such as the jars and baskets of Tutankhamun, don't automatically assume it's a "fast one" by Hawass, or even a "doctored" event. It's usually not. Human memory is not infallible, and with all the various expeditions, excavations, etc. which were held in the "golden years" of Egyptian archaeology (from about 1870 - 1950), one could certainly misplace and/or even forget that objects were found that bear examination or re-examination today, based upon what we now know since they were excavated.

The problem was put well by David O'Connor and David Silverman in the original report of this find, as reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer, on 1 September 2007:

O'Connor, former head of the Egyptian collection at Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, said he could easily see how the jars would have been forgotten. They were found a month ago when workers were transferring artifacts from a variety of past excavations to a modern storage facility.

Egypt is overflowing with antiquities, and the original finders of Tut's tomb may have thought some of the less spectacular objects were not worth taking to the Cairo museum, O'Connor said. More surprising is that the boxes of seals in the tomb itself were somehow overlooked, he said.

Penn's David Silverman, curator of the traveling Tut exhibit, said he had never seen the boxes in more than 30 visits to the tomb. That's probably because they were in the treasury room, which is located beyond the king's burial chamber and is typically not open even to scholars, he said.

Silverman said further analysis of the seals and plaster fragments was needed. But both he and James Allen, a Brown University Egyptologist, said they might well be the very seals that the ancients used to mark the king's name when they closed the tomb doors more than 3,300 years ago.

Silverman said he would be even more interested to learn the contents of the jars, which he speculated contain wine for the king to drink in the afterlife, or perhaps oils or unguents.

"It's nice that some of the mysteries remain," Silverman said, "because it spurs us on to do more research."

HTH.

Katherine Griffis-Greenberg

Doctoral Candidate
Oriental Institute
Doctoral Programme in Oriental Studies [Egyptology]
Oxford University
Oxford, United Kingdom





Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 09/25/2007 09:58AM by Katherine Griffis-Greenberg.