Thieves Find Cemetery of Pharaoh's Dentists

junglee_iitk writes with news of an important archaeological find from Egypt. Grave robbers located a tomb and were arrested while digging; what they found turns out to be the graves of three dentists who took care of a Pharaoh's teeth. The graves are located in the shadow of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, said to be Egypt's oldest, and are around 4,000 years old. From the article: "Although archaeologists have been exploring Egypt's ruins intensively for more than 150 years, [a senior archaeologist] believes only 30 percent of what lies hidden beneath the sands has been uncovered." Yahoo has a few pictures of the dig.

Dr. Zahi Hawass

[Hangin10]

Dr. Zahi Hawass is just so damn cool. And he has the coolest title too (Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities). I strongly recommend checking out his website [guardians.net] (broken English warning here).

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about the fact that thieves dont have to ask for permissions, dont have to look for a crew and dont have to follow the way archeologyst work (Harris matrix and so).

And, even more important, thieves have nothing to lose.

Re:And yet...

[smilingman]

On the contrary. Since when have grave robbers documented their findings or even bothered to mark their provenance? Even the worst treasure-hunting archaeologists (and there were worse than Budge) did that. The difference between a tomb robber and even the worst archaeologist is huge, to say nothing of the difference between them and highly cautious and meticulous normal ones.

Re:And yet...

[curunir]

Not that I agree with removing any of the ancient Egyptian antiquities from Egypt, but there is a huge difference between removing them for display at a prominent museum like the British Museum and removing them to be sold on the black market such that they will likely never again be available to be seen by the public.

A good example of this is the mummy of Ramses I. If this had been pillaged by archaeologists on behalf of the British Museum, it would be in much better shape that it is currently. However, because it was unearthed by tomb robbers, it spent over 100 years at a museum in Niagra Falls with very little concern for maintaining it and absolutely no indication given to visitors that it was, in fact, the mummy of a Pharoah. An "expert" grave robber would have followed much a much more strict procedure to ensure that it was properly cared for and properly catalogued (if only to increase the value, but still).

That said, the Ramses I mummy did end up in Egypt, which almost makes up for the shoddy maintenance it received over the course of its post-excavation life (museums around the world should follow the example of the Carlos Museum at Emory University and return everything that was stolen from Egypt)...

Re:Obligatory digging-is-not-theft post

[cultrhetor]

Yet Native American remnants - while not specifically tied to any particular individual - are accepted as cultural heritage and thus belong to the respective tribes. Why is this any different? Just because they are older remains does not mean that they don't belong to Egypt as a nation. I'm not trying to be difficult, just to raise a contextualizing situation.

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Its also amazing how grave robbers seem to find all the good stuff before the archeologists."

I suspect that's a combination of -

a) more of them

b) better funded

c) no restrictions on where they can dig

d) less work involved (no need to preserve context)

How would that work?

[Junta]

Why would a jar with some semen in it be any more likely to contain DNA than all the other remains? In fact, if sperm were somehow miraculously well preserved in and of itself, you could probably recover some from the appropriate organs in the mummified remains (unless they had the testicle jar, but I never heard of that one). Anyway, non-gamete DNA for cloning would hypothetically be more interesting anyway than fertilizing a modern egg with half DNA from 4 millenia go. If you're going to make something like that, why only care about half the old DNA when you could have the whole thing? Even without cloning analysis can be done on the DNA versus today for a bulk of the scientific interest anyway, well, comparison for some of what we know today, archival for studies later when more is understood.

DNA may very well already have been extracted and studied, I have no idea, but sperm/semen is much more boring than a full set of chromosomes in a single package.

Zahi Hawass

[Dan East]

Zahi Hawass; either he's omnipresent, or is a media hound, because it seems any documentary or photo shoot about Egyptian archeology has him in it. Maybe he just likes fame as much as archeology.

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/sc/102206eg ypttombs//im:/061022/481/d9433cbb7dc24106bdf87f124 dd60323 [yahoo.com]

Dan East

Re:And yet...

[Colbalt Blue]

I would say it is more like the difference between a looter who leaves and IOU and a regular looter.

I would take a slightly different line.

[jd]

Any stolen object that can be returned without damaging it further (sawing a stone column into three pieces isn't exactly quality care) AND which will be kept with an equal or greater standard of care should be returned otherwise unconditionally.

"But it belongs to (country)! Why should (some other country) keep it?" In the end, none of this "belongs" to a country. History cuurered everywhere at the same time. (Duh!) For the most part, the political boundaries that marked these countries no longer exist, the political entities have vanished into oblivion, no living direct descendents who could claim even a moral ownership are known to survive, so for the most part the only meaningful designation is "world heritage" (which I believe to not be used nearly enough and most definitely not recognized nearly enough).

So, if object X is being, or would very likely be, damaged by being in country Y, I believe country Y has lost all right to the ownership of object X. I don't like the fact that Britain has the Elgin Marbles, but I like even less the fact that they'd be destroyed by pollution if they were ever returned. The Greece of back then no longer exists, any more than the Egypt of the Pharaohes exists today. In some cases, there simply isn't a country in which an object is truly safe. In that case, you document every last facet like crazy and hope. (You can't move the Great Pyramid and you certainly can't hide it, though reducing pollution might cut down on the deterioration.)

But what makes something "world heritage"? The object itself? Usually no. Except in some rare cases, the object has no value in and of itself. For inorganic objects, it is the information the object posesses - from the chemical structure through to any symbols or writings on it, and the information associated with it - where it was made, when, how and why, where it was found, the nature of the site, other items found there and their respective characteristics and associations, and so on. These are the things that have any lasting meaning. Once you know the object - totally - you can always make another using exactly the same materials, tools and methods.

For organic objects, it's tougher. If a bone is damaged or destroyed, there is next to nothing you can do. And time is rarely kind to anything of organic nature. Tutankamun is in very bad shape now and the remains will probably not survive a whole lot longer. Part of that is due to Carter's team, but part is due to Egypt having very high levels of acidic pollution and acid rain. You can't expect much to survive under such brutal conditions.

The other problem with organics is that there's much less information you can obtain. With luck, you can extract mtDNA, maybe even use modelling to produce an impression of what the person looked like. Bodies found in peat bogs and ice fields give slightly more information, perhaps yielding clues of fashion, food and culture that artifacts alone can't. We learned a lot from "Pete Marsh" and the iron-age traveller murdered in the alps, but such finds are almost never in any kind of context, so there is very little you can do to connect them with what was happening at that time. "Pete Marsh" - Lindow Man - might date anywhere from prior to the Roman invasion to a hundred years after the Boudicca Rebellion, making it very hard to know what sort of context is involved.

Getting back to thieves vs. archaeologists - IMHO, it's not a binary thing. I would argue that the "absolute" thief is one who destroys information in search of money, even if that involves destroying the thing they're trying to find. (When archaeologists started paying money per fragment of Dead Sea Scroll recovered, some of the locals cut fragments up so that they could get more money.) I would argue that the "absolute" archaeologist obtains all information, even if that means never reaching the object. (We now have GPR scans of Edward the Confessor's tomb, but reaching it would destroy countless artifacts and could potentia

Re:And yet...

[gripen40k]

This is funny 'cause I just wrote an essay on this. The difference is between anthropological archaeologists and non-anthropological archaeologists. The former cares about the culture in which the material remains were found, and will use those remains to gain incite into the workings of that culture. The latter cares about the material remains themselves, the tomb, the mummies, ect. They think the culture is neat, but what they really want to know about is what the item is and what is it worth. Not all were greedy, some wrote nice catalogues of what the items were before they sold them, but most didn't bother. Examples for the former were the Leakey family [wikipedia.org] (Rift Valley of East Africa), Edward Tylor [wikipedia.org] (way back in 1871 no less), and even Thomas Jefferson [wikipedia.org] (burial mounds in Virginia). The prime example of the latter would be Belzoni [wikipedia.org] in Egypt, an ex hydraulics engineer and circus strong-man from Italy :P

Re:I would take a slightly different line.

[TapeCutter]

Well said, returning a hypothetical "very large Buddah" to the Taliban would be like shooting the face off the Sphynx with a cannon. Ancient artifacts belong to humanity, period!