Another New Tomb in the Valley of the Kings? 131
Praxiteles writes "A radar survey in 2000 found KV63, the tomb excavated near King Tutankhamen's tomb earlier this year. (KV stands for Valley of the Kings). Just announced is that this same radar survey shows an image of what appears to be a shaft to another tomb just 15 meters north of KV63. Will radar stratigraphy change the multi-millennial tradition of destructive excavation and open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?"
What?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's hope it will open up new opportunities to learn about history, which contributes to the wealth of everyone.
Re:What?? (Score:2)
Re:What?? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What?? (Score:2)
Re:What?? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe, but "Lara Croft, Radar Stratigrapher" just doesn't have that ring to it.
Re:What?? (Score:1, Offtopic)
I don't know ... ever work in a lab environment with females? Yeah, that's right! It is inevitable that a boob (maybe even two at once!) is gonna brush up against you at some time or another. Oh, sweet bliss.
So "Lara Croft, Radar Stratigrapher" the game isn't likey to be very popular as I imagine it is hard to design a game in a labratory setting where the payoffs range from brushing up against feminine charms to discovering here
Re:What?? (Score:1)
Re:What?? (Score:2)
Re:What?? (Score:2)
History is by far more important than any monetary value of the finds in any archeological foray. Long after any riches have lined the pockets of someone, the understanding of the past remains in our minds (if we let it). There is so much to learn from what happened in the Egyptian dynastic holdings region. So much to learn...
I'm in hope that as our technology advances, so will our explorations - and perhaps our ability to preserve the purity of the finds.
Re:Is the archaeology.org map correct? (Score:4, Informative)
Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:3, Interesting)
Every time I see that someone has got a neutrino detector [wikipedia.org] up, I think we've finally got a deep "radar" that can see through practically everything (AFAWCT) in the Universe, offering us a neutrino detector detector.
I won't be surprised when we fire it up and the Valley of the Kings lights up, along with various museums (and attics) in France, UK, US, Germany and Japan.
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:3, Interesting)
he built as a mine detector. It works slowly but can find anything burried within anything
as long as there is a material anomoly. I was very suspicious of the story because it had
all the "scientists" saying it was "impossible" and the guy wouldn't fully share the method
until it was patented. Anyway he did a practical demonstration and discovered several
buried bodies, arms caches and stuff in a field that had bee
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:2)
(from apo/far + crypt/hidden)
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope your not one of those of people [vast majority afaict] who
have very different standards of evidence between a claim and
the debunking of a claim.
Someone makes a claim and no matter what evidence they provide,
the hearing from someone else that that person had heard it was
"debunked" is enough for them to discard it.
I am familiar [and sympathetic to] the viewpoint that extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence, but this phenomena is different.
Just the use of the word
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:1)
>the hearing from someone else that that person had heard it was
>"debunked" is enough for them to discard it.
I imagine taking a bunch of skeptics out to a field of their choice and finding mines and buried body parts would be rather enough evidence to merit further study and quiet the debunkers.
If they can't do that, "debunking" is hardly needed, as there are a lot of crazy claims which I'm not going to bother using mind space on
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:2)
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:5, Interesting)
.
Back in the day there were proposals about using neutrinos to communicate with submarines and other military vehicles around the planet, since neutrinos can travel through the Earth. Since a military vessel would have to have a very small neutrino detector (to keep its mobility), the detection of neutrinos by this thing would be super low. IIRC, expected usable bandwidths (not sure if they actually did the experiment or not) would be something like a byte per day, which is obviously too low to be useful for military.
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:2)
Even if they did add that to a mobile phone I'm sure we'd get complaints that it makes the phone too complicated and why can't we have a phone that's just a phone
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:2)
Re: Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:2)
Re: Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:2)
Oblig Stargate Quote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:2)
Sounds like you'll have to rely on some leftover alien tech in the pyramid's basement, either a detector or levitator, to pull that off easy. Or make a brighter muon source on one side, and a detector held up on the other side, which is more easily accessible than the space beneath the biggest, most precious ancient artifact on the planet.
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:1)
14 26 17 05 29 24 16
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:2)
done. [google.com]
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:2)
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:1)
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:2)
In general be careful with the terms
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:1)
Big deal, I say. Wikipedia also says:
Maybe the information is wrong or you know something I don't, but it doesn't look very practical to me.
Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:2)
Don't open it! (Score:2, Funny)
Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:5, Informative)
He also isn't even allowed in the Valley of the Kings. He got the boot because he's been known to work with smugglers. Generally not a reputable character.
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:3, Informative)
"false positives" and false negatives (Score:1, Interesting)
The only way to test it is with good old fashioned back hoe and shovel excavation -an opportunity I have often had.
GPR "finds"(and misses) gravel lenses, boulders,bedrock outcrops
Re: "false positives" and false negatives (Score:2)
But GPR is not totally worthless. Plenty of people have careers from it. In geology it is just another part of geowizardry, errr, I mean geophysics
Re: "false positives" and false negatives (Score:2)
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:3, Informative)
Well... FTA...
Looks like the Egyptians looked into that and cleared him. Sounds to me like your aunt has a personal axe to grind...
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing I learned from my trip to Egypt: almost anything is possible -- with the right baksheesh [wikipedia.org].
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:2)
and MJ is completely innocent.
Oh and lets not forget MS isn't exactly being held to any form of punishment even though they were found guilty....
I would trust the real peers of this guy to have a more accurate picture than any government, court, or "jury of peers" because a jury is NEVER really your peers. So axe or not, this is certainly no reason to believe the aunt in question has an axe to grind.
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:2)
OT (Score:2)
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:1)
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:5, Informative)
Shades of E A Wallis Budge [thebritishmuseum.ac.uk], a man so vain and unscrupulous, that the British Museum, the organization that he worked for, can only say this of him:
They only stopped short of slapping a red banner across his photo with the world "Crackpot".
Yet, nobody says Budge was stupid. Nor that he was unenterprising. He brought home lots of archaeological treasure that the Museum might not have received otherwise, which makes the Museum an important place for scholars. The down side is that he destroyed priceless and possibly irreplaceable knowledge in the process, which undermined the Museum's mission.
So, it isn't out of the question that a freebooting antiquities smuggler found a new, possibly unlooted, probably even royal tomb. IIRC we don't have tombs to match up every ruler we know to have existed from the period where the Valley of the Kings was in use. Furthermore, while most people I know are marginally unethical, very few of them view themselves as ruthlessly bad. Therefore he might not scruple to support antiquities smuggling, but might draw the line at looting a newly discovered tomb. Or the tomb, if it exists, may not be excatable without a fairly major engineering effort.
Or it may not exist at all. But I hope it does. Even a looted tomb is bound to be very interesting, unless all the inscriptions and paintings have been removed.
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:2)
Don't forget the dictionary. Its pretty good.
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:5, Informative)
If you'd bothered to RTFA (Yeah, yeah, I know this is Slashdot; people never RTFA before posting.) you'd have seen two things. First, he's not saying it is a new tomb but that it might be. Second, he gives credit for the discovery of the other new tomb to the person who excavated it, even thought it had been found earlier in the radar survey.
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:2)
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:1)
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:2)
It:s that easy, huh? Hell, I don't even need to LOOK at the X-Ray scans... Even from here I can clearly see half a dozen undiscovered tombs! And at least one of them has some shocking new discovery! I'll take the credit for that, thank you very much.
Egyptology is a notoriously vicious field (Score:2)
Reeve's discovery of intact stratigraphy outside of the tombs (it
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:1)
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:1)
Get A Grip (Score:1)
Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:1)
Agenda week on slashdot. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a better question. Why does every submission have to have the posters agenda? You could have said "Will radar stratigraphy open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?".
Re:Agenda week on slashdot. (Score:2)
Re:Agenda week on slashdot. (Score:2)
Because inflammatory submissions generate more comments, rebuffs, flames, etc...
Which translate to more page views, etc....
Which makes advertising on slashdot more valuable.....
Which means more money for CowboyNeal.....
I guess it's not... (Score:5, Funny)
I should play WoW less.
Re:I guess it's not... (Score:1)
Google UnEarth (Score:3, Interesting)
Trollish write-up (Score:1, Offtopic)
(off-topic) I wish Slashdot had qualitative scoring for posts, instead of a simple 0-5 points scale of bad->good. I read at +5 because I remembered one day that I had other things to do with my life than read every comment. Unfortunately a lot of pretty lame gags, and equally glib dinner-party received opinions get modded up. Most of th
Re:Trollish write-up (Score:1)
You can also crank up "Informative" if you wish.
Re:Trollish write-up (Score:2)
Gosh... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Arrrr matey! (Score:3, Funny)
Arr, matey! Any of ye swabs got a pirate ship that can sail in the desert?
Camels are the ships of the desert (Score:2)
We should leave some stuff where it is. (Score:2, Interesting)
The Renaissance was jump-started by ancient Roma
Re:We should leave some stuff where it is. (Score:1)
Re:We should leave some stuff where it is. (Score:1)
One good war (Score:2)
But you are right in principle. Perhaps we should send out backups to the moon.
Re:We should leave some stuff where it is. (Score:5, Informative)
On the salvage side of things it's slightly different, for example if there was a new interstate highway going through an archaeological site and there was absolutely no way to reroute that road, we would attempt to do 100% recovery of the site. This almost never happens (it'd have to be a really small site - digging right takes a long time and the road builders get pissy if you sit there and delay them for too long. Can't stop progress). In salvage or "Section 106" or whathaveyou style archaeology the rule is to reover as much as possible as quickly as possible.
Plenty of false positives... (Score:5, Informative)
Oblig. Stargate comment (Score:1)
Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh (Score:4, Interesting)
slaves and from the pockets of honest egyptians for thousands of years. The "tomb robbers"
are not thieves, that stuff was abandoned the same as a sunken treasure ship. The egyptian government didnt even care until they realized they could make money off it.
At least the tomb robbers did something with the gold and treasure instead of just taking
from innocent people and burying it. What good does it do history yet another
Golden mask sitting in some museum somewhere. At least the tomb robbers enjoyed the
treasure and put the gold into the economy.
You want to talk about a treasure...the palimpset of archimedes is a treasure, the Rosetta stone is a treasure, the ruins of pompeii and karnak are treasures, Gold should be used for the living not the dead.
Re:Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh (Score:2)
Used for what I wonder?
Re:Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh (Score:1)
Re:Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh (Score:2)
Re:Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh (Score:2)
what more can be learned from another mask?
Re:Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh (Score:2)
Re:Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh (Score:2)
For the most part, the slavery bit is Jewish/Christian/Muslim propoganda. The pyramids were generally built by farmers in the off-season.
The money didn't take "thousands of years" to acquire, it was put together during the lifetime of the that particular pharaoh (for obvious reasons).
And the farmers that built and paid for the pyramids weren't exactly taxed into oblivion; thei
Re:Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh (Score:2)
Considering some of the later Pharos hired "tomb robers" to steal gold from previous burials to help bolster their coffers, and considering the practice was to empty those coffers at the time of burial to go into the next tomb, I'm not sure I can really look at those as "hallowed" graves.
It does however shed more light on the traditional jewish practice of bu
Re:Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh (Score:2)
The pyramid-building Old Kingdom had limited access to the outside world, and presumably few, if any, foriegn slaves. So the pyramid building workers were probably motivated chiefly by religious conviction. I'm not sure I'd agree with your "farmers in the off-season" classification. Indications seem to be that the society was well off enough to support dedicated pyramid-builders, and that these monuments were in fact collosal resource commitments. But basically, I second your note that the image of slav
We can question what we could find there... (Score:1)
Typical /. story... (Score:5, Funny)
Hehe... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Sure, it's Valley of the Magi, but still. I think I played that game too much...
At this rate (Score:2)
Wont that be cool.
Archeologist versus Grave Robber (Score:3, Insightful)
Time after time, from the Incas, the Mayas, the Egyptians, American Indians, etc. entire cities or societies worked for a generation to ensure that their royalty, leaders, or god-kings could rest forever undisturbed. What gives us the right to violate that sanctity? "Knowledge" is the canonical answer, but is it curiosity for curiosity's sake? And is that sufficient justification violate an entire society's clear wishes?
Re:Archeologist versus Grave Robber (Score:4, Insightful)
Grave robbing occurs when a burial ground is disturbed while members of the same race/society/tribe/etc are still present.
As soon as they have all been exterminated and the previous society no longer exists, then it becomes archaelogy..... because there is no longer any protest...
Re:Archeologist versus Grave Robber (Score:1)
The wishes of a dead civilization do not matter.
Re:Archeologist versus Grave Robber (Score:2)
From learning, there is benefit for the living. Burial rituals are for the living, so when there are no living to be annoyed by it, why not dig?
Re:Archeologist versus Grave Robber (Score:3, Informative)
Actually archaeological digs on 'recent' burials and in the West is fairly common. (The just completed one at Little Big Horn about a decade back for example.) Then there is the study of the Franklin expedition back in the
Grave Robbing? (Score:2)
Re:Grave Robbing? (Score:1)
Thats why they cut up rabbits, test atomic bombs and make caged animals eat cosmetics.Mainstream science doesn't lookahead,it just ignores failure.
And thats not surprising in the least, as civilizations contains alot of defective ideas,fucked-up traditions and self-destructive reasoning (as an eye for an eye) embedded within.
Mayan Ruins in Central America? (Score:2)
Re:Mayan Ruins in Central America? (Score:2)
Non-uniform ground is a pain for two reasons. First, it creates false reflections, and secondly because GPR measures depth as a function of the time for the echo to return, the vertical scale goes to hell in a handbasket. You've no idea where things
Re:KV != VK (Score:2)