Tuesday, December 07, 2021

More golden tongues, but still no Cleopatra's tomb

EGYTPIAN ARCHAEOLGY: Meet the lawyer-turned-archaeologist leading the search for Cleopatra's tomb. Kathleen Martinez has risked everything in her quest to find Egyptian queen's resting place, she tells 'The National' (Hamza Hendawi, The National).

This article gives a good brief account of Ms. Martinez's background and her archaeological work at Taposiris Magna. But one has to read far along to learn that the only new announcement is that there might be a new announcement soon:

But now, the end may be in sight.

“Sometimes I feel like I would like to update the people on what I am doing,” she said, explaining that only Egyptian authorities, not the relevant archaeologists, announce new discoveries.

“They may announce by the end of this year, that I am now closer to my objective,” she said cryptically.

“It is very improbable that I won’t discover the tomb,” she said, striking a confident note as she sipped a glass of lemonade at the lounge of a Nile-side Cairo hotel.

I hope she's right.

For more on Cleopatra VII (THE Cleopatra) see here and links. Plutarch reports that she knew Hebrew and Aramaic.

For the excavation at Taposiris Magna and the hope that it will lead to the tomb of Cleopatra, start here and follow the links. That link is about the discovery of two mummies there which were equipped with golden tongues. That leads to the other part of my header above. Two more golden tongued mummies have just been discovered, this time at at Oxyrhynchus:

Golden tongues found in mouths of ancient Egyptian couple. Tombs of man and woman dating back 2,500 years found at Oxyrhynchus; male mummy’s sarcophagus still sealed with hundreds of funerary items inside (Times of Israel).

The article also reports that three more golden tongues were recovered "outside the tombs," whatever that means.

The site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus is best known for its trove of many thousands of ancient papyri found in a trash dump. For many posts on it and them, start here (plus here) and just keep following those links. For the missing Oxyrhynchus papyri scandal, see here and links. Cross-file under Oxyrhynchus Watch.

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