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Egypt in the News! - TAS 264
491 Plays8 months ago
Ancient Egypt seems to be all over the news lately, so today we cover 3 of the most interesting of those stories!
Links
- Scientists Are Investigating a Puzzling Underground 'Anomaly' Near the Giza Pyramids
- Newly mapped lost branch of the Nile could help solve long-standing pyramid mystery
- Archaeologists discover ancient Egyptian pharaoh's fortified royal retreat
- New Kingdom Pharaoh’s Royal Rest House Found
Contact
- Chris Webster
chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com - Rachel Roden
rachel@unraveleddesigns.com
RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast. Hello, and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 264. On today's show, we talk about Egypt. Let's dig a little deeper, but not with shovels, with science.
Travel Experiences in Montana
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everyone. How's it going? Pretty good. So, for our die-hard listeners, we have traveled into the future compared to the episode you're going to listen to next week. If you're following along with our adventures. Yeah. So, we're traveling right now, which means we're trying to get ahead, which we're doing a
00:00:52
Speaker
very mediocre job of right now. We did record one episode ahead. We're so excited. It's a fantastic interview with one of our fabulous hosts on the APN, and that's coming next week. We were still in Washington when we recorded that episode, but now we have
00:01:09
Speaker
to tell you about where we're at right now, because this is the only way we're going to be here, but we're in Montana. And I'm literally looking out the window that I can see you from my recording spot. And it's just like, it's just like mountain. It's like big mountain, like Yellowstone, big mountain. We're a few hours north of Yellowstone right now, but basically the same mountain range. It's amazing here.
00:01:30
Speaker
I know we were kind of going for like if you've seen the show Yellowstone, if you're going for that vibe. We're not quite there because we're more penned in than just like this open field kind of thing. But we're really penned in by mountains around and it's kind of cool. And we can hear a waterfall in the distance. There's almost nobody else in this Forest Service campground. I mean we don't see anybody else from where we're sitting.
00:01:50
Speaker
Like it's not the easiest thing to get to, so I get it. Like we had to go an hour off the interstate to get here, right? So like, yeah, but oh my gosh, is it worth it? And since we travel with our own internet and like we can be in a place like this and still work, it's like just fantastic that our office view this week is basically the backside of Yellowstone. Yeah.
Egypt's Archaeology and Its Fascination
00:02:08
Speaker
Yeah. You know what else isn't easy to get to? What would that be? Anomalies underneath rail graveyards and Egypt.
00:02:16
Speaker
I mean, I think, bam, done. That's the article. Indeed. So I've got to say, for archaeologists, talking about a couple of things gets people to roll their eyes. Some of those are like Romans, Stonehenge, Belize.
00:02:32
Speaker
Not Belize, we Belize alone. We barely even talked about Belize. No, I won't give you that one. No. Egypt. Yes, Egypt's on that list. Egypt, they don't even call themselves archaeologists. They're Egyptologists. I mean, come on. Right.
00:02:49
Speaker
Well, it's probably because they study the culture of Egypt, not just archaeology as a science. It's not study of culture necessarily. Exactly. And it is a much bigger field because they have written records and they're comparing written texts or hieroglyphics with the archaeological remains that they're finding. They're marrying this picture together with historical texts and archaeology and all of it. So it's just a much bigger and more complicated field, I think, which is why it gets its own thing. Yeah.
00:03:15
Speaker
And I'll tell you what, there is some amazing stuff there. I know. And they're so good at publicizing and marketing it too. Egypt is so good at getting announcements and things out into the media, I think. Don't you think so? I do. And the simple fact is, people love Egypt. I mean, your standard non-Egyptologist might not love Egypt, but that's just because Egypt gets so much press.
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah. And they're like, hey, my little pottery type is from some mountain range that nobody's ever heard of in central, whatever the hell. That also is cool. But yeah, that is cool. It is very cool. But it's not Egypt. It's just, it doesn't have the gravitas that Egypt does.
00:03:56
Speaker
So we found one article. In fact, I saw this article a couple of weeks ago. And it was kind of before it got big. And I just randomly saw it. And I didn't think. I mean, I thought it was kind of neat. I didn't think too much about it. We were doing some other things. And then it started to kind of blow up. And then we found some other articles. And we decided to just make an Egypt episode. Yeah. We haven't really talked a lot about Egyptian finds recently, I don't think. There hasn't been a lot of news. And then all of a sudden, there was a bunch of them. So we're like, cool. Today is Egypt in the news.
00:04:24
Speaker
Yeah, so this first article is from Smithsonian Magazine. My favorite. Although right now it's really pissing me off because it's just opening ad after ad after ad. Going to a reader view. If you have a reader view on a smart device, like an iOS device, yeah, definitely do that. But it's called, scientists are investigating a puzzling underground anomaly near the Giza pyramids.
00:04:45
Speaker
Yeah, this was really cool. And I think it has been pretty widely reported at this point too, almost as much as the article you were just hinting at that we're going to talk about next. And so this anomaly was found beneath a royal graveyard near the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
Investigating Giza's Underground Anomalies
00:05:00
Speaker
Yeah. And the necropolis has many above ground monuments known as mastabas for the pharaoh's family and high ranking officials. That's sort of like how they buried their dead in this time period. Yeah. The mastabas are rectangular on the ground surface with a flat roof constructed out of limestone or mud bricks. So what are these like just burial chambers kind of things or representations? Yes. I guess.
00:05:20
Speaker
But what makes these tombs unique is that below the surface level, they have these vertical shafts that go straight down and they connect to underground chambers, which provides space for more than one burial. So I think these are sort of the openings to what could be many burials. And a lot of them connect to each other underneath the ground too. So it's sort of this underground network of like catacombs, similar to what you get in Europe, you know, like, but the Egyptian version of that. So yeah.
00:05:48
Speaker
It is amazing how much subsurface stuff the Egyptians did. Yeah. Yeah. Just like so much. Because it was so hot on the surface, maybe? Or was that? I don't know. I think they just liked the secrecy, to be honest with you. Oh, yeah, maybe. Because a lot of the stuff under the surface is all burial chambers. Not like they live down there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all associated with burials and graves and things like that. But they just had such extensive networks and really impressive structures underground.
00:06:13
Speaker
And grave goods were very, very important to these cultures, and they wanted to protect those from looters, too. So, I suppose going down and making it hard to get to was one way of protection, just from surface people. A lot of the mastabas were excavated in the 20th century, but one was left unexcavated because of lack of surface features, basically.
00:06:33
Speaker
There's no tombs there. Didn't seem interesting. Yeah. Why go there, right? Yeah. A joint effort in 2021 and 2023 between researchers from Higashi Nippon International University in Japan and Tohoku University in Japan and the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics in Egypt analyzed this overlooked area. And rather than using traditional excavation, they used ground penetrating radar, which seems like an awesome thing to use in Egypt. Yeah, definitely.
00:07:02
Speaker
and electrical resistivity tomography to study the area. Now I'm a little, I don't have to read the paper, I'm a little surprised at resistivity only because moisture in the ground is kind of a high component for resistivity. But anyway. I don't really know how resistivity works. I get the ground penetrating radar. You're looking for differences in the soil basically, right? Like that's how that works. Yeah. Now that I'm saying it.
00:07:25
Speaker
I've done resistivity before, but I can't remember if moisture is good or bad for resistivity. I mean, they used it and it seemed to work and it's a desert, so obviously it was okay. Yeah, they didn't really go into specifics on the methodology in the Smithsonian article. They believe what they found below the surface was a shallow L-shaped structure connected to a deeper structure. Yeah. So the L-shaped structure is 33 feet long and buried six and a half feet deep.
00:07:54
Speaker
And scans of it indicate that it was filled in with sand after construction. They don't say specifically when. They don't say if it was, but they can't know. They haven't excavated yet. So we don't know how or when it was filled in by people who did it in the moment or centuries later. That's impossible to say right now until they excavate. Right.
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah, they think it could have been an entrance to a deeper structure, potentially, as they do in Egypt, of course. The deeper structure is a highly resistive anomaly. I guess that's what they use their resistivity for. It could be empty or filled with a material like sand or gravel.
00:08:27
Speaker
It's crazy that both empty and something filled with sand or gravel would present the same in something like this. But I guess what they're really detecting is the difference between the natural ground and whatever these anomalies are, right? Is that essentially what these methods are doing? Probably bedrock. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Right, yeah.
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah. Either way, what these indicate is that there may be buried archaeological remains. So there's something down there. They're saying they need to dig. Yeah, basically. And that's the nice thing about some of these non-destructive subsurface techniques is you don't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in time just wasting your time. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know there's something down there. You can pinpoint and say, yep, here's where we need to go. So that's the whole point of that whole exercise.
00:09:12
Speaker
The problem with these kind of techniques, though, is that yes, they point out what they call an anomaly, but that anomaly could just have been like a backfill pile from somewhere else that they were excavating, you know? It's just out of place.
00:09:28
Speaker
is out of place sand or an empty space right and they just they don't know until they start excavating so but at least they know it's something they do know it's something but i guess a backfill pile might still have some archaeological knowledge to share but that's what that's what could be disappointing about it but it could be another amazing underground tomb like you know king tut again king tut part two right it's Egypt it's probably the tip of another pyramid
00:09:54
Speaker
Well, we could only hope it's something as amazing as that. Who knows? But we do know the excavations have already
Discovery of a Lost Nile Branch
00:10:00
Speaker
begun. So Egyptians, man, they move quick and they love their archaeology there. So hopefully we'll know soon what they have found or not found. For all we know, it's the yacht club for another branch of the Nile. We'll find out on the other side of the break back in a minute.
00:10:19
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, Episode 264. And we're talking about the Egyptian Yaw Club. Get to that in a minute. Definitely not what we're talking about. But go on. I'm sure they had one.
00:10:32
Speaker
All right, so the article we're talking about is from CNN, but again, it's everywhere now. Yes, everywhere. And this one is in particular titled, newly mapped lost branch of the Nile could help solve a longstanding pyramid mystery. So Egypt's Great Pyramid and other ancient monuments at Giza exist an isolated strip of land at the edge of the Sahara Desert.
00:10:55
Speaker
Pretty hard to get to and do things with. Quite a ways from the Nile. Yes, and this is a moment where, not our words, this would be CNN's words, this location has puzzled archaeologists. Yes. I'm not sure they're as puzzled as you might think because this idea that we're about to go into has been hypothesized for a long time, but these researchers are finally filling in the evidence.
00:11:21
Speaker
And that hypothesis is that the Nile likely flowed near the pyramids and probably helped facilitate their construction beginning about 4,700 years ago. So there was water there to use as transportation for all of the work that was going on. Yeah, rivers move. Yes.
00:11:42
Speaker
That's not uncommon. Rivers move. They've never had proof of it before. Where has this branch been? Sand doesn't really present well when it comes to this. Next time you're flying over the U.S. Midwest or anywhere in Europe, basically, that doesn't have a city on it.
00:11:58
Speaker
and where they've penned in some sort of river with a channel. If you're looking over farmland or something like that, anytime you see an oxbow lake or something like that, that's where a river has moved, a river has moved. Sometimes when you see those little lakes coming off of rivers, that oxbow lake is where they've basically either naturally dammed itself up or they just dammed it up and the river straightened itself back out again.
00:12:18
Speaker
And then you've got this little lake right there. And you can see dried up old oxbows, too, when you look at the aerial images of a lot of rivers, especially super windy ones that are really active and constantly moving. Because it's easy to see it when it's been more recent geologic activity. But what we're talking about with the Nile is from a really long time ago. So I think it's less, not as easy to see. And it's also in an area that has a lot of farming going on. So the farming has really affected the landscape as well.
00:12:48
Speaker
Understanding how landscapes form and how water moves is one of the things that helps you understand how cultures adapt to landscapes. One of my favorite classes I ever took in grad school was called fluvial geomorphology. I remember you taking that. It sounded so complicated. It was just a really fun class to take. It was just so interesting. One of my favorite words that I learned in that class that I always remember is anastomosing.
00:13:12
Speaker
Ooh, okay. I know. And it's basically when a river comes down a pathway and basically branches off into a bunch of little branches. And it happens when you've got, not a solid pathway, but a bunch of little pathways. It's coming down a...
00:13:29
Speaker
We saw this actually just driving over the weekend, um, where it's, it's, it's like branching out over this wide, wide expanse or something like that. And there's a bunch of trees and little islands and all this stuff. It's just a ton of tons of little, little pathways. Is it like, there's just a lot of directions that can go and being water, it will go in every direction that is easy for it to go. Probably collects up down somewhere. Yeah. But, but it branches out in lots of different places. That was just a cool word to learn.
00:13:55
Speaker
But all of that has impacts on the landscape, and people learn to adapt to that, animals learn to adapt to that. And generally when the animals learn to adapt to that, well, the people learn to adapt to where the animals are. So you get a whole bunch of things happening. And also, pyramids learn to adapt to that. Well, actually, I don't think the pyramids adapted very well, because the water left them, but the pyramids didn't move.
00:14:20
Speaker
What we're talking about is a new study published in the Journal of Communications, Earth, and Environment. They have mapped a 64-kilometer branch of the Nile that no longer exists. They use satellite images and analyses of core sediment to create a map. The map in the CNN article here comes straight from the article and it's pretty good.
00:14:41
Speaker
It's so cool to look at. I need these visual touch points to see and understand exactly what we're talking about and how this would have looked. Definitely check out the map. I know. They call this the ancient Aramat branch. I think somewhere I read that Aramat is actually Arabic for pyramid.
00:14:58
Speaker
Oh, is it? OK. It's A-H-R-A-M-A-T. I know. I want to say Aromat. Oh, it is Aromat. Yeah, I think that's right. Amarat. I keep wanting to say Amarat, but that's wrong. It's Aromat. No. Yeah. Anyway, it would have been about half a kilometer wide, the branch, and at least at its biggest, a third of a mile. Because the Nile is a big, wide river to begin with. Yeah. And at least 25 meters or 82 feet deep, which is similar to the Nile today. Yeah. And I wonder if.
00:15:28
Speaker
if they say in the actual article, the actual Nile proper, if this was the only one or if it was also flowing. I had that exact same question and I did not, I wasn't able to figure
Impact of Nile on Pyramid Construction
00:15:40
Speaker
out the answer to that if it was two rivers.
00:15:44
Speaker
or back in this time, or if it was one and this was the main route, I don't know. Also, was this diverted by the Egyptians? I don't know if they could divert a half a kilometer wide river. Just takes one spot. Maybe. No, they would have had to. Why would I just build the pyramids somewhere else? Yeah, they would have just built the pyramids by them, but yeah, there's no point in doing that.
00:16:04
Speaker
Anyway, it runs roughly parallel to the current path of the Nile, which is no surprise, gravity. It also runs right along the base of not only the Great Pyramids, but also pyramids at Abusir, Saqqara, Dasher, and the Lishd Pyramids. And again, look at the map. It's quite obvious that these pyramids were built there for a reason. Yeah. They're just like in this perfect little line.
00:16:26
Speaker
I feel like stuff doesn't always map out so perfectly like this, but this really does. It makes me wonder if they're like omitting anomalies, like if there are other pyramids that don't fit into this map. There probably are, but the thing is is that the water wasn't the only reason to build a pyramid, so yeah.
00:16:42
Speaker
Yeah, many of the pyramids in the study have a causeway or ceremonial raised walkway that is perpendicular to this branch of the river and where the riverbank would have been. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. I mean, it's almost like it seems like pretty obvious, right? Yeah. It's almost like they knew it was there. Wait, hold on. But we don't, we do and they did. And now we both know. We both know. We both know. Okay. But they don't know that we know that they know we know.
00:17:10
Speaker
So the soil and the cores they collected reveal sandy sediment consistent with a river channel at a depth of about 25 meters or 82 feet, which is where they're getting the maximum depth of that. So that's where they know the river channel bottom would have been.
00:17:26
Speaker
And it's unclear why it dried up. It might have been after a long period of drought. A drought would have brought a large amount of sand to the region and it could have silted in this branch. That's sort of the leading hypothesis, I guess. So I guess the most important thing is that mapping this branch gives us some more evidence that the ancient Egyptians used the
00:17:44
Speaker
natural landscape to help build the pyramids and one of the articles that I saw initially just what helps us understand how they how they actually did that was you know people often wondered how they got a lot of the rock and stone and things to build these pyramids to where they got it and I mean there's seems to be pretty clear evidence now that wherever they quarried this from and we know where some of the quarries are too that they could have floated it on barges yeah yeah I mean the manpower to move it across the landscape would have been
00:18:14
Speaker
insane. And it would have been so just so hard on the people too. So having water be part of the process of moving these super heavy materials only makes sense. And this, while this is not direct evidence that they were moving stone with river, the fact that they all line up along this extinct river branch just makes sense that that's what they would use. I mean, people are still people and they're going to use the path of least resistance, right? Like that is the easiest way to do it. So
00:18:44
Speaker
Yeah. It just helps fill in that picture of how they were doing this. Please, can we remove the A word from the table? Was not involved. There was. Arabs? No. I don't even want to say it, but aliens, like that kind of thing. We just need to remove that. These people were so smart. They had engineers that were amazing. They were completely able to figure out how to do all of this.
00:19:12
Speaker
just using the power of their minds and their landscape. And this is just more evidence to help clarify the picture of how exactly they did that.
00:19:21
Speaker
Yeah, it was pretty cool. And I mean, just using the power of water. And it just makes me wonder, I want to see some alternative history fiction or something like that, where like 4,700 BC, where they're floating these big heavy rocks and stones down the river and building these pyramids, where somebody's just like, just builds a wheel and starts moving water. And then somebody's like, hey, accidentally invents electricity. And then all of a sudden you've got Egyptian steampunk.
00:19:51
Speaker
3,000 B.C. Why not? Why didn't they invent electricity back then? Imagine what our world would look like if electricity had been invented 5,000 years ago. Where would we be right now? It would be really cool to see an alternate history where that happened. Why did that take so long? It's a necessity thing.
00:20:13
Speaker
It's also an invention kind of thing. They don't know you need it until it's invented. They didn't invent electricity because they needed it. They didn't even know to think of it though, I guess. I understand that, but it's not like it was invented because it was needed. The steam engine wasn't invented because it was needed.
00:20:29
Speaker
things were invented because somebody said, I want to, you know, I'm tinkering with this thing and look what happened. Well, that is some inventions, but some inventions are, I need to do this thing better than it's being done right now. And so need does drive that invention. I mean, when they're rocking around down on the catacombs with torches, you don't think somebody's going, there's got to be a better way.
00:20:47
Speaker
You know, they're in the middle of a pyramid going, I can't even see the walls right now, seriously? Have you not seen like every movie ever where there's all these oil lamps built into the wall and you light one point and it lights up the whole room? Obviously they figured it out. That's oil driven electricity. Oil driven electricity. Well, maybe they couldn't figure it out because pharaohs were just building royal retreats and not focusing on inventions. Back in a minute. They kind of went off the rails.
00:21:18
Speaker
Welcome back to the Egyptology show, episode 264. We need an Egyptology
Royal Retreat Discovery at Tel Hebwa
00:21:23
Speaker
show. If there are any Egyptologists listening, you probably turn it off by now. Yeah, probably. You probably hate everything we said. Yeah, but if you're still listening and you're just angrily writing out an email right now, instead, turn it into a proposal for a podcast. Yeah, totally. That would be amazing. Send it to Tristan.
00:21:41
Speaker
Archaeology Podcast Network.com. There you go. Anyway, so this next one is from all over the internet, but we have two sources, one from archaeology.org, the Archaeological Institute of America, and also from Newsweek. The Newsweek article is, archaeologists discover ancient Egyptian pharaohs fortified royal retreat.
00:22:01
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm going to explain what I was just telling you before we started recording that I found this article and I pulled in the Newsweek article first because I was like, oh, it's so much longer. There's probably a lot more information here. And I was reading through it and kind of filling in our notes for this segment. And I was like, you know, this is kind of like fluffy and like very surface level information about the site. So then I went to the archaeology article and
00:22:26
Speaker
There's one paragraph, right? One paragraph compared to this much longer Newsweek article. And in that one paragraph, they concisely share so much more information about this site. So I would say if you don't have time to read two articles and only want to read one, go for the archaeology one. It's much more concise and you'll get all the information you need. Anyway, that being said, let's talk about it. That's right.
00:22:49
Speaker
difference in journalism, right? Exactly. Like the archaeology one is just much more like science focused and then the Newsweek one, you know, they probably just went to the archaeology one and pulled out some details and then filled it in with all this like other fluffy stuff. Yes. Yeah. Indeed. Well, they got the clicks from us. They did. And now we're sending them more. You're welcome. That's right. All right. Well, this particular retreat, I guess, discovered at the archaeological site of Tel Hebwa in the north of the Sinai Peninsula.
00:23:18
Speaker
Yeah, and preliminary research indicates it dates to the reign of King Tutmos III, who was the sixth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty of the New Kingdom period. That is so much, but ancient Egypt is so big and lasted for so long that they have to break it out into smaller chunks like that. That's how time travelers are going to find Egypt. That's their address.
00:23:42
Speaker
I'm so funny to me. I don't know why like I could just see like sitting in a time travel machine and like typing in like 6th Pharaoh 18th Dynasty New Kingdom Go 6th 8th
00:23:59
Speaker
Okay, off the rails again. This is why we shouldn't podcast in the morning while we're drinking coffee. It's better than podcasting and drinking wine. Maybe it is. He was awesome. He rained from 1479 BCE until he died in 1425 BCE, which is a long time, over 50 years.
00:24:19
Speaker
Yeah, he is known as Thutmose the Great because he was an excellent military commander and through various campaigns he expanded the Egyptian Empire to its greatest extent. So he did a lot of conquering. Yeah, I don't think his neighbors thought he was Thutmose the Great. Maybe not so much. I think he was Thutmose the not so awesome. Thutmose the oh crap here he comes again.
00:24:43
Speaker
Yeah, he definitely was good for Egypt, but maybe not anywhere else, so. Yeah, Temple's the great pain in the ass. Yeah. It's all about perspective. Yes, it totally is. Anyway, they're calling this place the Royal Rest House because of both the layout and the lack of part of your shirts, which is interesting. By the way, Newsweek said shards. Oh, did they really? They did. Oh, Newsweek. Yeah. It's okay. They probably saw shards in whatever article they wrote, and it's like, typo. And they're like, oh, typo.
00:25:12
Speaker
Yeah. They hypothesized he used it during his military campaigns to expand Egypt to the east. The structure was made of mud brick, which is like lots of structures there. Yes, that's pretty common, I think. Yeah. The entrance is located on the northern side and led to a large hall with three columns, the first of two halls. Yeah.
00:25:30
Speaker
And then this hall connected to a smaller one with entrances that were flanked by columns. And you can see that in the picture. There's a pretty good image in both of the articles that we linked to of just like that sort of perfect cleaned off image of an excavated archaeological site, right? And there's like these little white round spots in some of the areas. And I think that those are the columns that they're referring to. Yeah, I think that that is the large hall because that's got
00:25:56
Speaker
three columns I see in the image. And then the thing I'm guessing the smaller hall is not actually in this picture, but, or maybe it is cause the scale, the scale is pretty big, isn't it on that one? Yeah. So anyway, look at the picture. You'll see the whole, the whole thing cleaned off and all pretty for its picture day.
00:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, just for anyone looking at the Newsweek article, that scale rod that's in the lower left-hand corner, you can see that that's got 10 divisions, which tells me that that's probably 10 centimeters per division, which means it's probably a meter. That's probably a meter, yeah. Yeah, so if you're trying to figure out where that's going, it's probably a meter, so. Yeah.
00:26:33
Speaker
Anyway, they try to, anytime they don't say what the scale is in the photo, which they probably do in the actual article. Probably, yeah. You usually list what your scale is, but if they don't, then it's put some standard unit of measurement, which has got to be a meter. And it does, just to point out really quick, it does seem like this is sort of a preliminary press release situation. I don't think that this is reporting on the actual like scientific article or journal or whatever that's been written yet. It's just a, Hey, look what we found kind of thing.
00:26:59
Speaker
which is another thing that archaeologists hate about Egyptologists. They do a lot of this press release. It's not necessarily even Egyptologists. It's more like the Antiquities Department of Egypt. They love releasing press releases because Egyptology is the thing that ... It drives their tourism. It drives their tourism, which you've got to appreciate. It brings in funding. It brings in all kinds of stuff. But a lot of other places just ...
00:27:22
Speaker
It's very preliminary and you're drawing conclusions about something that you can't really say for sure yet because you don't have the actual evidence, the scientific evidence to back it up yet. Now the conclusions that you're drawing might be true or accurate. It's just they're not proven yet. So anyway, I can see the problems, but also like it's just really nice to see a country that takes such pride in its ancient history and wants to share it with the world. So I can appreciate it from that respect.
00:27:52
Speaker
Yeah, this entire structure was protected by a perimeter wall. And this other fact here, which is even more interesting to me, was that there were also burials related to later periods in Egyptian history that date to 1070 and 713 BCE. Between 1070. Between. Which either way is still 500 years later or more. And I'm like, so was this structure in use around then? Was it just known about in there? Why would you bury people around it?
00:28:20
Speaker
What's going on there? They think that it was sort of just opportunistic. From my reading of it, that's what I understood. It was sort of an opportunistic use of this structure as a cemetery later on. That's weird. When it was abandoned by the people that originally built it, you know? I don't know. It's strange.
00:28:38
Speaker
Yeah, but really cool to see a structure that is potentially connected to a pharaoh, and yet so far from where the pharaoh's hub would have been, right? This is not near Cairo. This is in the Sinai Peninsula, which is that sort of little dingleberry that's off to the side for Egypt. Should I take that out? Maybe I shouldn't say that. All of Egypt would love that you called the Sinai Peninsula a place with 10,000 years of history.
00:29:07
Speaker
I'm going to edit that out. I'm not leaving it in. No, I'm not going to do it. But anyway, so yeah, it is quite far from where the seat of the empire would have been. So yeah. All right. Well, I think that's enough Egyptology for today. Yeah. Again, if you are an Egyptologist and you're listening to this, sorry, first off, second.
00:29:26
Speaker
If you hated everything you heard, please call me, or not call me, what is it? Wow, hello. What is it, 1999? 1992? Yeah, 1992, oh, frame of reference, yeah. But email me, chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com, and let's do an Egyptology podcast. Yeah. Yeah, there's plenty to talk about. Yeah, I think that would be amazing. Yeah.
Invitation for Egyptology Podcast Ideas
00:29:44
Speaker
All right, well, with that, I think we will do one little plug for members so we can afford an Egyptology podcast and arkpodnet.com forward slash members. You know, a couple of times I've actually typed that in just to make sure that's working and it redirects to archaeologypodcastnetwork.com's homepage.
00:30:02
Speaker
So, if for some reason that doesn't work, just archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash members. Arcpodnet.com is something we also own, but occasionally it will just redirect itself back to the homepage no matter what you type in. Honestly, you can get to it just by clicking on the link in the show notes to go to the show, and then if you try to log in,
00:30:22
Speaker
it's not going to let you. And then you can just create an account right there if you're interested in becoming a member. And if you want to know more about what you get from member page, just click on any link to go to our homepage or to the APN webpage. Click shop in the upper right hand corner and you'll see membership of the APN as something you can buy. And it tells you what benefits you get. Yeah. I mean, the biggest benefit is just that it's a donation to us to help us keep this going. And podcasting is
00:30:50
Speaker
Not free, but we make all the content for free, so it's just helpful. It costs as much as a four-shot flavored grande latte with extra stuff on it from Starbucks. One per month. If you can give up one of those and do this instead. Yeah. Then you're furthering archeological education in the world. Yeah, I agree.
00:31:13
Speaker
Wow, that little pledge drive just like went to like massive guilt trip. All right. I might edit that out too, we'll see. No, no, no. All right, with that, we're going to go, you know, beg for scraps until we get more members. Now we're going to go hike to a waterfall. Oh yeah, because we're going to do that instead. Yeah. Okay, bye. Bye.
00:31:40
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:32:03
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.