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| Ancient Egyptian Art and Culture |
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EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY |
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During
the late 18th and early 19th century, research of Egyptian history
began. People became fascinated
with ancient cultures, including Greece, Rome, and Egypt. During the
French Revolution in
1798, Napoleon Bonaparte and his troops, found themselves stranded
in Egypt after defeating the British army. Though they were trapped
in Egypt for 3 years, Napoleon had brought 150 scientists with
him to study Egypt. Much of our knowledge of the country came out of
their studies. Since that time, ancient Egypt has interested archaeologists and historians from all over the world. For the last 200 years, excavations and research in Egypt continues and understanding of the culture comes from the study of tomb paintings, artifacts, mummies, and hieroglyphics. Various scientific breakthroughs have led to greater understanding of the culture of Egypt under the pharaohs that lasted for almost 3000 years. |
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| Carbon-14 Dating |
| One way scientists are able to date mummies and artifacts from ancient Egypt is through carbon-14 dating. This process measures the amount of carbon-14, a chemical element made from living material, in an artifact. This includes wood, linen and human remains. After a living material has died, the amount of carbon-14 gradually declines over time. By measuring the amount of carbon-14 in an artifact it is possible to know how long ago it lived. |
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| The Rosetta Stone |
| During the occupation of Egypt by Napoleon, various structures were built to provide soldiers with places to live and train. Near the town of Rosetta, a young French soldier found a block of stone which contained three bands of writing in three different languages. One language, ancient Greek, was known to modern scholars. The second, demotic, was not familiar to them, and the third, hieroglyphics, was a complete unknown. It was first deciphered through comparing the known and unknown languages. Many linguists (people who study languages) and historians attempted to translate hieroglyphics. Although it took almost 25 years, a scientist named Jean Champollion finally broke the code of the hieroglyphics by matching up the names of the pharaohs in their cartouches with the names in Demotic and Greek, a process of learning the phonetic sounds of different images and the words represented by individual symbols. The Rosetta Stone is now on display in the British Museum in London. |
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| X-Rays and CT-Scans |
| Many people are familiar with x-rays. X-rays allow doctors to look inside the human body without making an incision. A CT (computer tomography) scanner examines objects in thin sections and displays each section or "slice" on a high-resolution, black and white television screen. These images can then be transferred to film and viewed like conventional x-rays with a light box. When viewing photographs of CT scans note that the dense area such as bone appear white, and areas that are not dense, like air, are black. Structures such as resin, used in mummification, as varying shades of grey. The mummies at the Albany Institue were x-rayed and scanned in 1988 (9). |
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| Scientific Study |
| The Manchester Museum in Manchester, England, has a large collection of mummies, animals, and artifacts from ancient Egypt. Over the last 30 years they have begun to try to use science to learn more about the mummies and their lives. Recently the museum has begun the Egyptian Mummy Tissue Bank. This bank will hold tissue samples from collection of Egyptian mummies worldwide. The tissue can be used for various studies, including trying to discover the cause of a disease called schistosomiasis. This disease still affects as many as 300 million people in the world today. The Albany Institute's mummies have already been included in the tissue bank. |
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