Talking Pyramids: Ancient Egyptian Pyramids

The re-wrapping of the mummy of the Anonymous Man was carried out in early February by the team from the Brooklyn Museum. We saw some of the live coverage of the re-wrapping here on Talking Pyramids.

Today they’ve released the batch of photos from the fourth day of the re-wrapping and you can see all of the photos from all four days on their Flickr stream.

Curator Ed Bleiberg and Conservators compare documentation to final form.

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Work is underway at Giza to complete the Grand Egyptian Museum by 2012

This week we return once again to the Giza plateau with this recent observation. Talking Pyramids reader and explorer Leszek Zadlo snapped this photo of some large earth moving trucks on the south-west corner of the plateau. They appear to be working in the area of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), the construction of which is currentlly underway.

Over eight years after personally laying the foundation stone, Culture Minister Farouk Hosni signed the contract last month for phase 3 of the GEM’s construction. According to Hosni, this phase would be completed in 26 months, in time for the opening of the museum around June 2012.

“It will be the biggest cultural project in the world…a cultural high dam that fulfills Egyptians’ dreams and belongs to the whole world.”

More information:
Dr Zahi Hawass: Grand Egyptian Museum
Egypt State Information Service: Culture Ministry inks contract with GEM managers
Photo of Giza by Leszek Zadlo. All rights reserved.

Following on from Thursday’s post I’d like to focus a bit more on the Pyramid Texts found in Queen Behenu’s recently discovered burial chamber.

Offering texts on the north wall of the Unas sarcophagus chamber. Photo by Helmut Satzinger.

I’ve been investigating the particular way in which the Pyramid Texts are arranged in Behenu’s pyramid. Confining the analysis to just the one section of the north wall of Behenu’s sarcophagus chamber I began translating the middle section as it is the easiest to see.

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Astronaut Soichi Noguchi is currently flying through space aboard the International Space Station and he is using Twitter to communicate with us Earthlings. He goes by the name: @Astro_Soichi

He has just posted a photo of the pyramids at Dahshur. The Red pyramid and the Bent pyramid can easily be seen from space:

YES, you can see pyramid from space :-) Late afternoon in Egypt.

Read Soichi Noguchi’s tweets at his his Twitter page.
View Soichi Noguchi’s Twitter photos
View a satellite photo of Dahshur on the Dahshur page.

The Pyramid Texts were first discovered in 1880 inside the Pyamid of Unas by Gaston Maspero. Unas was the first pyramid to be inscribed with the famous corpus of texts and of the inscribed pyramids, Unas is considered to contain the most complete form of the texts. Maspero published the texts from the pyramids of Unas, Teti, Pepi I, Merenre, and Pepi II before the discovery of the other five tombs. Actually, it was only the texts of Unas that were published in their entirety as the other four pyramids had not been completely cleared of rubble at that time and were only partially recorded.

Some of the blue colouring that remains on the hieroglyphs in the pyramid of Unas

There are ten pyramids in all that have parts of the Pyramid Texts inscribed on their walls, the other five being excavated by French expeditions in the early 20th century. The ten pyramids in chronological order are:

Unas (Dynasty V, ca. 2352-2323 B.C.)
Teti (Dynasty VI, ca. 2323-2291 B.C.)
Pepi I (Dynasty VI, ca. 2289-2255 B.C.)
Ankhesenpepi II, wife of Pepi I
Merenre (Dynasty VI, ca. 225-2246 B.C.)
Pepi II (Dynasty VI, ca. 2246-2152 B.C.)
Neith,wife of Pepi II
Iput II, wife of Pepi II
Wedjebetni, wife of Pepi II
Ibi (Dynasty VII, ca. 2109-2107 B.C.)

It wasn’t until 2001 that the pyramid of Ankhesenpepi was cleared and found to contain Pyramid Texts. Each additional pyramid discovered containing the texts adds to our knowledge and understanding of these enigmatic utterances.

With the discovery of portions of the Pyramid Texts inside the pyramid of Behenu, wife of Pepi I or Pepi II, the number of pyramids known to contain the magical texts rises by one more.

Photo Unas Blue, by Jon Bodsworth

Pyramid Texts from the north wall

Although badly damaged, the walls are covered in texts which contain the name of the tomb’s owner, ‘Behenu’, thought to be the Queen of either Pepi I or Pepi II, and dates to the Sixth Dynasty over 4000 years ago.

Leader of the French team Dr Philippe Collombert, said that it is not clear whether Behenu was the queen of Pepi I or Pepi II, who’s pyramids are also in the South Saqqara region.

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First Steps into Khufu's Pyramid, by Sean Ellis

Access to the interior of the Great Pyramid is not through the original entrance as many would think. That entrance is now sealed with a locked gate and instead, tourists enter through the crude tunnel dug by Calif Mamun and his men when they broke into the pyramid in 820 A.D.

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