Excavations Unearth Massacre at Royal City
Tim Radford
Guardian Unlimited, UK
__________________
Cairo (Egypt):
Archaeologists have begun to piece together the story of a mysterious massacre more than 4,000 years ago in the former royal city of Mendes, which flourished for 20 centuries on a low mound overlooking the green fields and papyrus marshes of the Nile delta north of Cairo.
Donald Redford of Pennsylvania State University had begun to excavate the foundations of a huge temple linked to Rameses II, the pharaoh traditionally linked to the biblical story of Moses, when he found an earlier structure destroyed by fire, and evidence of a grisly episode of death on the Nile, he told a Bloomsbury Academy conference in London on Saturday.
"We were under the misapprehension that it was a new temple on a new site," he said. "But in fact I sunk a trench below the existing temple and was really surprised beyond belief by what I found. There was a late Old Kingdom structure of some sort, a great mud brick platform 40 metres wide, on which a temple had once stood."
Under the fire-scorched rubble, the scientists discovered the first of at least 36 bodies, victims of some brutal event 40 centuries ago.
"We thought they had died where they were. But it has now become apparent that they were killed elsewhere and thrown in front of the podium. The mud brick of the burning temple cascaded over them. They were covered up and never retrieved. So there is a certain amount of foul play here."
They found old and young, men and women, tumbled in disordered heaps. In a civilisation that made a cult of death, such discoveries are rare: even the poorest were interred formally, and with some provision for the afterlife.
The arid, baking climate of Egypt helps in preservation. But the discovery of human remains in one of the cities of the delta - annually flooded by the Nile, and in some parts inundated for 10 months of the year - astonished the researchers.
Nov 7, 2005
Tim Radford
Guardian Unlimited, UK
__________________
Cairo (Egypt):
Archaeologists have begun to piece together the story of a mysterious massacre more than 4,000 years ago in the former royal city of Mendes, which flourished for 20 centuries on a low mound overlooking the green fields and papyrus marshes of the Nile delta north of Cairo.
Donald Redford of Pennsylvania State University had begun to excavate the foundations of a huge temple linked to Rameses II, the pharaoh traditionally linked to the biblical story of Moses, when he found an earlier structure destroyed by fire, and evidence of a grisly episode of death on the Nile, he told a Bloomsbury Academy conference in London on Saturday.
"We were under the misapprehension that it was a new temple on a new site," he said. "But in fact I sunk a trench below the existing temple and was really surprised beyond belief by what I found. There was a late Old Kingdom structure of some sort, a great mud brick platform 40 metres wide, on which a temple had once stood."
Under the fire-scorched rubble, the scientists discovered the first of at least 36 bodies, victims of some brutal event 40 centuries ago.
"We thought they had died where they were. But it has now become apparent that they were killed elsewhere and thrown in front of the podium. The mud brick of the burning temple cascaded over them. They were covered up and never retrieved. So there is a certain amount of foul play here."
They found old and young, men and women, tumbled in disordered heaps. In a civilisation that made a cult of death, such discoveries are rare: even the poorest were interred formally, and with some provision for the afterlife.
The arid, baking climate of Egypt helps in preservation. But the discovery of human remains in one of the cities of the delta - annually flooded by the Nile, and in some parts inundated for 10 months of the year - astonished the researchers.
Nov 7, 2005
