The Eloquent Peasant

Most people have heard the famous story about how Rameses the Great’s temple at Abu Simbel was rescued from being submerged entirely by the rising waters of Lake Nasser caused by the Aswan Dam project. The entire temple was dismantled and relocated block by block to higher ground in a project that cost 80 million […]

From a wonderful collection of aerial photographs over Luxor, an incongruously colourful but sad view of the bulldozed village.

A blockbuster exhibition of the treasures of Tutankhamun and other ancient Egyptian artefacts from the Cairo Museum has been travelling the world recently. However, the one thing that everyone wants to see, one of the most iconic artworks of all time, will not be on display.
The last time Tut’s treasures travelled, almost thirty years ago, […]

I heard from someone in Egypt that many Gurna houses have been ruthlessly bulldozed and that their violent destruction has more than likely damaged beyond repair any unknown tombs that might still have survived beneath them. So much for relocation for the sake of archaeology!

A short while ago, I had the privilege of being given a tour of the Griffith Institute Archives here in Oxford by its director, Dr. Jaromir Malek. It is one of the most renowned Egyptological archives in the world and it houses among many other things, all the personal papers of Howard Carter, the excavator […]