Читать книгу The Golden Mask of King Tut The Code - Jesús Ariel Aguirre - Страница 9

News travels fast in the vicinity of Tell El Amarna, a discovery that has puzzled Egyptian archaeologists and the international community.

For 40 years the Emeritus Professor of Egyptology Barry Kemp from the University of Cambridge (UK) has directed the Amarna Project, whose systematic research on the site.

He directed excavations and investigations at the British Mission at Tell Amarna since 1977.

Amarna is the Arabic name of a region located on the eastern bank of the Nile River, famous for being the territory where the city of Ajetaton was built in the mid-fourteenth century BC.

Pharaoh Akhenaten gave the order to build this city in the fifth year of his reign, making it the capital of all Egypt, serving as a cult to the god Aton (Represented by the solar disk). The city was located right in the middle between Memphis and Thebes, both capitals of the ancient empire at different times.

Although it was destroyed by order of the pharaohs who succeeded it, even today in ruins, it contains two royal palaces, the South Palace and the North Palace, and the temples of Aton.

It has also been possible to collect information on the disappeared city since no other city was ever built on this site again, in the city the heads of the statue of Akhenaten and another of Queen Nefertiti were discovered.

Currently known as the Amarna archaeological site, 3,300 years of history are preserved there.

This city is known as the Pompeii of Egypt, covered for 3000 years by sand, Amarna was abandoned shortly after the death of Akhenaten.

At floor level, with a brush they remove the sand until the stone of the foundations of their buildings is exposed, thus it has been possible to make a plan of the Great Temple of Aton.

One of the main tourist attractions of Amarna are 25 rock-cut tombs, and the Royal Tomb TA26 itself, which display in their decoration a detailed pictorial record of Akhenaten’s court and life in the city.

Ajetaton stretched about 12 kilometers along the Nile and five inland. North of the urban center stood the largest temple, some 750 meters long by 300 meters wide. Ajetaton was not walled. In the center stood the Great Palace, in whose rooms with colorful walls, patios and cobbled paths.

Thomas returns to the excavations and while investigating one of the ancient cartridges, he has found an object that probably belonged to the 18th Dynasty, to the very mysterious Akhenaten, son Amenophis III, and father of King Tut.

Archeology professor Thomas Dee, Archeology and Egyptology study at the University of Cambridge and a doctorate with a thesis dedicated to the archaeological site of Tell el-Amarna. I subsequently investigated Akhenaten’s royal family as a researcher at the British Academy in New Gall, Cambridge. He is currently Professor of Egyptian Archeology at the Oxford University School of Archeology. He is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles on Ancient Egypt.

Right there in the excavations found a small funeral article very similar to that found in the valley are the kings in Luxor King Tut Ankh Amon, but is and is Realize or very beautiful stone blue faience 18.5 centimeters.

Fascinated by Egyptian history, a South African journalist Anne Lein, who works for the international chain CNN, who is accredited for the inauguration of the Great Egyptian Museum, persecutes the professor wherever he walks, she wants to be the first to write about the news of such a discovery, so he joins Professor Dee in search of answers.

The professor, after carefully analyzing the object, says that the object found is probably an ushabtis, part of those that were buried with Akhenaten first in Amarna and later taken to Thebes, to the Valley of the Kings.

Anne interrupts and asks ¿what were these Ushebtis?

Thomas tells him that they are small statues of the pharaoh, small mummiform figures, usually made of wood or earthenware, which were placed in the tomb with the intention that they would act as servants of the deceased and that, in this way; he did not have to work for eternity. Ushabtis is an Egyptian term that means “those who respond”, and they were devised as part of the funeral trousseau, the idea was to replace their owners in the tasks of farming and irrigation that could be required in lalu, that is, in the kingdom of Osiris , or as we commonly know it: in the “Beyond.”

The origin of these pieces is lost in time, but in Egypt it was not until Champollion managed to decipher the hieroglyphic writing, that we found the first approximation to the true meaning of these objects. We can consider that it is at that precise moment (year 1822), that the long journey of the study began that will lead to recovering and understanding the true meaning of the statuettes.

Thomas tells Anne that at first they were made for the deceased, over time as the different dynasties passed, large quantities of these statuettes were manufactured, as if they were in series, in the case of the pharaoh Tutankamon who had his disposition 365 ushabtis, one for each day of the year, 36 foremen, one for each crew of 10 workers, and 12 month bosses, one for each month of the year. This made a total of 413 ushabtis who served the king in the Hereafter.

There is a diversity of materials with which the ushabtis were made, among which are wood, faience and other materials such as terracotta, clay, wax, ceramics, copper, bronze, vitreous paste, stone in its different forms in use in Egypt (granite, in its different characteristics, especially pink, calcareous stone, calcite, serpentinite, quartzite, limestone, even alabaster). The height of the objects was between 20 and 25 centimeters.

They had hieroglyphic inscriptions that refer to the call, it is found on the legs.

They were generally kept in wooden boxes; they had a particularity, of having a vertical element that allowed them to be erect forever.

The way to activate the different funerary figures to carry out the tasks they had entrusted to them was through the recitation of certain magic formulas. Called “Formulas shabtis”. Later we will continue talking about this, when we talk about the holy books, you think, says Thomas to Lein.