The Egyptian archaeological mission under the authority of the Supreme Council of Antiquities has brought to light, during excavation work carried out in the archaeological area of Kom el-Khilgan, in the Dakahlia Governorate, a necropolis whose origins date back to the Predynastic Period and whose use continued through the Greek and Roman eras, together with […]

The silvery fur of the hamadryas baboon is, under a spectrometer, nearly the exact color of moonlight, which may explain why ancient Egyptians made a monkey the face of their moon god, according to a new study in Time and Mind.

The work, from biological anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy of Dartmouth College and primatologist Catherine Hobaiter of the University of St Andrews, takes an old Egyptological question and points an instrument at it. Thoth, god of the moon, writing, and magic, had two sacred animals: the ibis and the baboon. The ibis makes sense. A curved beak echoing a crescent, white plumage the same color as the moon’s glow.

The baboon, however, has long “defied explanation,” as one Egyptologist put it; the key problem being that baboons didn’t live in Egypt.

Egypt’s pantheon features many local creatures, from the jackals that haunted its cemeteries to the cow that stood in for the mother goddess Hathor. But no wild baboon has ever been found in Holocene Egypt. The hundreds recovered from tombs and temples were all imports, carried in by ship from somewhere down the Red Sea coast. Of all the animal gods, the baboon is the only foreigner.

“Why would two such different animals be used to represent one deity? Most other Egyptian deities are represented by just one type of animal. Ancient Egyptians were familiar with at least three species of ibis, but they chose the white one for embodying Thoth. They were also familiar with two species of baboon, along with vervet monkeys and patas monkeys, but again they chose the silver-white species,” explained lead author Professor Catherine Hobaiter in a press statement.

According to the study, the Egyptians were picky. They knew two species of baboon and three of ibis, and each time they deified only one of each.

“Sacred ibises and hamadryas baboons are different in many ways, but one thing that unites them is their moon-like colour,” Hobaiter said.

To test whether color was the thread, the team recorded reflectance spectra from the hair of 12 baboon specimens at the American Museum of Natural History and lined them up against the measured spectrum of moonlight. The olive baboon came back green, peaking around 525 to 650 nanometers (which is precisely why it is called the olive baboon). The hamadryas came back silver-gray, roughly 65 percent brighter, with a curve the authors call “indistinguishable from moonlight.”

 

According to the study and historical records, the living emblem of Thoth is not just the hamadryas but the mature male, with his heavy silver shoulder mantle and white cheek ruffs. This head of hair is so reflective the authors clock it as brighter than a golden lion tamarin, a monkey practically famous for glowing. The Germans noticed too. Their name for the animal is Silberpavian, the silver baboon.

There is a stranger layer beneath the color. Egyptians kept baboons in their temples partly to watch them, because the animals seemed to answer to the moon. There are historical records which indicate that male baboons in Egypt, during a fifth-century solar eclipse, fell into a state of “grief” and, according to the ancient writer, entered a sort of trance of reverence. 

Modern ethologists watching zoo baboons during the 2017 total eclipse logged something uncomfortably close: activity falling away, the animals going quiet and huddling together. The Egyptians, in effect, may have kept a small colony of living eclipse detectors and read their unease as devotion.

History being what it is, and not an exact science, the authors are careful not to pretend that their findings are direct evidence as to why Ancient Egyptians made gods of baboons. A spectrometer can confirm that a baboon is the color of moonlight. It cannot confirm that the color is why anyone bowed to it. The argument rests on a 2024 etymology tracing Thoth’s name to a word meaning roughly “bright-thing.”

There is also an irony the study mostly steps around. The male’s silver mantle did not evolve to look like the moon; it evolved as a sexual signal, a way for dominant males to advertise themselves to other baboons. The Egyptians took a mating ornament and read it as a message from the sky.

That may be the most human thing in the whole account. The Egyptians were meticulous observers who noticed that one animal, in one sex, at one particular brightness, resembled the thing they worshiped, and decided the resemblance meant something.

One of those baboons even has a name. Harnufi was brought to Egypt in the sixth year of Ptolemy V and entombed 31 years later, on September 6, 168 BC. Someone counted out his life in years, mummified him, and laid him down as a small gray piece of the moon.

The archaeological mission under the Supreme Council of Antiquities has uncovered, during its first excavation campaign at the Tell Nasser archaeological area, a comprehensive complex of bathing facilities dating back to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. The site is located approximately 40 kilometers south of the city of Port Said, 35 kilometers north of the […]

Thousands of years ago, a striking blue pigment began appearing in the art that adorned the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs, and eventually on the crown of the famous bust of Nefertiti, wife of the 18th dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten and half-sister to one of Ancient Egypt’s most famous kings: Tutankhamun.

However, the ancient artists who first used this remarkable pigment, known today as “Egyptian blue,” had likely never guessed that thousands of years into the future, this unique substance would have applications in modern biomedical research.

That is precisely what one team of researchers discovered several years ago, in a study that revealed how this striking pigment is more than just a modern medical marvel with origins in the ancient world—it also provides evidence of ancient nanotechnology in early Egypt.

The Enigma of Egyptian Blue

“Egyptian blue” is the common term for a pigment first developed in ancient Egypt around 2500 B.C., made from calcium copper silicate. Originally, it was created to provide an artificial alternative to a more costly form of blue pigment from the era, which was produced using lapis lazuli.

However, ancient Egyptian scientists discovered that by heating limestone, sand, and copper, they could produce a far less expensive form of blue pigment, and soon its use spread throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, making its way into the craftsmanship in parts of the ancient world that ranged from Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome.

An Ancient Technology Finds Modern Biomedical Applications

Although Egyptian blue’s obvious practical uses in art were derived from its unique and stunning appearance, time would eventually reveal that it had other uses. Specifically, in a 2020 study published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers reported on their discovery that Egyptian blue in its powdered form can be separated into nanoscale sheets roughly 100,000 times thinner than a human hair.

This is significant because these tiny particles of the substance exhibit significant fluorescence under near-infrared light, which can be used by researchers to track them within biological samples.

Chemist Sebastian Kruss of Georg-August University Göttingen, the lead author of the 2020 study, remarked at the time that he was certain such capabilities “will be of growing interest for material scientists as well as biomedical research” in the years ahead.

Ancient Nanotech’s Survival Through the Centuries

One reason the pigment is so useful is also the likely reason behind its discovery, and that is Egyptian blue’s durability. For many millennia, samples of this unique material have managed to survive, and the material’s nanoscale form remains stable even over such long periods.

In the past, earlier studies had demonstrated that the material fluoresces in near-infrared wavelengths. Additionally, it was known to scientists that the pigment could be broken down into flakes after being stirred in hot water for periods of several days.

Building on this knowledge, the research detailed in the 2020 paper sought to go even further by examining whether those particles could function as fluorescent markers in living systems.

Near-Infrared Applications

One thing that scientists find useful about near-infrared imaging is that it provides an effective way to examine biological material by leveraging wavelengths that fall just beyond the ranges of the visible spectrum.

Although some molecules can already be used as fluorescent markers, Egyptian blue nanoparticles generate significantly brighter signals than several common alternatives. Additionally, unlike other fluorescent compounds, the pigment can resist photobleaching, which is important because this allows its glow to persist even during prolonged observation.

A pair of experiments was used by the team to demonstrate the material’s potential. The first involved using Egyptian blue particles injected within a fruit fly embryo, which were tracked as it developed. In another, the particles were added to plant leaves, allowing comparisons with the performance of a conventional near-infrared imaging molecule.

In this experiment, the team found that the Egyptian blue produced a bright signal that remained visible even against the leaves’ natural fluorescence—the comparison molecule, by contrast, was heavily obscured.

According to Kruss, the tiny Egyptian Blue particles prove to be “very useful glowing labels in biomedical research,” calling the pigment a “very powerful fluorophore.”

An Ancient Discovery Breaking New Ground in the 21st Century

According to Kruss and his colleagues, such particles could eventually help scientists observe processes including embryonic development and cell division, while potentially supporting applications such as image-guided surgery and the labeling of cancerous tissue.

Altogether, this enigmatic form of ancient nanotechnology is still playing a role in helping develop the cutting-edge biomedical technologies of tomorrow, even more than 5,000 years after its initial discovery.

Kruss and his team’s original paper from 2020, “Exfoliated near infrared fluorescent silicate nanosheets for (bio)photonics,” was published in Nature.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

A “cursed” ancient Roman tablet, intended to invoke divine and demonic wrath upon one’s enemies, has been deciphered by researchers at Heidelberg University in Germany.

The magical lead tablet, originally discovered by Dutch archaeologists in the Netherlands, was crafted in the second century AD. Strangely, it is written in ancient Greek, although in an Egyptian style, rather than the Latin that would be expected for what was then a Roman province of Lower Germania.

Today, the excavation site within the city of Heerlen in the southeast of the Netherlands, near the German border, is home to the country’s largest ancient Roman ruins.

Curse Tablets

The object is not entirely unique, as it belongs to a category of curse tablets called katadesmoi in Greek and defixiones in Latin. The Greeks and Romans believed that cold, heavy iron was especially useful in binding supernatural entities, making it the go-to material for crafting such objects.

As this artifact’s material was both cold and heavy, it reminded ancient people of the bleak underworld. Additionally, lead is also easy to work with in practice, as it is both inexpensive and easy to inscribe.

These small tablets were typically inscribed with curses and then buried, with the intention of bringing misfortune upon rivals in matters of sport, law, or love.

At the time the tablet was created, Heerlen was a Roman military settlement known as Coriovallum. Dutch archaeologists unearthed the 9.3-by-4.8-centimeter katadesmos from a pit beneath the former town square.

Deciphering an Ancient Curse

Researchers at the University of Heidelberg’s Institute for Papyrology used reflectance transformation imaging, a technique that combines photographs taken under different lighting conditions to enhance subtle surface details. Their analysis revealed three distinct types of characters within the inscription.

The combination of Egyptian-style invocations of deities and demons written in ancient Greek is highly unusual for a region where Latin was the dominant written language. Also notable are three symbols known as “Characteres”—magical symbols believed to facilitate communication with supernatural entities—along with two male and two female names.

Dr. Rodney Ast, Academic Director of the Institute for Papyrology, suggests that these four individuals were either the targets of the curse or those on whose behalf it was created. However, Dr. Julia Lougovaya, a research associate at the institute, notes that the male names are Latin while the female names are Greek, a distinction that may hold additional significance.

“It cannot be ruled out that one of the two women was the author of the inscription and had brought the supposed ability to communicate with divine powers through such curses with her from Roman Egypt,” said Dr. Lougovaya.

Ancient Magical Practices

Magic played an important role in Egyptian society, where rituals aimed at healing and protection formed a visible part of religious life, while malicious spells were typically practiced more discreetly.

“In the early centuries A.D., Near Eastern, Egyptian, Jewish, and sometimes even Christian traditions increasingly merged and spread throughout the entire Roman Empire of that time – a development that the discovery from Heerlen impressively underscores,” explained Prof. Joachim Quack, Director of the Institute for Egyptology at Heidelberg University.

A forthcoming scholarly publication will provide the full transcription of the inscription and details of the analysis. The tablet is also scheduled to go on display at a museum in Heerlen in the future.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

A joint expedition to the ancient Egyptian city of Elkab has unearthed several previously unknown ancient rock art inscriptions, including what the team believes are the earliest known monumental Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Written over 1,000 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed, these ancient Egyptian writings, discovered by archaeologists from Yale University and the Royal Museums of Art and History (Brussels), laid the foundation for the later, better-known hieroglyphic writing system.

Yale Professor John Coleman Darnell, the expedition’s leader and the co-director of the Elkab Desert Survey Project, said the newly discovered inscriptions, which were not recorded by any previous scientific expedition, include samples as far back as 4,000 BCE.

Although the team concedes that these are not the first examples of this specific style of rock art, they are the first of this ancient age and “monumental” scale, making them of great significance in the history of ancient Egyptian writing systems.

“This was not what I was expecting to find when I set out on this period of work on the expedition,” Professor Darnell said of the historic find. “It was completely shocking to me.”

Earliest Monumental Egyptian Hieroglyphs Depict Cosmological Concepts

In a Yale news story announcing the discovery, Professor Darnell noted that the newly discovered rock art site of El-Khawy preserved some of the earliest and largest signs “from the formative stages of the hieroglyphic script.” The professor added that the discovery includes “rare” evidence for how this enigmatic ancient society invented its internationally recognized ancient writing system.

The expedition, which was directed by Darnell and Dirk Huyge, was undertaken in cooperation with the Ministry of Antiquities and the Aswan and Edfu inspectorates.

After photographing the newly discovered inscription, Darnell and Alberto Urcia, a digital archaeologist and associate research scientist in the University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, created a series of three-dimensional (3D) images. Darnell said the new technology allows archaeologists to record ancient sites and artworks “at a level of accuracy and detail that was absolutely impossible before.”

“It also means that we can record the site as a place, or a location, and not just as a series of inscriptions,” the professor added.

One of the more noteworthy examples of ancient monumental hieroglyphs, carved sometime between 4,000 and 3,500 BCE, depicted a herd of elephants. A closer examination also revealed that one of the elephants had an image of a smaller elephant inside of it, which Professor Darnell described as “an incredibly rare way of representing a pregnant female animal.”

A second discovery detailed by the joint expedition, which consists of four separate panels, was likely created sometime around 3,250 BCE. Written right to left, which ultimately became the dominant writing form in later Egyptian hieroglyphic languages, the panels show animal images of a bull’s head on a short pole, followed by two back-to-back saddlebill storks with a bald ‘ibis’ bird above and between them.

The research team said this arrangement of symbols is common in Egyptian representations created centuries after the newly discovered panels depicting the solar cycle. These same depictions typically include imagery of luminosity. Darnell suggested that the images may also express “the concept of royal authority over the ordered cosmos.”

“This is the First Time That Anyone Has Seen Them on Such a Massive Scale”

When discussing the importance of the new find, Professor Darnell noted the immense size of the individual tableaus and their elements. For example, each individual hieroglyph identified by the Yale-led team measures over half a meter in height. The professor also noted that the entire tableau “is about 70 centimeters (27.5 inches) in height,” whereas previously discovered signs of early Egyptian hieroglyphs were “only one or two centimeters in size.”

“This discovery isn’t new in the sense that this is the first time that anyone has seen these hieroglyphs,” Darnell explained, “this is the first time that anyone has seen them on such a massive scale.”

To offer a perspective on the discovery’s significance, the professor said a modern-world equivalent would be seeing smaller text displayed on your computer screen, “and then suddenly seeing very large ones made the same way,” only displayed up on a highway billboard.

When discussing the site’s location in the northeastern desert hinterland of Elkab, Darnell noted that it was a “very important” center in ancient Egypt, which demonstrates that the area’s budding communicative system “is not limited to the more commonly found small tokens or labels.”

The professor also said the study shows that ancient writing did not develop slowly “for bureaucratic use,” as researchers had previously believed. Instead, Darnell suggested that the discovery shows hieroglyphic-style writing “was more geographically widespread and topically diverse at the time of or shortly after its development.”

“This also suggests that there is a much more expansive use of the early writing system than is indicated from other surviving archaeological material,” the professor added.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

For more than four and a half millennia, the Khufu Pyramid has stood on the Giza plateau, enduring dozens of earthquakes without serious structural damage.

The post Great Pyramid of Giza’s Design Naturally Shields It from Earthquakes, Archaeologists Say appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.