CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
April 18, 1988 |
Workers cleaning the dusty tomb of Ramses II's beautiful Queen Nefertari have found a fragment of beaten gold jewelry that grave robbers and tourists apparently overlooked for 3,250 years. Resins clinging to the etched fragment indicate that it may have been attached originally to her missing mummy, Egyptian and U.S. officials said last week. The only other surviving legacy of Nefertari is the lid of her sarcophagus, on exhibit at the Turin Egyptian Museum in Italy.
November 5, 1994 |
Fresh flooding swept through southern Egypt on Friday, drenching 70 additional villages, seeping water into some of the historic tombs of the pharaohs and collapsing 500 houses on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor. And as survivors of a burning flood that surged from a fuel depot about 200 miles south of Cairo this week began burying their dead, the discovery of dozens of new corpses pushed the death toll from the bizarre tragedy to more than 500.
January 17, 2004 |
French scientists have found the first complete skeleton of a lion in a tomb in the Nile valley -- a discovery they say confirms the lion's sacred status in ancient Egypt. The adult male skeleton that was buried about 2,000 years ago was unearthed at Saqqara. It was near the entrance to the tomb of King Tutankhamen's wet nurse, they reported in the Jan. 15 issue of Nature.
April 13, 1989 |
Empress Dowager Nagako, Emperor Hirohito's widow, visited her husband's tomb for the first time Wednesday in her first trip outside the Imperial Palace in nearly seven months, a palace official said. The 86-year-old empress dowager rode in a passenger car from the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to Hirohito's hillside mausoleum in Hachioji about 30 miles away. She walked several yards to the tomb with the help of an aide. Emperor Hirohito died of cancer Jan. 7 at age 87. His widow did not attend the ceremonies because of ill health.
November 24, 1995 |
A moderate aftershock rattled the Middle East on Thursday, and caretakers of the Great Pyramids at Giza discovered that the previous day's deadly quake has spread slight cracks in a 5,000-year-old burial chamber. The 20-second, magnitude-5.4 aftershock was centered south of the Israeli resort of Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba, the same as the original quake Wednesday, Israel's Institute for Petroleum Research and Geophysics said.
September 23, 1992 |
The tomb of Tutankhamen, the celebrated burial place of an Egyptian boy king, is slated for conservation in a collaborative venture between the Getty Conservation Institute and the Egyptian Antiquities Organization. The challenge for the joint project, to be announced today at a press conference in Cairo, is to restore the cracked, flaking wall paintings in the 3,300-year-old tomb, located in the Valley of the Kings on the Nile River near Luxor.
July 7, 2007 |
Chinese researchers say they have found a strange pyramid-shape chamber while surveying the huge underground tomb of China's first emperor. Remote sensing equipment has revealed what appears to be a 100-foot-high room above Emperor Qin Shihuang's tomb near the ancient capital of Xi'an in Shaanxi province, the state-run New China News Agency reported this week. The room has not been excavated.
November 18, 2001 |
Archeologists have uncovered two tombs dating back more than 2,500 years in a part of Cairo where the ancient city of Heliopolis once stood, Egyptian antiquity authorities said. One of the limestone tombs contained a sarcophagus and 16 statuettes, said the chief state archeologist for the Cairo-Giza area, Zahi Hawass. The one tomb belonged to Waja-Hur, a builder. His name was engraved on the statuettes. The other tomb is to be opened today.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
March 4, 1999
The mummy of a priest and the skeleton of a grave robber were the chief findings in the televised opening of two Egyptian tombs Tuesday evening. The skeleton was found inside the pyramid of Queen Khamerernebty II but was clearly not the queen's, said archeologist Zahi Hawass. "The entrance and the chambers were unfinished and the queen was never buried here," he said after the show. The mummy was found in the Tomb of the Unknown, recently unearthed by Hawass.
October 5, 1996 |
Dale Sprosty raised his trumpet to his lips, closed his eyes and fulfilled a dream at Arlington National Cemetery by playing taps Friday at the tomb of unknown Civil War soldiers. Sprosty of Mount Pleasant, Mich., is the first civilian ever known to be allowed to play taps at either of the cemetery's two tombs for unknown soldiers, said John Metzler, superintendent of the cemetery, which is run by the Army.