Tag: egypt

‘Do Not Fly’ Alert Over Iran Issued For Airlines During Oddly Specific Night Hours

Egypt has just issued a rare and oddly specific NOTAM, or Notice to Air Missions alert, instructing all of its airlines to avoid Iranian airspace for a 3-hour period in the overnight and early morning hours of Thursday. Some other countries have since followed in issuing similar do not fly alerts, including the UK.

“All Egyptian carriers shall avoid overflying Tehran. No flight plan will be accepted overflying such territory,” the notice says. Specifically the instructions are valid from 01:00 to 04:00GMT (or 9pm to 12am US Eastern). Will the big expected Iranian retaliation be tonight? Zero hour may be approaching fast.

NOTAMS alert aircraft pilots to potential hazards along flight paths, and are internationally recognized among aviation authorities.

Reuters has picked up on and reported the NOTAM as well, saying based on Egyptian government sources that Cairo was notified by Iranian authorities that airlines should avoid traversing Iranian airspace due to overnight “military exercises”. 

According to the citation in Reuters:

“Based on a report from Iranian authorities to all civil aviation companies, flights over Iranian airspace are to be avoided,” the unnamed official was quoted as saying.

Many airlines are revising their schedules to avoid Iranian and Lebanese airspace while also calling off flights to Israel and Lebanon as many fear a possible broader conflict after the killing of senior members of militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

A flight risk monitor identified as OPSGROUP has further told the same publication that “Such a NOTAM from Egypt is very unusual.”

The aviation industry group explained further that “It is possible that this is an indicator of an Iranian response to Israel, and in turn a potentially large set of air space disruptions – at the same time, there may be another reason.”

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Researchers Claim Long-Lost Technology Used to Build Iconic Pyramid of Djoser

The magnificent step pyramid standing tall in the ancient Egyptian necropolis of Saqqara is truly one of the wonders of the ancient world.

Erected some 4,500 years ago, the tomb of the pharaoh Djoser is the earliest known example of Egypt’s colossal stone structures; a monument not just to the king but to the engineering ingenuity of the people who inhabited the land thousands of years ago.

How this architectural marvel was constructed – especially given its sharp departure from any building that came before – has been of intense interest to archaeologists and historians.

Now a team led by Egyptologist Xavier Landreau of Paleotechnic in France may have uncovered a significant clue.

A previously unexplained structure in Saqqara, they argue, is in fact a check dam, supporting the hypothesis a water-powered lift helped move materials used in the pyramid’s construction.

This is bolstered by the discovery of several other features, including what the researchers interpret as the remains of a novel kind of hydraulic lift: a central shaft through which water channeled from below might flow like lava in a volcano, raising a floating platform which would be capable of transporting large rocks to the pyramid’s summit.

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Ancient Egyptians used a hydraulic lift to build their 1st pyramid, controversial study claims

The ancient Egyptians may have used an elaborate hydraulic system to construct the world’s first pyramid, a controversial new study claims.

Known as the Pyramid of Djoser, the six-tiered, four-sided step pyramid was built around 4,700 years ago on the Saqqara plateau, an archaeological site in northern Egypt, according to research posted to ResearchGate on July 24. The research has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Archaeologists have long wondered how ancient workers accomplished such an architectural feat — the structure contains 11.7 million cubic feet (330,400 cubic meters) of stone and clay — before the advent of large machinery like bulldozers and cranes.

Because the pyramid sits near a long-gone branch of the Nile River, researchers hypothesize that the ancient Egyptians utilized the water source to build the 204-foot-tall (62 m) pyramid by designing a “modern hydraulic system” comprising a dam, a water treatment plant and a hydraulic freight elevator, all of which were powered by the river, according to a translated statement from the CEA Paleotechnic Institute, a research center in France. They posit that the mysterious Gisr el-Mudir enclosure near the pyramid worked as a structure that captured sediment and water.

“This is a watershed discovery,” lead author Xavier Landreau, CEO of Paleotechnic, told Live Science. “Our research could completely change the status quo [of how the pyramid was built]. Before this study, there was no real consensus about what the structures were used for, with one possible explanation being that it was used for funerary purposes. We know that this is already subject to debate.”

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Plato’s Dialogs at Edfu?

Did Plato lie about the Egyptian origin of the Atlantis story when he composed his famous dialogs Timaeus and Critias? Classicists say he had good reasons to make up a persuasive tale to prove an important point about ancient Greek society and politics. This, so-called, Noble Lie Thesis is the lens through which scholars of ancient Greece look when they read what Plato has Socrates, Critias, Timaeus, and Hermocrates say to each other about divine law and human corruption, cosmos and soul, Atlantis and Athens, and the rise and fall at the hands of the gods of these once mighty city states. In this article, I put the Noble Lie Thesis to a test by examining Egyptian cosmogonical texts for substantial congruences with Plato’s dialogs.

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At Least 30 Egyptian Tombs Have Reappeared—and Archaeologists Are Astounded

There are a few questions coming from an archaeological dig on a hillside along the Nile River near the ancient Egyptian city of Aswan. The biggest, though, is exactly why two mummies were glued together inside the same stone coffin.

During a joint Italian and Egyptian archaeological mission working in the vicinity of the Aghakhan Shrine west of Aswan, the team explored the multi-level structure crafted into the hillside. Originally discovered outside of official channels—read: during illegal excavations—the government stepped in and took control.

The joint group dated the site to from 332 B.C. to 395 A.D., somewhere in the late Greek and Roman periods. Ayman Ashmawi—head of the Egyptian archaeological sector of the Supreme Council—said in a news release that the group found what equates to 33 graves, and as many as 40 percent of the remains were from those who died either as newborns or within their first couple of years. They also started discovering some more incredible things, such as the 10-level tomb still containing oil lamps that were potentially left behind by mourners.

“We can imagine how spectacular it was when, for example, during the [mourners’] feast, all these tombs were illuminated,” Patrizia Piacentini—Egyptologist and archaeologist at the University of Milan who led the effort at the site—told Live Science.

Believed to be family graves based on the range of ages of the deceased, the site was likely in use for around 900 years, Piacentini said.

The team discovered several mummies, including two bodies glued to each other inside a stone coffin. The team plans to study the pair to find out their relationship, said Abdul Moneim Saeed, the director of the archaeological mission for the Egyptians.

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Hidden ‘City of the Dead’ with more than 300 tombs that contain mummified families is discovered in Egypt

Scientists have discovered a massive burial with more than 300 tombs in Egypt that they are calling the new ‘City of the Dead.’

The city of Aswan was an important trade, quarry and military zone when it was first established more than 4,500 years ago – but the lives of its people have long remained a mystery.

The team has been working at the site for five years and recently uncovered 36 tombs that were reused for 900 years to include 30 to 40 mummies each – and many contained families who likely died from infectious diseases.

Patrizia Piacentini, an archaeologist at the University of Milan, told DailyMail.com that the burial site spans nearly 270,000 feet and featured up to 10 terraces of ancient tombs arranged in layers on the hill near the modern Mausoleum of Aga Khan III.

‘This was a really spectacular find, very unique in Egypt,’ said Piacentini.

‘[The people who once lived in Aswan] covered the hill with tombs. It is kind of a City of the Dead.’ 

Aswan, one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, is located on the east bank of the Nile River.

It was home to quarries that supplied granite for many ancient Egyptian monuments still standing to this day and was a military post for the Romans, the Turks, and the British.

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Scientists may have solved mystery behind Egypt’s pyramids

Scientists believe they may have solved the mystery of how 31 pyramids, including the world-famous Giza complex, were built in Egypt more than 4,000 years ago.

A research team from the University of North Carolina Wilmington has discovered that the pyramids are likely to have been built along a long-lost, ancient branch of the River Nile – which is now hidden under desert and farmland.

For many years, archaeologists have thought that ancient Egyptians must have used a nearby waterway to transport materials such as the stone blocks needed to build the pyramids on the river.

But up until now, “nobody was certain of the location, the shape, the size or proximity of this mega waterway to the actual pyramids site”, according to one of the study’s authors, Prof Eman Ghoneim.

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Curious L-Shaped Structure Found near Giza Pyramids is 4,500-Years-Old

An international team of archaeologists has stumbled upon a mysterious L-shaped structure buried within a cemetery adjacent to the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Giza. The structure is 4,500 years and would have been built around the same time as the pyramid.

The discovery of this ‘blank area’ and ‘anomaly’ came about through the scanning of the surface of Giza’s prestigious Western Cemetery using ground-penetrating technology. This burial site was designated for members of King Khufu’s royal family and esteemed officials, interred in mastabas, funerary tombs typical of the era.

The newfound structure is encompassed by these mastabas, all meticulously arranged in uniform alignment. Yet, curiously, no notable excavations have previously taken place within this peculiar vacant space.

Mastabas, serving as burial structures for the royal family and esteemed officers, are distinguished by their flat roofs and rectangular designs typically crafted from limestone or mudbricks. Central to their architecture is a vertical shaft connecting to an underground chamber, essential for the burial rituals and eternal resting place of the deceased.

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‘Curse’ behind King Tutankhamun’s tomb mysterious deaths finally solved, experts claim

The unsettling curse of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt has bewildered archaeologists since it’s been feared to be linked to the mysterious deaths of multiple excavators who discovered it in 1922.

However, a scientist now claims to have solved the mysteries of the infamous “Pharaoh’s Curse” more than 100 years later.

Toxic levels of radiation emanating from uranium and poisonous waste are believed to have lingered inside the tomb since it was sealed over 3,000 years ago, Ross Fellowes wrote last month in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (JSE).

The radiation level inside Tutankhamun’s tomb is so high that anyone who comes in contact with it could very likely develop a fatal dose of radiation sickness and cancer.

“Both contemporary and ancient Egypt populations are characterized by unusually high incidences of hematopoietic cancers, of bone/blood/lymph, for which a primary known cause is radiation exposure,” Fellowes wrote in his study.

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Israel knew of Hamas attack in advance – US lawmaker

Three days before Hamas’ large-scale assault on Israel, the Egyptian authorities warned their counterparts in Tel Aviv that such an operation was imminent, US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul told reporters on Wednesday.

“We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen,” McCaul said following a closed-door intelligence briefing on Capitol Hill. 

“I don’t want to get too much into classified, but a warning was given,” McCaul continued. “I think the question was at what level.” 

The Associated Press reported on Monday that Israeli officials ignored repeated warnings from Cairo that Hamas was planning “something big.” Citing a source within Egyptian intelligence, the news agency claimed that the Israeli government felt that an attack was unlikely to come from Gaza, and would probably take place in the West Bank instead.

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