Burial chamber of an ancient Egyptian priestess is discovered after 4k years | Hacker News Reader

Burial chamber of an ancient Egyptian priestess is discovered after 4k years

dailymail.co.uk

124 pointsuptownfunk59 comments

Source article (referenced as the source, and the photos/fb quote lifted from): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14048371/bur...

Source-source article: https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/sites/cairo/news/20241013_Lady-I...

Original source (German): https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/aegyptologie/aktuelles/...

That second link needs dy.html on the end. In fact all the links have been truncated to their visible length.

https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/sites/cairo/news/20241013_Lady-I...

Oh thanks! Copy-paste fail (from another post of this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42071429), too late for me to edit, but the working links:

Source article (referenced as the source, and the photos/fb quote lifted from): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14048371/bur...

Source-source article: https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/sites/cairo/news/20241013_Lady-I...

Original source (German): https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/aegyptologie/aktuelles/...

Thanks. The Post’s site is collapsing under the weight of the worst kind of lurid advertising. It is hard to find the news—you even have to expand the section if you don’t want to see only ads.

Fixed in the parent comment now. Thanks!

Ok, we've changed to the first link from https://nypost.com/2024/11/06/science/egyptian-priestess-mum..., since the latter points to this and it seems to have the most information. Thanks!

Interesting is also the mistranslation of "Dame", a lady from a wealthy family, as 'princess'.

This is a governor's wife, not a princess.

Did the article change? I see priestess, not princess.

The original article says (the German equivalent of) priestess and contains no indication that she was married.

Super interesting. I have been reading Cleopatra: A Life, recently, and it is amazing to think that the Egyptian civilization is measured in millennia. For reference, this tomb is about 2 millennia older than the rule of Cleopatra.

Complete side note, but the other articles on that news website are full of clickbait and sensational news. So kind of surprised to also find this article on there.

As soon as I see "dailymail" I, correctly, reasonably and thoughtfully IMO, start doubting whatever is linked.

Dailymail is dailymail but this particular article is boring.

Things like this happen every year, thanks to both the tomb building tradition and the climate of the region.

Middle kingdom did thrive about 4k years ago, this is the height of the classic Egyptian culture. Numerous tombs were escavated already.

Thr comment you replied to reasonably noted how the culture survived for 2.7k years. They kept track of every pharaoh they had, as well as dynasties, and key events.

This is amazing. Not the boring tomb. Although I love tombs.

It is indeed amazing. Like, the death of Cleopatra in 69 BC is closer to our present day than it is to the building of the great pyramid of Khufu (~2600 BC).

What's even more interesting is that even the great pyramid itself wasn't the beginning of it all, they built it in the later Old Kingdom period.

And we know so much because of the unusual culture of having to carve out one's achievements on the tombstone. In fact, serious people of the Nile cared more about the afterlife than life itself.

> ... Egyptian civilization is measured in millennia.

It's kind of funny that the pro-nuclear crowd generally seem to want to bury extremely toxic waste for time periods multiple times as long as that.

Perhaps they should, and also put some fake tomb stuff inside them. Then they can have real curse stuff happening along the lines of "anyone who goes in there dies with a few weeks" or "their kids are born with severe deformities" (etc).

What a gift to future generations. o_O

</rant>

> It's kind of funny that the pro-nuclear crowd generally seem to want to bury extremely toxic waste for time periods multiple times as long as that.

I imagine that someone will discover a better way to dispose or "recycle" nuclear material before that.

I'm basically a troglodyte so this could very well be a dumb question, but... couldn't we just launch that shit into space? The only limiting factors I can think of would be the weight of the waste and the fuel cost to get it up to escape velocity.

Ignoring the fact that launching stuff into space is quite expensive, the failure mode of a rocket full of nuclear waste blowing up is also rather bad.

The fuel cost to launch is significant here, as you'd want to put this into quite a high orbit. You absolutely don't want this stuff in low orbit where it will be taken down eventually by atmospheric drag, or by slamming into some other spacecraft.

Another issue is the reliability of your launch vehicle. Sometimes these things blow up on launch, which you really don't want happening when it's loaded with radioactive waste. Developments made by SpaceX might contribute positively to both of these, by lowering the cost and increasing the reliability.

A third issue is that this stuff might turn out to be valuable after all. Hopefully not for making bombs, but future technology might come up with socially positive uses for material that's currently considered dangerous waste.

> I imagine that ...

Sure. Lots of people can imagine all kinds of things. It's all wishful thinking though, where they're hoping someone else will solve the problem for them.

We need actual solutions in order for it to be feasible, not wishful thinking.

It sounds like a pessimistic answer in the XXI century when we can see that science and engineering are really advancing in many directions.

There is a context on this [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_reprocessing_of_spent...

[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=repr...

Again, we need actual solutions not wishful thinking.

It's good that science is developing potential solutions to the problem. When (and if) they do come up with a good solution, then it will be the right time to consider the pro-nuclear approach.

In the context of sites like Göbleki Tepe and the sites of the Natufian culture, which reach back 15k years, Ancient Egypt (and their contemporaries in Mesopotamia) are very recent.

It's crazy how our perspective on the age of "civilization" has shifted so much recently.

I find it very interesting how long it took us to assemble the constituent ingredients of sedentary cities into what we recognize today. Almost as if the sedentary lifestyle were inherently undesirable to people living at the time.

Agriculture took thousands of years of work in selectively breeding crop plants. For a long time it produced little food for a lot of effort, so until it became easier reliably grow good food plants, it was not widely practiced.

Also while there was a lot of megafauna around, probably there was little incentive to settle and care for crops. It was better to chase the beasts.

I'm not convinced. Cultivation began about 20kya, and we begin to see seed stores roughly contemporaneous with Gobekli.

If anything, population was simply not dense enough (or could be maintained in the climate) for there to be incentive sufficient to focus on even staying sedentary with areas devoted to growth of crops. Why build a city to protect food stores when wetlands still produced enough in the natural economy to support you through the average year?

One theory is the climate shifted around that time (coincident with the last gracial period) so that the relative abundance of resources available to hunter-gatherers declined, basically necessitating agriculture.

Yes, one very obvious example of this is the desertification of the Sahara.

It required the invention of beer (which was predicated on a number of technologies, including large-scale agriculture, pottery, and zymurgy). Once they cracked open the first cold ones though, it got hard to get up off the stone-age couch and people began to specialize in such fields as philosophy and singing.

Wasn’t all beer warm until the invention of refrigeration?

There are writings from Mesopotamia around 4000 BC talking about cooling food and drink in ice houses.

A yakhchāl (Persian: یخچال "ice pit"; yakh meaning "ice" and chāl meaning "pit") is an ancient type of ice house, which also made ice. . . . Records indicate that these structures were built as far back as 400 BCE, and many that were built hundreds of years ago remain standing, where Persian engineers built yakhchāls in the desert to store ice, usually made nearby [0]

Perhaps the earliest reference to icehouses comes from Shulgi, who held sway in the Sumerian city of Ur at the tail end of the third millennium bc. . . . Year 13, for Shulgi, was dubbed “Building of the royal icehouse/cold-house.” Jackson suggested such buildings might have been “timber-lined holes in the ground” designed to keep ice brought down from the mountains “cool and secure.” [1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l

1. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/do-you-want-buil...

That's so cool! Very interesting how similar it would be to the ice houses used right up until fridges come around. Ice blocks in basements lined with timber and packed in sawdust.

Sumerian civilization is just endlessly fascinating.

Even back then they called it “opening a cold one with the boys”

Good beer has always been best at room temperature. In the 1870s German industrialisation created cheaper beers that are tolerable if refrigerated.

A sedentary lifestyle is also inherently undesirable for some people living in our time, but most of us have little choice in the matter!

Fwiw, sedentary in the archaeological context doesn't mean "couch potato". It just means a society stays at a fixed location (vs constantly migrating).

Sedentary hunter gatherer societies exist where the environment can support them.

> Almost as if the sedentary lifestyle were inherently undesirable to people living at the time.

To the extent that nomadic hunters had a choice about whether to become sedentary (vs being enslaved by the larger sedentary populations), the reduction of autonomy (for both individuals and groups) for sedentary lifestyle behind fortifications has to be worth the benefits.

That said, sedentarism vs nomadism is a spectrum, and it's not clear that the nomads would have seen themselves as fundamentally different than sedentarists. It was probably much later that terms related to being "civilized" vs "wild" came into existence - probably courtesy of agriculturalists' organized religion. Even as late as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, it wasn't necessarily inimical as king Gilgamesh's best friend was the wild man Enkidu.

I would guess that nomads/hunters thought of sedentarists just as people who just had bigger and more permanent settlements than they did.

Alas:

"Idy’s remains were robbed of jewelry and metal objects, though the other grave goods appeared to have no interest to the thieves"

Any pictures of the 11m high chamber?

I'm really intrigued by that because that height seems really excessive given the difficulty of carving that it of rock so they must have thought it was really important.

There are multiple chronologies and uses here; the necropolis complex also had use as an early quarry - following strata of "softer" rock to carve out blocks for use elsewhere.

See: https://phys.org/news/2020-02-necropolis-asyut-important-ele...

for a view from the distance and more general notes.

Interesting. That makes sense. Thanks!

I hope we find some more undisturbed ones like Tutankhamen's one, at least in my lifetime.

Reading this after another article about a pre-historic discovery, made me feel 4000 years was not that long ago. This got me thinking, how long is enough before its ok to dig up our dead?

That is a reasonable question. I think the answer has a lot to do with why the dead are being dug up. If the dead are being exhumed by archeologists seeking to make information about our ancestors available to everyone, that's very different from grave robbers looking for gold.

But is it ok?

If an archaeologist goes down to the local cemetery and digs someone up, runs a DNA test and publishes the results (‘oh, and I found a gold ring!’) it’s clearly not ok.

The line is there somewhere, I’d suggest it was seen as ok from 150-200 years or older.

Two remarks:

Those bird illustrations are amazing. Both in terms of detail and in terms of preservation.

And: how does one die of a congenital foot defect?

> And: how does one die of a congenital foot defect?

It might be the way it’s written. Ie she died around 40 and had been born with a foot deformity.

That might make more sense than my original interpretation.

It sounds like tomb robbers found it in a lot less than 4k years.

I heard - and I wish I remembered where, but possibly when I heard Dr Zahi Hawass speak one time - that much of the grave robbing actually happened within a few years of the tombs being sealed in the first place. So it could still be 4k years since they were last opened.

Surely there must have been a better source for this than the daily mail

Can we please stop linking to this hateful rag of a paper, find any other source for this story. Daily mail is trash.

Edit: I see someone down voted me and I expected as much. But I stand by my comments.

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