In 1830, the viceroy of Egypt gifted France a 3,300-year-old Egyptian obelisk—a carved stone pillar with a pyramidal top. In 1836, the obelisk found its home in Paris, in Place de la Concorde. One would think that after standing in the center of the French capital for almost 200 years, Parisian Egyptologists would have learned […]
Archaeologist Who Uncovered Pharaoh’s Tomb May Have Just Made an Even Bigger Find
The stunning discovery of a pharaoh’s burial spot last week was a bombshell in the archaeology world. Not since Howard Carter located the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun in 1922 had such a site been found. There was only one problem: the pharaoh’s body wasn’t in the tomb. Now, the archaeologist who made the […]
Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice: Researchers Analyze the Surprising Smells of Ancient Egyptian Mummies
Here’s a question you’ve probably never thought of: What do Egyptian mummies smell like? An international team of researchers has a surprising answer: woody, spicy, and sweet (but if you’re inexplicably interested in things that smell like rotting bodies, check out the corpse flower). As detailed in a study published today in the Journal of […]