#Egypt

In the Valley of the Kings, a doorway once dismissed as a minor, debris-choked entry belongs to KV5—the tomb of sons of Ramesses II and, after late twentieth-century clearance, the largest tomb complex mapped in the royal necropolis. Kent R. Weeks and the Theban Mapping Project relocated the entrance in 1987 while assessing tourism and road impacts, then spent years clearing flood-hardened fill.

A Seti I temple panel at Abydos shows overlapping glyphs that, after plaster loss, resemble a helicopter and other craft to modern eyes. Griffith Institute records, ARCE’s Abydos King List, and Calverley/Broome epigraphy frame a Ramesses II palimpsest over Seti I—not aircraft. Verdict stays contested: palimpsest vs paleocontact claim; the Archive does not assert helicopter-as-fact.

Khirbet Qumran, the ruined settlement on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea adjacent to the scroll caves, was excavated in the 1950s under Roland de Vaux for the École Biblique et Archéologique Française, with Jordanian Department of Antiquities and Palestine Archaeological Museum partners.

The University of Würzburg project “Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt” catalogued and edited applied magical formularies (Kyprianos database; *Papyri Copticae Magicae* volumes), distinct from the live Nag Hammadi codices story (Gnostic library find/publication). Successor CoMaF work continues 2024–27. Documentary manuscript archaeology of everyday ritual texts — healing, binding, protection — not gospel sensationalism.

Between 1896 and 1907, Oxford classicists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt dug the rubbish mounds of ancient Oxyrhynchus—modern Bahnasa—for the Graeco-Roman Branch of the Egypt Exploration Fund, today the Egypt Exploration Society.

On a limestone cliff in the Wadi el-Hol, a ravine on the ancient Farshût Road that cuts the Qena Bend west of the Nile, two short rock inscriptions preserve early alphabetic signs mixed into a landscape of Middle Kingdom graffiti.

The Merneptah Stele—Cairo JE 31408—is a gray granite Year-5 victory hymn Flinders Petrie cleared in 1896 at Merneptah’s mortuary temple on the Theban west bank. The closing Canaan strophe names Ashkelon, Gezer, Yanoam, and a people written Ysrỉꜣr—widely read as Israel—under a people-determinative rather than a city-state ring.

Bourbon-era digging at Pompeii (from 1748) chased royal display objects via tunnels. Giuseppe Fiorelli (post-1860) imposed region/insula numbering, open excavation, conservation priorities, and the famous plaster casts of victim voids (1863 technique tradition). The modern Pompeii Archaeological Park still curates casts; British School at Rome projects CT/study the cast interiors. Documentary history of archaeology as a discipline — distinct from Pack 1’s Herculaneum papyri/V

A rogue geologist proved that the Great Sphinx of Egypt is thousands of years older than mainstream history admits, pushing its construction back to the era of the Sumerian "gods."

Cosmic-ray detectors revealed a massive, 100-foot-long hidden chamber sealed inside the Great Pyramid of Giza—the first major structural discovery inside the pyramid in over 1,000 years.

Researchers utilizing a groundbreaking satellite radar method announced they detected eight enormous, hollow cylindrical tubes plunging nearly half a mile deep into the bedrock directly underneath the Second Pyramid of Giza, arranged in two perfect rows of four.