M.J. Rose

The scans of King Tut’s tomb are to begin today!

Happy Thanksgiving, friends.

Hidden Chamber Theory to be Confirmed or Denied by Radar Scans beginning Thursday in Tutankhamun Tomb

(April Holloway/Ancient Origins)

“A three-day operation to scan behind the walls in the burial chamber of Tutankhamun is set to begin this Thursday with the results being announced by press conference on November 28. The official investigations are designed to test out the theory by archaeologist Nicholas Reeves that the tomb of Tutankhamun contains two hidden chambers and that one of them is the final resting place of Queen Nefertiti.

The Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt launched high-tech analyses within the boy king’s tomb on November 4 and initial infrared scans of the walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb detected an area of greater heat, which may indeed point to a hidden chamber. Excitement among historians is mounting that the long lost queen, and no doubt her wealth of treasures, may finally be found.

Ahram Online reports that the new operation “will involve the use of radar signals and infrared thermography to probe the north and west walls of the boy king’s burial chamber”. Antiquities Minister Mamduh al-Damati explained that these techniques will not cause any damage within the tomb, but are designed to reveal whether there are hidden chambers behind the walls or not…”

Read more here.

A mummified lover with her husband’s heart placed with her in the grave…This is the stuff of novels.

Mummified noblewoman kept her husband’s heart in a lead locket

(New Scientist)

“It’s rare to find a mummy wearing an outfit. But this exceptionally preserved body spent more than 350 years fully clothed in a lead coffin before being undressed during an autopsy (see video above).

The mummy was discovered a few years ago by the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research while investigating the burial grounds of a convent in Rennes, France.

They were able to identify her as noblewoman Louise de Quengo, thanks to the inscription on a lead heart, pictured below, found with her body, which contains the real heart of her husband, and historical records of her burial…”

For the rest, a video, and more photos, click here.

Who doesn’t enjoy a morbid love of vampires? And who doesn’t love the history of vampires even more?

What Vampire Graves Tell Us About Ancient Superstitions

Hundreds of years ago, ignorance about decomposition and disease sparked fears that the dead returned to drink the blood of the living.

“In 1846, a man named Horace Ray died of tuberculosis in Griswold, Connecticut. Within the next six years, two of his grown sons died of the same disease. When yet another son fell ill two years later, Ray’s family and friends could think of only one explanation: The dead sons were somehow feeding on and sickening the living one—from the afterlife. In an effort to keep the remaining son from getting even worse, they exhumed the dead sons’ bodies and burned them.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. In 1874, a Rhode Island man named William Rose dug up his own daughter’s body and burned her heart, and in 1875 a victim of “consumption,” as TB was called then, had her lungs burned posthumously for good measure.

This practice of digging up, burning, or otherwise attempting to restrain the deceased was a widespread practice in many Western countries until the early 20th century, and it was intended to prevent what people at the time thought of as vampires: Dead victims of disease that literally sucked the life out of the living from beyond the grave.

We now imagine vampires as blood-drinking, cloaked Counts—or possibly sparkly, sexy teenagers—but throughout history everyone from the Ancient Greeks, to the Eastern Europeans, to 19th-century Americans saw them as disease victims (and sometimes simply dead miscreants) who could prey on the living from the Great Beyond…”

For the rest, go here, to The Atlantic.