Egypt

KV63 and academic politics

commercialappeal.com

A University of Memphis team stumbled into international renown two years ago when it unearthed a 3,300-year-old chamber in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

But when the team leader, Dr. Otto Schaden, returns there in a few weeks to continue research, he will no longer be affiliated with the university.

The U of M did not renew its contract with Schaden last June due to a contentious relationship between him and university staff. On-site altercations and apparent tussles for control were covered in the January issue of Harper's magazine -- tales of yelling, crying, fuming and abruptly getting up from the lunch table to sit elsewhere.

"We would get back (from the dig) and sometimes we wouldn't even order lunch. We'd go to our room and fume," Schaden said.

Egyptian officials require archaeologists on projects there to be represented by an institution. But Schaden is covered. In a rare move, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities is now representing Schaden's project.

See the above page for (some) of the full story.

- The Mummy's Curse - Kv63
About.com (K. Kris Hirst) My thanks to Archaeology Magazine for linking to this item on their Today's Headlines page. The writer is commenting on a long article in Harper's Magazine, and suggests that journalists have a poor appreciation of the...

- More Re Speculation On Kv63's Owner
http://tinyurl.com/rm5zh (AOL News)Thanks very much to Kat Newkirk for the following item, which looks at Hawass's view that KV63 was originally a tomb and was later used as a storage area for embalming materials. Schaden and Hawass have differing...

- Kv63 Updates
http://tinyurl.com/nxh6x ( commercialappeal.com) This article quotes an interview with Otto Schaden about some of the recent and future work at the site: " The team hopes to get a portable X-ray machine and scanner to the site within "a week or so" to...

- Kv63
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12990529/A three page article on the MSNBC website about KV63 and the knowledge that has been accumulated so far, including extracts from a recent interview with Otto Schaden: "Five of KV-63's coffins are known to contain mummification...

- Hawass Dig Days: Kv63
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/790/hr2.htm Zahi Hawass's Dig Days column on the Al Ahram website this week features KV63, the newly discovered shaft and chamber in the Valley of the Kings. This is part 1 of an item which is scheduled to be continued:...

Egypt