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Showing posts from April, 2024

A sense of liberation in unearthing your history : Watching Netflix's documentary Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb

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  "You get a lot of mistakes about history, seeing the great temples, the great statues and you think everything in history was perfect. And then you see these people, you discover they're like us. Exactly like us. This is the real story."  - Amira Shaheen, professor of Rheumatology in the Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University. The film by James Tovell presents the odyssey of several excavations at Saqqara, Egypt, to unearth the tomb of the ancient priest lord Wahtye. A team of Egyptologists, archaeologists, researchers from Cairo University, and excavators are deployed at the excavation site, where they unearth artifacts dating back to the 5th Century BCE. In 2018, the excavation site at Saqqara had recently witnessed some of the most important historical discoveries, such as the oldest mummified lion cub, the discovery of the Bubasteion Necropolis, the Egyptian goddess 'Bastet' statues, playing figurines, etc.  According to the hieroglyphs that were deciphered b...