Egypt unearths tomb of ancient high priest
Cairo: Egyptian archaeologists have discovered the tomb of a priest dating back more than 4,400 years in the pyramid complex of Saqqara south of the capital Cairo, authorities said on Saturday.
“Today we are announcing the last discovery of the year 2018, it’s a new discovery, it’s a private tomb,” Antiquities Minister Khaled el-Enany told an audience of invited guests including reporters. “It is exceptionally well preserved, coloured, with sculpture inside. It belongs to a high official priest… (and) is more than 4,400 years old,” he said. The tomb belongs to “Wahtye”, a high priest who served during the fifth dynasty reign of King Neferirkare, the antiquities ministry said. His tomb is decorated with scenes showing the royal priest alongside his mother, wife and other members of his family, the ministry said in a statement. It also contains more than a dozen niches and 24 colourful statues of the cleric and members of his family, it said. In November archeology officials announced the discovery in Saqqara of seven sarcophagi, some dating back more than 6,000 years, during excavation work started in April by the same archaeological mission.
Three of those tombs contained mummified cats and scarabs. The Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo is home to the famous Djoser pyramid, a more than 4,600-year-old construction which dominates the site and was Egypt’s first stone monument. The tomb, built by the master architect Imhotep for the Pharoah Djoser, stood 62 metres (203 feet) tall originally and is considered the oldest building in the world built entirely of stone. (AFP)
Dutch build artificial islands to bring wildlife back
Lelystad (Netherlands): Dutch ranger Andre Donker sighs as he looks out at the rippling grey waters of the Markermeer, one of Europe’s largest freshwater lakes. “Once upon a time it was teeming with fish here,” he says.
But this vast 700-square-kilometre (270-square-mile) expanse of water, which regulates the level of water in the rest of the Netherlands, had become until recently nothing more than a cloudy mass devoid of aquatic life.
Now the hope is that a new artificial archipelago of five islands will bring nature back to the area via a typically ambitious engineering project for a low-lying country that has battled the sea for centuries.
It is “one of the largest rewilding operations in Europe”, says Donker. Standing on a wooden bridge over a pond in the middle of experimental plots of different kinds of reeds, he says he has been able to see the first signs of increasing biodiversity.
The lake was once part of the Zuiderzee, an engineering wonder of the world completed in 1932, which closed off a huge expanse of water to keep out the North Sea and combat flooding.
Vital in a country where 26 per cent of the land is below sea level, the scheme created an inland lake and polders, land reclaimed from the sea, but at a cost to the environment. Over the subsequent decades, sediment used to create a dyke separating the Markermeer from a neighbouring body of water, the Ijsselmeer, washed away and sunk to the bottom of the lake.
That turned the water cloudy, negatively impacting fish and bird populations, plants and molluscs. “We had to intervene,” says Donker, wearing a woollen hat to brave the storms from the North Sea. The solution was a bold one in keeping with a country whose people like to boast that “God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands”.
Eight kilometres (five miles) from the port of Lelystad, the ranger walks down the side of an artificial sand dune. Other similar dunes stretch out beyond it as far as the eye can see.
Still-sparse vegetation covers a large part of the 700 hectares that have been built anew in the lake. The islets plan is among many being worked on by the Netherlands, which is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change.
Since October, the port city of Rotterdam has hosted the headquarters of an international climate commission led by former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and Microsoft founder and climate activist Bill Gates. The five islets were built in two and a half years and have already served as a resting place for 30,000 swallows this year. (AFP)