Egypt

[Guest guest]

Why are these findings being scoffed aside all of the sudden?

 

Dharmapada Dasa

 

 

 

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Cave drawings an Iowa pilot stumbled on in the Egyptian

desert and experts initially said could date back to 7000 B.C. are now

considered suspect, with one leading Egyptologist dismissing them as fakes

no

more than 20 years old.

 

Egyptian archaeological authorities announced the find in June, saying it

seemed to span three eras and included writing that could represent a

transition between languages during the early Pharaonic dynastic period from

3000-2500 B.C.

 

Now experts have begun to cast doubt on the drawings, discovered by George

Cunningham of Algona, Iowa, while he was hunting for fossils in the desert

outside Cairo.

 

"There are suspicious aspects about the drawings that don't fit into what we

know about that period of Egyptian history," Mohammed el-Saghir, head of the

Pharaonic and Greco-Roman sector of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said

in an interview Friday.

 

El-Saghir, who earlier said he was certain the drawings were of value after

seeing photographs of them, said scientific tests were being conducted to

verify their age. Thousands of pre-dynastic rock drawings have been found in

the deserts of southern Egypt, but never in northern Egypt, el-Saghir said.

 

Kent Weeks, a prominent Egyptologist, said one look at photographs of the

find was enough for him to dismiss them as poor imitations.

 

"I am 100 percent certain that these drawings are fake," he said. "It looks

as if someone has seen some photographs in a book on ancient art and

slightly

misremembered them when they came to paint them."

 

"I've seen other fake pre-dynastic offerings, but this is the most audacious

and least convincing," he added.

 

Cunningham said he would be disappointed if the drawings turned out to be

fake.

 

"When I first saw it, there was a doubt in my mind -- that it was too good

to

be true," said Cunningham, who trains helicopter pilots in Egypt for an oil

company. "When the group of Egyptian archaeologists came to see it, my

impression was that it was genuine."

 

Originally, antiquities officials had speculated some of the drawings could

date to 7000 B.C., during the Mesolithic period of semi-nomadic fishermen

and

hunters. Others, they said, could be from Egypt's pre-dynastic history

(3400-3100 B.C.), a time of conflict when the country was divided into north

and south. Egypt then was inhabited by hunter-gatherers and farmers who also

produced pottery and carvings.

 

Weeks said the drawings, which depicted hunting, mortuary and religious

scenes, would have been cut into the rock, not painted, if they were

genuine.

 

"We have no painted rock drawings from that (pre-dynastic) period because

they would have eroded, particularly if they were in limestone, in as little

as 75 years," said Weeks, a professor at the American University in Cairo.

 

Weeks said the exaggerated breasts and buttocks on the female figures,

livestock without horns and painted temples holding royalty or deities were

uncharacteristic of pre-dynastic Egyptian art.

 

One marking, he said, looks like a North American teepee.

 

In one scene, two mummies flank columns of geometrical designs. Some experts

had speculated those markings could represent a transition between

languages,

either before or after hieroglyphics.

 

Weeks claimed they were a nonsensical "hotchpotch" of designs.

 

"They look like a combination of geometric designs that would look more at

home in North America," he said. "The mummy figures are not Egyptian.

Ancient

Egyptians used a much more formal and rigorous pose."