The satellite archaeological survey of Egypt

The satellite archaeological survey of Egypt
by Amelia Carolina Sparavigna

A recent announcement from BBC of 17 new pyramids discovered in Egypt arouses the interest on the archaeology aided by satellites imagery [1]. These pyramids, as many other ancient remains in Egypt, are under the sand of the desert. They were discovered by means of a remote sensing with infrared sensors. In fact, the archaeological surveys, usually performed by means of airplanes, are necessary to observing the sites from above and gain a better view of the landforms. In some cases, the survey of a region ends with the discovery of new archaeological sites or with the precise location of an ancient lost town [2].

Satellites give different opportunities, according to their sensorial equipment. BBC announced that Sarah Parcak, of the University of Alabama, used some data from NASA infrared equipped satellites to survey the Egypt. Waiting for a more detailed report on her researches and on the methods the team used, we can just tell that the infrared inspection is based on collecting the radiances in various wavelength bands, in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The resulting profiles depend on the methods used to obtain the surface data from radiances. To have a good detection, the surface must be free from clouds.

The Egypt's Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, Zahi Hawass, seems to be quite interested to the new technologies, but, as he told Ahram Online, the satellite infrared images are only able to locate the remains beneath the sand [3]. It is then necessary, according to Hawass, to identify them with archaeological researches on the spot. From the news on the Web it is not clear how many sites have been analyzed by the team of the University of Alabama. It seems that the amount of data collected by the researchers is huge.

Besides the analysis with infrared imagery, let us consider that there are other remote sensing techniques that can be useful in archaeology: among them we have the LIDAR system, which is, as we discussed in [4], able to see under the canopy of the forests, and the SIR-C/X-SAR imaging radar system, which has waves that can penetrate the clouds, and, under certain conditions, vegetation, ice and dry sand [5]. Of course, these facilities are not freely available and needs financial supports.

We could then ask ourselves if a free satellite service, such as Google Maps, can help in some archaeological researches in Egypt. It is my opinion that the answer is positive. In studying the Merowe Dam and the paleochannels of the Nile we could compare the images from SIR-C/X-SAR imaging radar system, with those of the Google Maps [6]. After a suitable image processing with some freely downloadable programs (GIMP, IRIS, AstroFracTool,[7]), the Google Maps revealed astonishing details of the network of old buried channels of Nile in the Nubian region. The same for the "raised fields" near the Titicaca Lake in Peru: the processing of the images clearly displayed the network of these ancient earthworks and canals [8]. Many of these structures are probably buries under some sediments of the lake.

Let us then try to apply the image processing to the Google Maps of those areas in Egypt, where according to the press, the infrared satellite imagery is giving good results. We see that one of these investigated areas is that of Tanis, a town of the ancient Egypt. In Fig.1, it is shown what we can have after processing the image from Google Maps. The upper part of the figure is obtained using the GIMP image- processing program, to adjust brightness and contrast. The lower part is gained after a processing with the wavelet filtering of Iris. These images seem to contain quite clear information on the buried town too.

Another example is the site where there are buried pyramids, according to the press [9,10]. The site is at Saqqara: Figure 2 shows the area as can be seen after a processing of Google Maps. The reader is invited to compare these images with those published on the Web, copyrighted BBC. I guess that after comparison, the reader can draw some positive conclusions about Google Maps and its use for an archaeological survey of Egypt. I am proposing another example of the use of image processing in Fig.3. This is the Great Temple at Amarna, buried under the sand (more images at [11]).

As Zahi Hawass is telling, it is necessary to understand whether some “anomalies” revealed by the satellite remote sensing are archaeological remains or not. This means that archaeology can only receive benefits for geophysics researches and the related use of remote sensing.

References.
1. Egyptian pyramids found by infra-red satellite images, F. Cronin, BBC New, 24 May 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13522957
2. Documentation of the Abandoned Town La Ciudad Perdida in Peru Combining VHR Satellite Data and Terrestrial Measurement, K. Pavelka, M. Bukovinsky, J. Svatuskova, Remote Sensing for Science, Education and Natural and Cultural Heritage,  Rainer Reuter Ed., EARSeL, 2010.
3. News broadcast by BBC is inaccurate, says Hawass, N. El-Aref, Ahramonline, 26 May 2011, http://english.ahram.org.eg/
4. Lines under the forest, A.C. Sparavigna, http://www.archaeogate.org/, and http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5277.
5. SIR-C X-SAR Earth-Imaging Radar for NASA's Mission to Planet Earth, Infopage.
6. The Merowe Dam on the Nile, A.C. Sparavigna, http://www.archaeogate.org/, and, Merowe Dam and the inundation of paleochannels of the Nile, A.C. Sparavigna, http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1011.4911.
7. Enhancing the Google imagery using a wavelet filter, A.C. Sparavigna, http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.1590.
8. The geoglyphs of Titicaca, A.C. Sparavigna, http://www.archaeogate.org/ and Symbolic landforms created by ancient earthworks near Lake Titicaca, A.C. Sparavigna, http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.2231.
9. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1390667/Seventeen-lost-pyramids-thousands-buried-Egyptian-settlements-pinpointed-infrared-satellite-images.html?ito=feeds-newsxml, and also
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/9202577-egyptian-pyramids-found-by-infrared-satellite-images
10. In my opinion, the published images at [9] are not the real infrared images of the Alabama University team, but this is what is published on the web.
11. Some image processing on Amarna, https://sites.google.com/site/amarnasatelliteimagery/

Fig.1: Tanis as can be observed after processing an image from Google Maps. In the upper part, brightness and contrast had been adjusted with GIMP. The lower image was obtained with a wavelet filtering with Iris. It seems that the image is giving quite good details too.

Fig.2. This is the Saqqara area where there is a buried pyramid. The image has been obtained after processing a Google Maps image. According to Refs.[9], in this area there one of the buried pyramid announced by BBC [1]. (SEE PLEASE THE NOTE AT THE END OF THIS POST)

Fig.3: The Great Temple in Amarna, as can be seen after processing a Google Maps image.


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NOTE 11 November 2018

For what concerns the Figure 2, here I would like to show you also - in the blue insert of the following image - that published by BBC of the pyramid.

Here the insert is used  just for information, to show in an image of Google Maps, after enhancing the contrast, the place where Sarah Parcak told she has evidenced a pyramid. I beg BBC pardon for the use of the insert, but I have seen today, at the following  link

https://hoax-alert.leadstories.com/378841-hoax-alert-nasa-images-did-not-reveal-ancient-human-settlement-under-23-km-of-ice.html

 that my image was used for a hoax of a human settlement under the ice. Let me thank Maarten Schenk for having evidenced this fact.  I am quite upset by the use of an image of mine in this hoax.

I repeat, I am discussing the work by Sarah Parcak and the use of satellites for the archaeology in Egypt. Let me stress that the IMAGE is an image from Egypt, and the article of BBC was on Egypt. Nothing to do with ICE, only SAND!

Amarna

The following images are showing a great temple in Amarna, the city of Akhetaten.

The images have been obtained applying an image processing to Google Maps. 

The image processing is done by means of  GIMP, IRIS and AstroFracTool.

Tanis - a detail

A detail of Tanis (from Google Maps, after processing).

For more details see

http://stretchingtheboundaries.blogspot.com/2011/05/tanis-map.html

Tanis map

This image is showing the ruins of the ancient city of Tanis (an archeological site in Egypt, well-known from the Indiana Jones' movie). The image has been obtained from the original image from Google Maps, with a certain image processing. The following is the original image from Google. 

You can use GIMP and IRIS program to enhance the details, and obtain the following image. 

Or you can use AstroFracTool and Gimp

For more details see

http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.1590

Scarab seal

"Ancient Egyptian scarabs were popular amulets in ancient Egypt. According to ancient Egyptian myths, the sun  rolls across the sky each day and transforms bodies and souls. Modeled upon the Scarabaeidae family dung beetle, which rolls dung into a ball for the purposes of eating and laying eggs that are later transformed into larva, the scarab was seen as an earthly symbol of this heavenly cycle. This came to be iconographic, and ideological symbols were incorporated into Ancient Egyptian society."

From Wiki

Heart-scarab with a decoration on the back

(Egyptian Museum, Torino)

See my book

http://www.scribd.com/doc/42000776/Ancient-Egyptian-Seals-and-Scarabs-by-A-C-Sparavigna-2009

Painted ostraca

Painted ostraca

Egyptian Museum, Torino

Primo Maggio - Festa del Lavoro

Museo Egizio - Torino

Egyptian faience

"Egyptian faience is a non-clay based ceramic displaying surface vitrification which creates a bright lustre of various blue-green colours. Having not been made from clay it is often not classed as pottery. It is called "Egyptian faience" to distinguish it from faience, the tin glazed pottery associated with Faenza in northern Italy. Egyptian faience, both locally produced and exported from Egypt, occurs widely in the ancient world, and is well known from Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean and in northern Europe as far away as Scotland." Wiki

Faience bowl blue-glazed decorated with lotus flowers and the face of the goddess Hathor, symbol of rebirth are the decoration.

Faience. Provenance unknown. New Kingdom, dynasty XVIII-XX (1350-1070 B.C.)
Egyptian Museum, Turin.

Fishes and flowers

Ciotola decorata con pesci e fiori di loto
Faience azzurra con decorazioni nere, provenienza sconosciuta
Bowl decorated with fishes and flowers.
Blue faience,  unknown origin.
First period of XVIII Dinasty (XV century BC)
Berlino, Aegyptisches Museum und Papyrussammling

Three-fold rotational symmetry in the decoration of this bowl.
Note the eye of the fishes at the center of the bowl.
It seems a Escher's creation!

It is amazing that very old creations (pottery and seals) show symmetry in their decorations.

For a discussion on symmetry of the engraved images on seals, see:

Symmetries in Images on Ancient Seals, Amelia Carolina Sparavigna
Abstract: We discuss the presence of symmetries in images engraved on ancient seals, in particular on stamp seals. Used to stamp decorations, to secure the containers from
tampering and for owner's identification, we can find seals that can be dated from Neolithic times. Earliest seals were engraved with lines, dots and spirals. Nevertheless, these very  ancient stamp seals, in the small circular or ovoid space of their bases, possess bilateral and rotational symmetries.  The shape of the base seems to determine the symmetries of images engraved on it.  We will also discuss what could be the meaning of antisymmetry and broken symmetry for images on seals.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.3566

Weighing of the Heart

"In Egyptian religion, the heart was the key to the afterlife. It was conceived as surviving death in the nether world, where it gave evidence for, or against, its possessor. It was thought that the heart was examined by Anubis and the deities during the Weighing of the Heart ceremony. If the heart weighed more than the feather of Maat, it was immediately consumed by the monster Ammit."
Wiki

Egyptian Museum Torino

Four sons of Horus

Statuette dei quattro figli di Horus: Duamutef, a testa di sciacallo, Hapi, a testa di babbuino, Qebehsebuf, a testa di falco, Amset, a testa umana erano i protettori delle viscere del defunto, XXV-XXXI dinastia. Statuettes of the four sons of Horus:  Duamutef, jackal headed, Hapi, baboon headed,  Qebehsebuf, falcon headed, and human headed Amset, protectors of the deceased's viscera,  Dinasty XXV-XXXI
(712-332 BC)

Eye of Horus

The Eye of Horus is an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection, royal power and good health. The eye is personified in the goddess Wadjet. The name Wadjet is derived from 'wadj' meaning 'green' hence 'the green one' and was known to the Greeks and Romans as 'uraeus' from the Egyptian 'iaret' meaning 'risen one' from the image of a cobra rising up in protection. More at Wiki
Wadjet was one of the earliest of Egyptian deities who later became associated with other goddesses such as Bast, Mut, and Hathor, who is also depicted with this eye. Burial amulets were often made in the shape of the Eye of Horus, to protect the owner in the afterlife and to ward off evil. Ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern sailors would frequently paint the symbol on the bow of their vessel to ensure safe sea travel (Charles Freeman, The Legacy of Ancient Egypt, Facts on File, Inc. 1997. p.91).
"Horus was the ancient Egyptian sky god who was usually depicted as a falcon. His right eye was associated with the sun Ra. The eye symbol represents the marking around a Peregrine Falcon's eye that includes the "teardrop" marking sometimes found below the eye."
It is interesting to note that, in the ancient egyptian calculus, the Eye Of Horus defined number one (1) = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64, by throwing away 1/64. The parts of the Eye were used to represent fractions.

Amulets on display at the Egyptian Museum, Torino

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

Questa poesia parla di Ozymandias, altro nome di Ramses II.

Ramses II, Egyptian Museum, Torino

Testa osiriaca danneggiata

"Uno dei pezzi esibiti alla mostra di antichità del Museo Egizio di Torino a Shizuoka (Giappone), durante i lavori di imballo/trasporto, ha subito un grave danno. Si tratta della testa osiriaca che era a suo tempo stata riparata con l'aggiunta di una corona bianca, non sua. Viva preoccupazione degli Egittologi italiani."
http://www.archaeogate.org/egittologia/article/1277/1/danneggiata-la-testa-osiriaca-del-museo-egizio-di-torin.html

Egyptian Museum, Torino

This head has been damaged during the packaging after an exhibition in Japan

Thera and the biblical plagues

Thera, a volcano in the Mediterranean sea, produced with its explosion  around 3,500 year ago, one of the biggest cataclysms in the human history. The remains of  Thera are the Mediterranean islands of Santorini,  north of Crete.  As we can read from an article of Telegraph, the volcanic ash of eruption could have clashed with thunderstorms above Egypt, producing severe  hail storms (one of the biblical plagues).
According to Prof.Trevisanato, a Canadian biologist, another plague, the locusts, could be explained by the volcanic fall out from the ash. The ash fall out caused weather anomalies, which produced higher precipitations and humidity, fostering the presence of the locusts. The volcanic ash could also have caused the plague of darkness. In fact, pumice stones have been found during excavations of Egyptian ruins despite there not being any volcanoes in Egypt.
Very interesting article.

Night at the Museum - 4 - Egypt

Wood and faience objects at the Egyptian Museum

Revisiting the construction of pyramids

"The Kufu pyramid, with a volume of 2,7 millions of meter cubes, was completed over a period of 20 to 30 years. From this one can estimate a daily rhythm of 300 to 400 blocks, each having an average volume of 1 meter cube. This means one block put at the right place every 2 minutes.  To achieve this goal,  1 meter square of block face would have to be hewn every 20 seconds! What a performance, with tools made of stone or with soft copper ..."  As we can read in the Europhysics News Vol. 40, No. 1, 2009, pp. 27-31, Revisiting the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, Guy Demortier,  www.europhysicsnews.org/epn20091p27.pdf ...
"In 1978,  the French chemist Joseph Davidovits rejected the generally accepted technique of carving and hoisting stones. He proposed that the building method involved the moulding on site: blocks were made of a kind of concrete whose basic binding compound was natron: a sodium carbonate extracted very close to the site of Giza.  The binder was obtained by some chemical reaction leading to a geopolymer (a name given by Davidovits). It is a poly-sialate containing an alkaline nucleus: sodium from natron.  Natron, lime and water form caustic soda,  which reacts with aluminous limestone to yield the basic geopolymer.  X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction have shown that the blocks consist of limestone (85 to 92%) associated with a binder.  Additional analyses were performed by PIXE (Particle-Induced X-ray Emission), PIGE (Particle-Induced gamma-ray Emission) and by NMR-Spectroscopy for structural characterization in laboratories of Namur and Lecce. One of the pyramid’s samples appeared  to be made of  a central compact structure embedded in a material of different composition. The central part is identified as natural limestone but the outer part contains a large amount of F,  Na,  Mg,  Al,  Si."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Davidovits
http://www.geopolymer.org/archaeology/pyramids/pyramids-3-the-formula-the-invention-of-stone/2

Isis and Harpocrates

In late Greek mythology as developed in Ptolemaic Alexandria, Harpocrates is the god of silence, adapted from the Egyptian child god Horus. To the ancient Egyptians, Horus represented the new-born Sun, rising each day at dawn. When the Greeks conquered Egypt under Alexander the Great, they transformed the Egyptian Horus into their Hellenistic god known as Harpocrates, a rendering from Egyptian Har-pa-khered or Heru-pa-khered (meaning "Har, the Child"). Horus was conceived by Isis, the mother goddess, from Osiris, the original god-king of Egypt, who had been murdered by his brother Set.  Among the Egyptians the full-grown Horus was considered the victorious god of the Sun who each day overcomes darkness. In this way Harpocrates, the child Horus, personifies the newborn sun each day, the first strength of the winter sun, and also the image of early vegetation. Egyptian statues represent the child Horus, pictured as a naked boy with his finger on his mouth, a realization of the hieroglyph for "child" , or with the mother Isis.
From Wiki

Isis and the child Harpocrates - Museo Egizio

Amun

The king and the god Amun. This sculpture represents the king's allegiance to the Theban god Amun. The sides of the throne are decorated with hieroglyphs forthe unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. Limestone, Dinasty XVIII,reign of Horemheb (1319-1292 BC), Temple of Amun, Thebes.

Hathor

"Hathor was an Ancient Egyptian goddess who personified the principles of love, beauty, music, motherhood and joy. She was one of the most important and popular deities throughout the history of Ancient Egypt. Hathor was worshipped  ... as "Mistress of the West" welcoming the dead into the next life. In other roles she was a goddess of music, dance, foreign lands and fertility who helped women in childbirth, as well as the patron goddess of miners. The cult of Hathor predates the historical period and the roots of devotion to her are, therefore, difficult to trace, though it may be a development of predynastic cults who venerated the fertility, and nature in general, represented by cows.
Hathor is commonly depicted as a cow goddess with head horns in which is set a sun disk with Uraeus."
Source: Wiki

Museo Egizio, Torino