Until that moment, no one had recognized the batten's significance it had been attached to this particular coffin by mistake.Īrchaeologists first began discovering these intriguing coffin records in the 1890s while exploring tombs in the nearby burial complex at Asyût. The batten's surface was painted with graceful hieroglyphics representing star names, and Symons and Cockcroft immediately realized that the cross piece was part of yet another ancient astronomical record. Symons flicked the beam of her flashlight to illuminate a thin batten-a cross piece-that held the flat panels of wood together. At that moment, he was crouched beside a display case that enclosed a coffin in the central room of the Mallawi Monuments Museum, craning his neck to peer at the underside of the propped-up wood lid. “I can see writing!” Cockcroft exclaimed. The record, which had been described only vaguely, was indeed there, but to their astonishment, it was not the only one. But one of us (Symons) traveled there in May 2013 with Robert Cockcroft, a postdoctoral researcher in her laboratory, hoping to see one of the oldest astronomical records in the world. The Egyptian town of Mallawi is not on the main tourist beat, given its location 260 miles and a seven-hour train ride north of the temple complexes at Luxor.
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