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LOST EGYPT
Fun Facts
 King Tut never rode a camel. The animals came to Egypt at
the end of the age of pharaohs.
 As of 2002, AERA had catalogued nearly 25,000 pieces
of flint, 200,000 fragments of animal bone, and 500,000
pieces of pottery from the Lost City site. Those numbers
continue to grow.
 According to Richard W. Bulliet’s book The Camel
and the Wheel, camels actually replaced pre-existing
wheeled technologies in some parts of the Middle East
because they didn’t get stuck in the sand.
 The first recorded restoration of the Great Sphinx at
Giza took place nearly 3500 years ago, when Pharaoh
Thutmose IV removed the sand that had buried it up to its neck.
At the time of Thutmose’s restoration, the Sphinx was already 1000 years old.
 In the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones discovers the Ark of the Covenant in a hidden
chamber in the ancient city of Tanis. Tanis was an actual city, and it served as the capital of Egypt
from the Twenty-first to the Twenty-third dynasty (approximately 1078 BC – 740 BC).
 The mummy in both the 1932 film The Mummy and in the 1999 remake of the same name is
named Imhotep. In reality, Imhotep was the engineer who designed the Step Pyramid of Djoser,
the first pyramid constructed in ancient Egypt.
 Thutmose III covered the texts of Hatshepsut’s obelisks
at Karnak Temple with stone in an attempt to remove
any mention of her from the temple. Ironically, the
stone coverings helped to keep these carvings in pristine
condition almost 3500 years later.
 Using her work as a remote sensing expert, Dr. Sarah
Parcak estimates that less than 0.01% of the archaeological
sites in Egypt have been discovered.
 The words mummy, sphinx, and pyramid do not have
Egyptian origins (mummy is derived from Latin and
Persian, while sphinx and pyramid are derived from
Greek).
 The popular myth of Napoleon’s soldiers shooting off the
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CAMEL
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LOST EGYPT
Great Sphinx’s nose is untrue. It is more likely that the nose was
destroyed some 400 years before Napoleon ever set foot in Egypt.
 Around 99% of Egypt’s population lives along the Nile River or in
the river’s delta.
 The total number of animal mummies found in Egypt is
unknown. Animal mummies were so prevalent, sailors would
use them as ballast (or weight used to stabilize a ship). It is
unsure how many animal mummies left Egypt stuffed into the
holds of ships.
 It took over 100 years to translate the Rosetta Stone.
 In popular culture, we often see images of mummies buried
standing up. Archaeologists have not found any mummies
buried standing up.
 There is a cemetery near the Step Pyramid at Saqqara
dedicated entirely to Apis Bulls. Both in life and death,
these animals were treated like royalty. After the funeral
ceremony, some Apis Bulls were buried in sarcophagi
weighing over 60 tons.
STATUE
OF
NAPOLEON AT THE GREAT SPHINX
42
AN APIS
BULL