Quote:

---

Meroe "Royal" pyramids. These "Royal" pyramids were a bit fancier than the "Nobels" pyramids. They were actually perfectly intact until a German scientist decided to blow some of them up to find treasure while Sudan was under English rule:

Erik

---

ecxuse me please but you have to made your homework better:

Giuseppe Ferlini (1800–1870), of Bologna, Italy, was an Italian doctor turned explorer and archaeologist who destroyed over 40 pyramids in a quest for treasure in the 1820s in Egypt and Sudan. He served as surgeon the Egyptian army, occupying Sudan. While the army stayed at Khartoum and Sennar, he went in 1834 to Meroë and destroyed many pyramids there and in Wad ban Naqa while searching for treasures. He found only one cache of gold. He tried to sell it to several European museums, but at this time nobody believed that such high quality jewellery could be made in Black Africa. His finds were finally sold, and remain at the museums in Munich and Berlin.

The Sudanese do not fondly remember this infamous rogue archaeologist. According to "Dark Star Safari" by Paul Theroux, Ferlini dynamited the tops of many of the Meroë pyramids, marring the formerly pristine relics and making off with the artifacts. Of particular note was the leveling of Pyramid N 6 of the kandake Amanishakheto.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Ferlini

was long time before the british came into the sudan btw

in this time nobody in the sudan was thinking that this was a problem. ferlini destroy only a few of the pyramids and he was succesful and found a gold treasure.
because of the pistols in his hand he was able to escape with his treasure. the locals around try to to find more gold and they may have destroy to most of the pyramids in the years after.

the first german scientist coming to meroe was Lepsius, the father of the modern scientific discipline of Egyptology:
In 1842 Lepsius was commissioned (at the recommendation of Alexander von Humboldt and Christian Charles Josias Bunsen) by King Frederich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to lead an expedition to Egypt and the Sudan to explore and record the remains of the ancient Egyptian civilization. The Prussian expedition was modeled after the earlier Napoléonic mission, and consisted of surveyors, draftsmen, and other specialists.

The chief result of this expedition was the publication of the Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien (Monuments from Egypt and Ethiopia), a massive twelve volume compendia of nearly 900 plates of ancient Egyptian inscriptions, as well as accompanying commentary and descriptions. These plans, maps, and drawings of temple and tomb walls remained the chief source of information for Western scholars well into the 20th century, and are useful even today as they are often the sole record of monuments that have since been destroyed or reburied.

Lepsius published widely in the field of Egyptology, and is considered the father of the modern scientific discipline of Egyptology, assuming a role that Champollion might have achieved had he not died so young. Much of his work is fundamental to the field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepsius

--------------------
Norwegian hunter misses moose, shoots man on toilet
.
bringing civilisation to the barbarians

Edited by lancaster (01/05/11 07:26 PM)

Post Extras