More than 70 years after his disappearance, a 5,000 year old object coming from the Great Pyramid of Cheops It was found by chance in 2020 inside a box of cigars at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.
Consisting of a fragment of cedar woodis one of only three objects found in 1872 by British archaeologist Waynman Dixon inside the egyptian pyramid.
The other two, a ball and a bronze hook presumably used for construction, they are preserved in the British Museum, but trace of this fragment of wood had been lost.
A clue emerged in 2001 that the third object may have been handed over to the University of Aberdeen, but had not been located until now.
The incredible find in a box of cigars
At the end of 2019, Abeer Eladany, an Egyptian assistant who was reviewing an Asian collection, came across a box of cigars which carried his country’s ancient flag before realizing that the piece of wood it contained was the missing artifact, now in several pieces.
«When I looked at the numbers in the Egyptian record, I knew immediately what it was. I have worked on excavations in Egypt before, but I never imagined that it would be here, in the north-east of Scotland, that I would find something so important to the heritage of my own country,» explained the archaeologist.
At the time of his discoveries in the 19th century, Dixon was accompanied by the British doctor James Grant, who had traveled to Egypt to fight cholera and with whom he had befriended. When Grant died in 1895, his collection was bequeathed to the University of Aberdeen, where he had studied.
In 1946, His daughter also donated this fragment of cedar to the university, but this was not cataloged and could not be found despite an intense search.
Recent analyzes allowed us to date the wooden fragment between the year 3341 BC and 3094 BCapproximately 500 years before the construction of the pyramid on the Egyptian Giza plateau. This suggests that the objects found by Dixon, nicknamed «the Dixon relics», may have been left there by the builders.
In the opinion of Neil Curtis, head of museums and special collections at the University of Aberdeen, the results of this carbon dating represent a «revelation» that «will certainly revive interest in the Dixon relics and how they can shed light on the Great Pyramid«.
AFP Agency.
GML
