When New Art’s Really Old

I’m always chipper around Christmas and New Year’s, times of gift giving, snow, revelation, reflection, and renewal. Revelation isn’t just about prophets channeling God. I follow Biblical archaeology but also Greek and Roman discoveries, believing that there’s so much we don’t know, plus technology has advanced so much. AI, ground penetrating radar, drones, magnetology, and DNA science are a few of the new ways to marry technology to the human eye and touch and the scholarly mind and to read what’s underground. Egypt’s Valley of the Kings has been combed for hundreds of years, thousands counting tomb raiders, but just a few months ago archaeologists there confirmed they’d found the tomb of Thutmose II, who ruled during, we think, the 1480s b.c. It’s the last missing tomb of an Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh and the first discovered since King Tut’s tomb in 1922. The dynasty ran from around 1550 to 1292 b.c. and was ancient Egypt’s golden age.