using nigella sativa l. (black cumin), in traditional medicine, dates back to tutankhamen, the pharaoh of egypt. there are aboundant historical and religious evidence implying the importance of these curative seeds. traditionally, they have been used for various therapeutic purposes. zokam and nazleh (zan) are two nasal diseases used to be treated by these medicinal seeds. traditional persian m...

The Valley of the Kings (arab. Wadi al Muluk; KV) situated on the West Bank near Luxor (Egypt) was the site for royal and elite burials during the New Kingdom (ca. 1500-1100 BC), with many tombs being reused in subsequent periods. In 2009, the scientific project "The University of Basel Kings' Valley Project" was launched. The main purpose of this transdisciplinary project is the clearance and ...

Queen Nefertari, the favourite Royal Consort of Pharaoh Ramses II (Ancient Egypt, New Kingdom, 19th Dynasty c. 1250 BC) is famous for her beautifully decorated tomb in the Valley of the Queens. Her burial was plundered in ancient times yet still many objects were found broken in the debris when the tomb was excavated. Amongst the found objects was a pair of mummified legs. They came to the Egyp...

Recent medical investigations have worked to decode some of the great mysteries surrounding the life of various Ancient Egyptians. The research has sparked debate over this mysterious civilization; debates that range from the genetic makeup of the Pharaohs to whether or not they were murdered. The scientific and historical knowledge gained from such research has opened the doors for medicine to...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Tutankhamen, the last pharaoh of the XVIIIth dynasty, died unexpectedly at approximately age 18 years. A cause of death has never been established, but theories that the young king was murdered by a blow to the head have been proposed based on skull radiographs obtained by a team from the University of Liverpool in 1968. We recently had the opportunity to evaluate the sku...

With a few exceptions, the distant past is an anonymous land occupied by people who made things and left behind a cryptic record of broken pieces. Even when the written word comes into play in human history and we can read the hieroglyphs naming an Egyptian pharaoh and describing royal achievements, the majority of human experience remains unknown and unrecoverable. Archaeologists usually excav...

Making accurate predictions about events is an important but difficult task. Recent work suggests that people are adept at this task, making predictions that reflect surprisingly accurate knowledge of the distributions of real quantities. Across three experiments, we used an iterated learning procedure to explore the basis of this knowledge: to what extent is domain experience critical to accur...

The Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten initiated worship of a single god and established a new capital city (Tell Amarna) that was built and occupied only once from 1350-1330 BCE. This single short occupation offers a unique opportunity to study a short time period. The royal tombs have long been known and studied, but the location of graves for the common inhabitants has been an archaeological puzzle ...

The Neolithic revolution, which began some 12,000 years ago in Turkey and in other parts of the Fertile Crescent, caused man to adopt a sedentary lifestyle, which on its turn speeded up the process of domestication of animals. The dog was already domesticated before this revolution and had served man as help in hunting. During hunting, man probably figured out that a few of the hunted species c...