Identifying Tutankhamun's lineage, retrieving the gospel of Judas, unearthing the cachette of Amenhotep III's statues in Luxor, the issuance of a new antiquities law and celebrations for the centennial of the Coptic and Islamic museums are some of the most significant events of 2010. Nevine El-Aref looks back at an exciting year This year, 88 years after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, scientists have decoded the DNA of one of the most powerful royal houses of the New Kingdom which included Akhenaten and the famous Boy King. Through analysis of five royal 18th-Dynasty mummies, several perplexing questions about the genaeology and physiology of the Amarna- period family have been answered. The mummy from tomb KV 55 in the Valley of the Kings found by archaeologists in 1955 turned out to belong to the monotheistic Pharaoh Akhenaten. DNA tests also showed that Akhenaten was Tutankhamun's father, not his brother as some had claimed. The stylised male/female physique characteristic of representations of Akhenaten was found to be an iconographic convention bearing no relation to the Pharaoh's actual appearance. According to Amarna religious belief, Aten was both male and female, and therefore Akhenaten, as his representative, was depicted as having both male and female form. The mummy of Queen Tiye, wife of Amenhotep III and mother of Akhenaten, was also identified. Her mummy, known as the Elder Lady with Hair, was in KV 35 alongside the remains of a younger woman now identified as Tutankhamun's mother. Significantly, studies by the Supreme Council of Antiquities proved that Tutankhamun died of a combination of malaria and vascular bone necrosis, a condition that diminishes the blood supply to the bone and leads to serious weakening or destruction of tissue. There were also major developments in studies of Egypt's Coptic era. The only known copy of the gospel of Jesus's favourite disciple, Judas, which casts an unorthodox light on events leading up to the Crucifixion, returned to Egypt. The fragile codex -- made up of 13 papyrus leaves -- was handed over to the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo by most recent owners, the Basel-based Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art. Written in Coptic in the third or fourth century, the codex is believed to be a translation of an original Greek text dating from sometime before AD 180. It was found in the late 1970s by a farmer near the village of Beni Mazar, near Minya in Upper Egypt, but was later stolen and smuggled abroad. In 2000, after 16 years in a New York bank and in a deplorable condition, it was sold again before being authenticated and restored. On Luxor's west bank, archaeologists uncovered a cachette of red granite statues that once stood at the forefront of Pharaoh Amenhotep III's mortuary temple. It contained a large number of statues featuring Amenhotep III accompanied by various ancient Egyptian deities and by his wife, Queen Tiye. Excavations carried out in the funerary temple area came within the framework of the project to produce a virtual reconstruction of the temple. Eventually an open-air museum will be established at the site and the statues will go on permanent display. The night landscape on Luxor's west bank has totally changed with the installation of a new lighting system that provides a dramatic view of the famous monuments. The lights were provided by the Ministry of Culture, the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), the Egyptian Sound and Light Organisation and the French lighting company, Architecture Lumière. Visits will now be paced between 7am and 8pm, thus reducing the damaging humidity levels inside the tombs that lead to deterioration of the mural paintings. This is one of several development projects to transform Luxor into an open-air museum. Plans include the restoration of Howard Carter's rest house with a view to making it a museum, a new visitor centre at Deir Al-Bahari and the restoration and reopening of the Youssef Abul-Haggag Mosque. This year also witnessed the celebration of the centenary of both the Islamic and Coptic museums. The centennial of the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) followed the completion of seven years of rehabilitation. The masterplan for the renovation and the new exhibition design was drawn up by French designer and museographer Adrien Gardère in cooperation with the Islamic Department of the Louvre Museum in Paris, which advised on the reorganisation of the museum's collections. The MIA is divided into two large wings, the first devoted to the chronological exhibition of Islamic artefacts taken in the main from monuments in historic Cairo, and the second to objects from other parts of the Islamic world. These include calligraphy; manuscripts; ceramics; mosaics; textiles; gravestones; mashrabiya (latticed woodwork); wooden objects; metal and glass vessels; incense burners and caskets; pottery; metalwork and glass lamps dating from various periods in Islamic history. These objects are displayed according to chronology and theme, provenance and material. The renovated museum has state-of-the-art security and lighting systems, a fully-equipped restoration laboratory, a children's museum and a library. The Coptic Art Museum, situated next to the Hanging Church in Old Cairo, was founded in 1910 by an influential Copt, Marcus Pasha Simaika, as a permanent home for Coptic Egypt's heritage artefacts. To celebrate the museum's centenary the SCA held the first-ever locally-curated exhibition of Coptic art. The Coptic Art Revealed exhibition in the Amir Taz Palace highlighted the contribution Egypt's Copts made to the nation's heritage. The 205 artefacts chosen to represent the period in the exhibition were arranged either chronologically or thematically. They began with an event of the utmost importance for the history of Christianity in the country: the Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. With the help of artefacts chosen to demonstrate the overlap of Pharaonic, Graeco-Roman and early Christian motifs, the exhibition showed how the new religion survived in Egypt while older religions and cults did not. Recent discoveries from Bawit (Deir Abu Abullu, north of Assiut) formed the highlight of the exhibition. Copts produced some of the beautiful crafts in the early Christian world, and the exhibition displayed some of these items that were at one time in daily use. The objects were selected from several museum collections in Egypt and included treasures from the Coptic Museum; the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Fustat; the Museum of Islamic Art in Bab Al-Khalq; the National Museum, the Graeco-Roman Museum and the Museum of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria; and the Beni Sweif and Arish museums. All in all, 2010 was a good year for Egyptologists; and with most missions still at mid-season point, next year could yield more surprises.
