From the EEF:
* Press report: "Severed Hands Discovered in Ancient Egypt Palace"
"A team of archaeologists excavating a palace in the ancient city of Avaris,
in Egypt, has made a gruesome discovery. The archaeologists have
unearthed the skeletons of 16 human hands buried in four pits. Two of
the pits, located in front of what is believed to be a throne room, hold
one hand each. Two other pits, constructed at a slightly later time in
an outer space of the palace, contain the 14 remaining hands. They
are all right hands; there are no lefts. "Most of the hands are quite
large and some of them are very large," Manfred Bietak, project
and field director of the excavations, told LiveScience. (..) At the
time the hands were buried, the palace was being used by one of the
Hyksos rulers, King Khayan.
The hands appear to be the first physical evidence of a practice
attested to in ancient Egyptian writing and art, in which a soldier
would present the cut-off right hand of an enemy in exchange for
gold, Bietak explains in the most recent edition of the periodical
Egyptian Archaeology. "Our evidence is the earliest evidence and the
only physical evidence at all," Bietak said. "Each pit represents a
ceremony."