A team of Egyptian archaeologists and researchers from the Penn Museum, Philadelphia, at the site of a newly discovered tomb of an as yet unknown pharaoh
A team of Egyptian archaeologists and researchers from the Penn Museum, Philadelphia, at the site of a newly discovered tomb of an as yet unknown pharaoh
Archaeologists have unearthed the huge tomb of an unknown pharaoh at an Egyptian necropolis, a team of researchers said on Thursday, in what they are calling the second discovery of a king’s tomb this year.
The team of Egyptian and American archaeologists found the tomb, which the researchers estimate is 3,600 years old, nearly 23 feet underground at Abydos, one of the oldest cities of ancient Egypt. The city, about 483km south of Cairo, was a burial place for early pharaohs and became a pilgrimage site in antiquity. A necropolis developed at Anubis Mountain to the city’s south.
Researchers uncovered the tomb at the mountain, at the base of a high desert cliff where strong winds carry gusts of sand. In some places around the necropolis, sand has buried structures more than 16 or 19 feet deep.
The burial chamber features a decorated entryway, several rooms and soaring 16-foot vaults made of mud bricks. It dwarfs a tomb unearthed at Abydos over a decade ago, which was hailed at the time as the first material proof of a “lost” dynasty of kings there.
“It’s a new chapter in investigating this dynasty,” Josef W. Wegner, a curator at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia and the leader of the American side of the excavation, said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s pretty exciting.”
Egypt’s ministry of tourism and antiquities briefly described the findings at Abydos earlier this month, but researchers at the Penn Museum announced more about their discovery on Thursday.
Similarities between the newly unearthed tomb and the one discovered in 2014, which belonged to a king named Seneb-Kay, have led the archaeologists to conclude that the as-yet-unknown pharaoh may have been an earlier member of the so-called Abydos dynasty.
In the newly discovered tomb, painted scenes on plastered brickwork decorated the entrance to the limestone burial chamber, showing the goddess Isis and her sister Nephthys, who were often paired in funerary rites. “This tomb and Seneb-Kay’s tomb are the earliest surviving royal tombs that actually have painted decorations inside of them,” Wegner said. But there were no identifiable skeletal remains at the newly unearthed site.