3,300-year-old ancient Egyptian tombs and chapel with ‘amazing’ decorations unearthed at Saqqara
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New Ancient Egyptian tombs at Saqqara include the burial place of a temple custodian, an artist from the royal treasury and an unknown person.
Egyptian archaeologists have discovered several tombs and chapels dating back about 3,300 years in an ancient cemetery in Saqqara.
The largest tomb belongs to a man named “Panehsy”, who is “Supervisor of the Temple of Amun”, said Lara Weiss, curator of the Egyptian and Nubian collections at the National Museum of Antiquities of the Netherlands in Leiden and author of the book “The Walking Dead at Saqqara” (De Gruyter 2022), one of the leaders of the excavation, told Live Science in an email.
Weiss notes that Panehsy “has a very beautiful tomb with wonderful reliefs showing wonderfully colored traces”. The inscription said he was childless and an employee arranged to bring the offering to the mausoleum. Weiss said human remains were found in Panehsy’s grave, but they appear to be from people buried later and will be studied in detail in 2024.
Weiss said another newly discovered grave belonged to a man named “Yuyu” who was a “gold leaf maker and therefore an artisan specializing in the royal treasury”. Although Yuyu’s tomb is smaller than Paneshy’s, it has remarkable artwork depicting “many interesting details such as numerous carriers [a ship] of bark and a huge procession of mourners” , Weiss notes. Weiss said four generations of his family were present, including “his parents, himself and his wife, his brother with his wife and children, children and grandchildren”.
One of the other graves found, whose owner is unknown, has reliefs and appears to show four people possibly from the same family. Weiss notes that the statues appear incomplete, but their design is similar to those found in a nearby tomb of a couple named Maya and Merit, who lived about 50 years before That tomb was built. Live Science has reached out to scholars not involved in the excavation to gather their input. Francesco Tiradritti, professor of Egyptology at Kore University in Enna, Italy, was impressed by the relief. “The quality of this relief is amazing,” said Tiradritti, noting that “the artist used the three-dimensionality and front of the four figures with a rare perception of Egyptian art. ancient.” Tiradritti said the relief reminded him of monuments found in a necropolis near Memphis dating back to the Old Kingdom (circa 2649 BC to 2150 BC), the period when the pyramids were built in Egypt. .
Work at Saqqara is ongoing and was carried out by researchers from the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy.
