Among the 3,500-year-old valuables found in a goldsmith’s tomb in a necropolis are mummies, diamonds, and sarcophagi.
Near Egypt’s renowned Valley of the Kings, in the necropolis of Draa el-Naga, a magnificent ancient Egyptian tomb has been found.
The tomb consists of a modest room on the main floor and a burial chamber with four mummies eight meters below. Amenemhat, a goldsmith, lived there during the majority of the 18th Dynasty (1550–1292 BC), which included Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Tutankhamun.
Skeletons, funeral artifacts, including 150 ushabti figures meant to serve as servants in the afterlife, four wooden sarcophagi, jewelry, and funerary cones are also found in the tomb.
The discovery of a tomb holding an identified nobleman, such as this, might be of immense significance, according to Zahi Hawass, one of the foremost Egyptologists in the world and a former minister of antiquities in Egypt.
Forty of the fifty funerary cones recovered are those of four other officials from the time period, the remains of which have not yet been located. The excavation’s director, Mostafa Waziry, declared, “This is a promising indicator.”
It indicates that if we continue to excavate in this region, we will discover four additional graves. Current Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Khaled Alnani praised the find as “a major scientific finding.”
The tomb was utilized again during the start of the Third Intermediate Period (1070 BC to 664 BC), and an adjacent shaft was found containing three Middle Kingdom corpses in two coffins (2050 BC to 1800 BC).
According to Alnani, this indicates that there are numerous mummies, sarcophagi, artifacts, and poems that need to be analyzed and studied. It is important in all areas, according to Albania.
A few months ago, the judge’s tomb was found, sparking the start of the area’s excavation. Alnani anticipates making other findings. He answered, “The task is not done. “We anticipate announcing something fresh next month.”
2017 has been “a year of archaeological discoveries,” according to Alnani, because of a number of findings. When an eight-meter-tall quartzite statue of Psamtek I was discovered in March and was mistaken for the well-known pharaoh Ramses II, headlines were created. The late-period king’s statue was discovered in the busy east Cairo neighborhood of Mataria, not far from Ain Shams University.
Hawass stated, “Ancient Egypt is built on top of modern Egypt. “You may sometimes uncover monuments by excavating in your courtyard, just like in Aswan or Heliopolis.” “Up to this point, we’ve only discovered 30% of the Egyptian structures; 70% are still buried,” he continued.
A Roman-era tomb was unearthed last month close to the Upper Egyptian town of Minya, while a 3,500-year-old tomb near Luxor included more than 1,000 wooden funeral figures. A pyramid was found at the Dahshur necropolis in April.
After the Arab Spring demonstrations in 2011 and the ensuing decline in tourism as travelers stayed away due to terrorism and political turmoil, Egypt’s archaeology experienced a period of stagnation. Egypt had 4.8 million tourists in 2013, a decrease of more than 30% from 2010.
The bombing of a Russian passenger plane in October 2015, which killed all 224 aboard, significantly hurt tourism numbers, which had already dropped during the demonstrations that brought down previous president Hosni Mubarak. The Antiquities Ministry said in 2014 that revenue from historic monuments had decreased by 95%, making tourism to cultural sites along the Nile valley the most severely affected.
The Egyptian government hired a New York-based PR company last year to manage a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to encourage tourism in an effort to bring tourist numbers back to pre-2011 levels. Such initiatives haven’t yet produced many noticeable improvements.
The ministry is having trouble making ends meet to pay for urgent maintenance tasks due to the loss of revenue. Hawass urged the preservation of the monuments. “I used to invest 1.3 billion Egyptian pounds annually in the building of museums and the preservation of historical sites. Since you now lack this cash, the ministry is in grave danger.
The Grand Egyptian Museum, which is currently being built on the Giza plateau, is one of several significant projects in need of funding. The museum, which Hawass refers to as “the most significant cultural undertaking of the 21st century,” has been years delayed and is now expected to cost $1bn (£750m), millions more than originally anticipated.
