Sands of Saqqara
Recent Update from Monday
These sands are a popular tourist site located in the desert
about 12 miles south of Cairo, Egypt.
They are the home to a collection of temples, tombs and funerary complexes.
So when on Tuesday archaeologists discovered finds that
dated back more than 3000 years the sands not only of Saqqara
but of Egypt
were recognized as a progressing mystery. Archaeology in Egypt
has been in action for just over 150 years and has consistently proved much
more than ‘note worthy’ but rather a remarkable ‘attention grabbing adventure’.
“The sands of Saqqara reveal lots of
secrets,” said Egypt's
antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass, as he showed reporters a 4,000-year-old mud
brick tomb that belonged to a scribe of divine records, Ka-Hay, and his wife. There
was a tomb, a butler’s limestone grave approximately 3350 years old and also
two painted coffins that had been discovered earlier this year in Saqqara
near the famous Step Pyramid of King Djoser. (Out of more than 90pyramids, Egypts
oldest).
Hawass referred to the brick tomb
unveiled Tuesday that it “…could enrich our knowledge about the people who
actually surrounded the kings of Saqqara.” In addition
to the many carvings, three wooden statues also were found in the mud-brick
tomb. Two of them, each about 3 feet tall and depicting the scribe, were laid
out on pieces of foam on the ground. The third was not shown because it was in
poor condition.
“It doesn't look great because it
was built from mud brick and not built of limestone, but I really believe that
this tomb is very important,” said Hawass.
On the other side of the Step
Pyramid, archeologists unveiled the second tomb, which belonged to a butler who
died approximately 3350 years ago.
The tomb was carved from limestone
and contained murals that illustrated scenes of people performing rituals and
monkeys eating fruit. It was well noted that the blue and orange colors of the
paint were surprisingly well preserved.
Maarten Raven, the excavation's director and a curator at the National
Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, Netherlands
responded to the find as “…a very, very lively scene.”
Raven spoke of believing that other tombs from the New Kingdom,
comparable to the butler's, have yet to be uncovered in Saqqara.
(Note: Saqqara: famous for Old Kingdom
antiquities) Many of the New Kingdom tombs, which date
back from 1570 B.C. to 1070 B.C., can be found in the southern Egyptian city of
Luxor.
"We hope one day this area will be open to visitors so people can see
that Saqqara is not only Old Kingdom
but New Kingdom as well," Raven said.
Hawass also unveiled two wooden coffins, dating at 4000 years old also found
south of the Step Pyramid. The rectangular coffins, painted light orange with
blue hieroglyphics, contained human-shaped coffins known as ‘anthropoids’, in
which lay the mummies of a priest and a woman, who Hawass identified through
hieroglyphics on the coffin as the priest's “girlfriend.”