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.”