![]() “Quite often digs take place in parts of the world where there isn’t any escape, you’re in the middle of the desert. “Often you’re living together – you wake up in the morning all in the same dig house, you go to the site together, you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together. It’s not just the possible locations of tombs that lead to rows. People are very attached to their own theories.” “There’s an awful lot of ego flying around. “Egyptology is a serious scientific pursuit, but it’s got a strong flavour of eccentricity,” admits Dr Naunton. “But the fact that everything was still in place, like they’d just gone out of the room and were about to come back, was absolutely amazing.” Dr Chris Naunton examining a reconstructed coffin in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo (Photo: Chris Naunton) Don’t you dare eat another Egyptologist’s peanut butter…Īrchaeology is a career that attracts some curious characters, especially in the land of the pharaohs. “You might think: ‘A few pots full of salt? A few coffins used as storage boxes? That’s not that exciting’. “Somebody placed all those items there, left the tomb and sealed and nothing moved for 3,500 years,” he says. Stepping inside, with the contents untouched, was magical. It was a storage chamber for mummification materials – quite possibly used for King Tut’s body. In 2005 Dr Naunton was lucky to visit the first ancient chamber found in the Valley of the Kings since Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s treasures in 1922, shortly after it was opened. Speaking to i shortly after returning from Sudan, where he had been guiding a tour group, Dr Naunton outlines the dream: “To uncover a tomb that’s a Mary Celeste for archaeology – completely untouched.” The site of a newly discovered mummification workshop discovered along with several burial chambers, at the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo, near the Djoser step pyramid (Photo: Khaled DESOUKI / AFP) People still hope of finding an intact tomb “Were you to put a spade in the ground there tomorrow, I bet you £100 you will find two huge tombs, whether they’re Imhotep’s or not,” he says. In fact, there are two structures found by geophysical surveys in Egypt that are waiting to be excavated and may belong to Imhotep, architect of the step pyramid. “There surely is more digging to do,” he writes in his new book, Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt, “and more to find”. The author of the text decided to cover the ostracon with brief excerpts from the Book of the Dead spells that also formed parts of the ritual of transfiguration, thus guarantying an undisturbed afterlife existence of the owner.As President of the International Association of Egyptologists, the 40-year-old Londoner is among those still drawn by the “allure of the desert” – and the prospect of finding something extraordinary. The team also found two uninscribed alabaster canopic jars, a faience model of an offering table, ten model cups and a limestone ostracon inscribed with religious texts written in black ink and hieratic script. Image Credit : Petr Košárek – Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles UniversityĪt the east of the shaft, several items were excavated intact and in situ: two wooden boxes with altogether 402 faience shabtis, a funerary figurine used in ancient Egyptian funerary practices intended to act as servants or minions for the deceased. The space inside the inner basalt sarcophagus was found almost completely empty, except for a finely carved but uninscribed heart scarab, and an amulet in a shape of a headrest. The outer sarcophagus is made of two massive blocks of white limestone that contains an inner sarcophagus made of basalt and is inscribed with the Book of the Dead, chapter 72, describing the resurrection of the deceased and his departure to the afterlife. Image Credit : Petr Košárek – Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles UniversityĪt the bottom of the shaft the researchers found a double sarcophagus situated directly on a filling of sand, but discovered that the tomb had already been robbed in late antiquity during the 4th to 5th century AD (indicated by two early Coptic vessels found in the main shaft). They found that the shaft was orientated east-west and measures approximately 6.5 by 3.3 metres. In the latest season of excavations, the team focused on the burial shaft and excavated 14 metres of material to a depth 6 metres below ground level. The site was first excavated in 2021, where archaeologists found the largest ancient embalming cache in Egypt, containing 370 pottery storage jars that held materials used in the mummification of Wahibre-mery-Neith. ![]()
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