THOUSANDS of years ago, Egypt’s royals were laid to rest in the famed Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, near Thebes (modern day Luxor). Less well-known is the nearby Al-Assasif necropolis, where nobles and senior officials were buried. Now an excavation at the site has revealed two sarcophagi.
In Tomb TT33 (left), archaeologists have found the sarcophagus of a mummy preserved in linen wrappings. The remains are those of a woman who lived more than 3000 years ago during Egypt’s 18th dynasty, the era of King Tutankhamun. The tomb was excavated by a team from the University of Strasbourg in France. Khaled el-Enany and Mostafa Waziri, who oversee antiquities for Egypt, opened the sarcophagus on 24 November.
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A nearby tomb called TT28 also yielded several well-preserved mummies (below). The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities says this group, which includes a child, may be a family that was embalmed together. In that tomb another sarcophagus was discovered, made of black wood and covered with carved hieroglyphics inlaid with gold. The writing indicates that the sarcophagus holds the remains of Thaw Irkhet-If, the overseer of an ancient mummification shrine. His tomb also held nearly 1000 wooden funerary figurines called “shabti” and the ceilings were covered in coloured paintings depicting Thaw Irkhet-If and members of his family.
Photographer
Khaled Desouki, AFP/Getty Images
This article appeared in print under the headline “Egypt’s ancient tombs”
