‘Garbage dump’ discovered in ancient Egyptian tomb dedicated to the fertility goddess
Figurines of deities and priests as well as vessels with a breast motif are among several hundred items discovered by archaeologists at an ancient garbage dump in Egypt.
Polish researchers at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor in the south of the country, came across the extraordinary find while working on the reconstruction of the 3,500-year-old Chapel of the Goddess Hathor.
Exploring a tomb carved into the rock face, the team from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology first came across the rubbish dump.
Hundreds of artefacts once used as offerings to the ancient Egyptian goddess of love and fertility have been uncovered in a 3,500-year-old garbage dump in Luxor.
Head of research Dr. Patryk Chudzik said: “We were concerned that our work could lead to the collapse of the tomb ceiling, which is why we wanted to secure it.
“After entering we found that it had never been studied and cleaned because the debris stacked up to a height of about half a meter.”
Buried within the rubble they came across the ancient artefacts.
Chudzik said: “The amount and quality of the artefacts we have found is astounding. They include a wooden figurine most likely depicting the owner of the tomb with a wig on his head.”
The trove of artefacts includes figurines painted a stunning blue color, along with cups, decorative plates, bowls and ceramic flasks with breast designs.
Other items discovered included dozens of women figurines, as well as ceramic flasks with breast motifs and floral patterns symbolising the rebirth of the Land of the Dead, and cow figurines from the early 18th dynasty, the period of the New Kingdom.
According to Dr. Chudzik, these were offerings to the Egyptian Goddess Hathor.
He said: “The offerings were made by local residents asking Hathor for support. After a while, there were too many of them and priests and temple staff had to clear them.
“We have already known a few places right at the temple entrance gates, where they were disposed of. Now we have discovered another, previously unknown place.”
The tomb was originally discovered in the late 19th century by Professor Henri Édouard Naville. However, the information he published about it was quite scarce. The researcher mentioned the rubble filling the tomb, but did not mention any excavations conducted in this place.
Archaeologists from an American expedition working at the Temple of Hatshepsut in the 1920s also missed this precious rubble.
It appears that the rubble with votive offerings to Hathor remained intact since the time of the deposit, almost 3,500 years ago.
The pile of rubble was also determined to be 500 years older than the Temple of Hatshepsut. Pictured is a figurine uncovered from the trash pile
The trash pile was discovered when researchers were reconstructing a tomb inside the Temple of Hatshepsut. Pictured is a piece of the tomb wall
Polish researchers have been working at the Temple of Hatshepsut since 1961 when Professor Kazimierz Michałowski founded Polish-Egyptian Archaeology and Conservation Expedition.
Since then, archaeologists, restorers and architects associated with the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology have been working on documentation and reconstruction of the temple. Currently, their efforts are focused on rebuilding the Hathor shrine. Partly underneath it, there is a tomb carved the rock, which they recently explored.
Figurines of deities and priests as well as vessels with a breast motif are among several hundred items discovered by archaeologists at an ancient garbage dump in Egypt.
The tomb is carved in the rock. It consists of a passage more than 15 meters long which leads to a chamber with a recess in the stone floor where the coffin with the body of the owner of the tomb was originally placed.
The discovery was made and research carried out in the spring of 2021. This season, the experts intend to support the ceiling of the tomb to enable reconstruction work in the Hathor shrine located above it.
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered an ancient pottery workshop — with the remains of rounded vessels, coins, figurines and even a ‘ritual room’ — dating to the beginning of the Roman period in Tabba Matouh, West Alexandria.
Archaeologists discovered a number of fragments of terracotta statues at the site in Alexandria.
Ancient workers primarily used the site for crafting amphorae — two-handed vessels with a neck narrower than the main body that was used for the storage and transportation of goods such as oil and grain, according to the University of Oxford’s Classical Art Research Center.
Archaeologists with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities discovered a number of buildings at the site, including a workshop containing a group of kilns.
During the Byzantine era (A.D. 330 to 1453), long after ceramic production ended at the site, the buildings were likely used for another purpose: lime production, Mustafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in the statement.
The archaeologists also uncovered graves, with burial holes dug into the rock, suggesting the site was later used as a cemetery during the medieval period. One of the graves held the remains of a pregnant woman.
A view of the site at Tabba Matouh, west Alexandria, Egypt
The archaeologists also discovered a storage room, which contained cooking utensils and tableware. A number of limestone buildings were most likely used as temporary residences for workers at the site. One room was discovered with a raised platform and the remains of terracotta statues, suggesting it was likely used for rituals.
Some of these statues represent the god Harpocrates, the juvenile form of the falcon-headed god Horus.
Another room that had stoves and the remains of amphorae containing preserved fish bones was most likely used for cooking and selling food, according to the statement.
The site dates back to early Roman Egypt, which began in 30 B.C. following future Roman emperor Octavian’s defeat of Anthony and Cleopatra, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Following the Roman conquest, Egypt became a highly prosperous Roman province that supplied the rest of the Roman Empire with a variety of craft-based products, including pottery.
“Pottery is the most common artefact recovered through excavation and survey of Roman sites [in ancient Egypt],” Scott Gallimore, an archaeologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada who was not involved in the new excavation, wrote in a 2010 paper for the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists.
The archaeological team also unearthed a number of smaller items at the site, such as firewood, small statues, animal bones and a number of coins featuring the likeness of Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, according to Heritage Daily.
An amulet of the ancient Egyptian god Bes and a feathered crown associated with Bes were also discovered. Bes was seen as the god of music, merriment and childbirth, according to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in California. Fishing hooks and the anchor of a boat were also among the items discovered.
A Massive, Black Sarcophagus Has Been Unearthed in Egypt, And Nobody Knows Who’s Inside
Archaeological digs around ancient Egyptian sites still have plenty of secrets to give up yet – like the huge, black granite sarcophagus just discovered at an excavation in the city of Alexandria, on the northern coast of Egypt.
What really stands out about the solemn-looking coffin is its size. At 185 cm (72.8 inches) tall, 265 cm (104.3 inches) long, and 165 cm (65 inches) wide, it’s the biggest ever found in Alexandria.
Oh, and then there’s the large alabaster head discovered in the same underground tomb. Experts are assuming it represents whoever is buried in the sarcophagus, though that’s yet to be confirmed.
It’s a fascinating find for archaeologists. Ayman Ashmawy from the Egypt Ministry of Antiquities says the layer of mortar still intact between the lid and the body of the coffin indicates it hasn’t been opened since it was sealed more than 2,000 years ago.
That’s particularly rare for a site like this – ancient Egyptian tombs have often been plundered and damaged over the centuries, which means archaeologists rarely find a final resting place that’s still intact like this one appears to be.
The site as a whole dates back to the Ptolemaic period between 305 BCE and 30 BCE, with this particular, find uncovered five meters (16.4 feet) below the ground.
Originally found while clearing the site for a new building, the tomb is now under guard while experts can work out what exactly lies inside the black sarcophagus. It could almost be the start of a new Indiana Jones film.
As Jason Daley at the Smithsonian reports, down the centuries Alexandria has developed to be such a busy, crowded city that finding relics can be a challenge – anything that has managed to survive is often difficult to get to.
Those are all the details we have of the new find, so we’ll have to wait and see if the identity of the buried Egyptian can be determined. But a sarcophagus of this size could mean someone of pretty high status.
We haven’t been short of incredible finds in Egypt this year.
In February, archaeologists found a hidden network of tombs south of Cairo in the Minya Governorate, which – like the giant granite sarcophagus – have probably lain untouched for 2,000 years. Experts say it’ll take them five years to work through that site.
Then in April, a rare Greco-Roman temple was found. It promises to reveal secrets about the Siwa Oasis, one of the most remote settlements in Egypt, including how foreign rule affected the country between 200-300 BCE.
Every discovery paints a little more detail about how people lived and worked in these ancient times. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this sarcophagus to see what it might reveal.
What Ancient DNA Reveals About Life in Africa 20,000 Years Ago
Kondoa Irangi rock art in present-day Tanzania features the cultural expressions of hunter-gatherers and pastoralists over a 2,000-year span.
Every person alive on the planet today is descended from people who lived as hunter-gatherers in Africa. The continent is the cradle of human origins and ingenuity, and with each new fossil and archaeological discovery, we learn more about our shared African past. Such research tends to focus on when our species, Homo sapiens, spread out to other landmasses 80,000–60,000 years ago. But what happened in Africa after that, and why don’t we know more about the people who remained?
Our new study, conducted by an interdisciplinary team of 44 researchers based in 12 countries, helps answer these questions. By sequencing and analyzing ancient DNA (aDNA) from people who lived as long ago as 18,000 years, we roughly doubled the age of sequenced aDNA from sub-Saharan Africa. And this genetic information helps anthropologists like us understand more about how modern humans were moving and mingling in Africa long ago.
TRACING OUR HUMAN PAST IN AFRICA
Beginning about 300,000 years ago, people in Africa who looked like us—the earliest anatomically modern humans—also started behaving in ways that seem very human. They made new kinds of stone tools and began transporting raw materials up to 250 miles, likely through trade networks. By 140,000–120,000 years ago, people made clothing from animal skins and began to decorate themselves with pierced marine shell beads.
While early innovations appeared in a patchwork fashion, a more widespread shift happened around 50,000 years ago—around the same time that people started moving into places as distant as Australia. New types of stone and bone tools became common, and people began fashioning and exchanging ostrich eggshell beads. And while most rock art in Africa is undated and badly weathered, an increase in ochre pigment at archaeological sites hints at an explosion of art.
Ostrich eggshell beads were popular trade items, tracing the reach of ancient social networks.
What caused this shift, known as the Later Stone Age transition, has been a longstanding archaeological mystery. Why would certain tools and behaviours, which up until that point had appeared in a piecemeal way across Africa, suddenly become widespread? Did it have something to do with changes in the number of people or how they interacted?
THE CHALLENGE OF ACCESSING THE DEEP PAST
Archaeologists reconstruct human behaviour in the past mainly through things people left behind—remains of their meals, tools, ornaments, and sometimes even their bodies. These records may accumulate over thousands of years, creating views of daily livelihoods that are really averaged over long periods of time. However, it’s hard to study ancient demography, or how populations changed, from the archaeological record alone.
This is where DNA can help. When combined with evidence from archaeology, linguistics, and oral and written history, scientists can piece together how people moved and interacted based on which groups share genetic similarities.
But DNA from living people can’t tell the whole story. African populations have been transformed over the past 5,000 years by the spread of herding and farming, the development of cities, ancient pandemics, and the ravages of colonialism and slavery. These processes caused some lineages to vanish and brought others together, forming new populations. Using present-day DNA to reconstruct ancient genetic landscapes is like reading a letter that was left out in the rain: Some words are there but blurred, and some are gone completely. Researchers need ancient DNA from archaeological human remains to explore human diversity in different places and times, and to understand what factors shaped it.
Unfortunately, aDNA from Africa is particularly hard to recover because the continent straddles the equator and heat and humidity degrade DNA. While the oldest aDNA from Eurasia is roughly 400,000 years old, all sequences from sub-Saharan Africa to date have been younger than around 9,000 years.
BREAKING THE “TROPICAL CEILING”
Because each person carries genetic legacies inherited from generations of their ancestors, our team was able to use DNA from individuals who lived between 18,000–and 400 years ago to explore how people interacted as far back as the last 80,000–50,000 years. This allowed us, for the first time, to test whether demographic change played a role in the Later Stone Age transition.
Our team sequenced aDNA from six individuals buried in what are now Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia. We compared these sequences to previously studied aDNA from 28 individuals buried at sites stretching from Cameroon to Ethiopia and down to South Africa. We also generated new and improved DNA data for 15 of these people, trying to extract as much information as possible from the small handful of ancient African individuals whose DNA is preserved well enough to study.
Genetic data reveals people’s movements and engagements across the Eastern African Rift Valley during the ice ages.
This created the largest genetic dataset so far for studying the population history of ancient African foragers—people who hunted, gathered, or fished. We used it to explore population structures that existed prior to the sweeping changes of the past few thousand years.
DNA WEIGHS IN ON A LONGSTANDING DEBATE
We found that people did in fact change how they moved and interacted around the Later Stone Age transition. Despite being separated by thousands of miles and years, all the ancient individuals in this study were descended from the same three populations related to ancient and present-day Eastern, Southern, and Central Africans. The presence of Eastern African ancestry as far south as Zambia, and Southern African ancestry as far north as Kenya, indicate that people were moving long distances and having children with people located far away from where they were born. The only way this population structure could have emerged is if people were moving long distances over many millennia.
Additionally, our research showed that almost all ancient Eastern Africans shared an unexpectedly high number of genetic variations with hunter-gatherers who today live in Central African rainforests, making ancient Eastern Africa truly a genetic melting pot. We could tell that this mixing and moving happened about 50,000 years ago when there was a major split in Central African forager populations.
We don’t know why people began “living locally” again. Changing environments as the last ice age peaked and waned between about 26,000 and 11,500 years ago may have made it more economical to forage closer to home, or perhaps elaborate exchange networks reduced the need for people to travel with objects. We also noted that the individuals in our study were genetically most like only their closest geographic neighbours. This tells us that around 20,000 years ago, the foragers in some African regions were almost exclusively finding their partners locally. This practice must have been extremely strong and persisted for a very long time, as our results show that some groups remained genetically independent of their neighbours over several thousand years. It was especially clear in Malawi and Zambia, where the only close relationships we detected were between people buried around the same time at the same sites.
Alternatively, new group identities may have emerged, restructuring marriage rules. If so, we would expect to see artefacts and other traditions, like rock art, diversify, with specific types clumped into different regions. Indeed, this is exactly what archaeologists find—a trend known as regionalization. Now we know that this phenomenon not only affected cultural traditions, but also the flow of genes.
NEW DATA, NEW QUESTIONS
As always, aDNA research raises as many questions as answers. Finding Central African ancestry throughout Eastern and Southern Africa prompts anthropologists to reconsider how interconnected these regions were in the distant past. This is important because Central Africa has remained archaeologically understudied, in part because of political, economic, and logistical challenges that make research there difficult.
Additionally, while genetic evidence supports a major demographic transition in Africa 50,000 years ago, we still don’t know the key drivers. Determining what triggered the Later Stone Age transition will require closer examination of regional environmental, archaeological, and genetic records to understand how this process unfolded across sub-Saharan Africa.
Finally, this study is a stark reminder that researchers still have much to learn from ancient individuals and artefacts held in African museums, and highlights the critical role of the curators who steward these collections. While some human remains in this study were recovered within the past decade, others have been in museums for a half-century.
Even though technological advances are pushing back the time limits for aDNA, it is important to remember that scientists have only just begun to understand human diversity in Africa, past and present.
Ancient DNA reveals surprises about how early Africans lived, travelled and interacted
A new analysis of human remains that were buried in African archaeological sites has produced the earliest DNA from the continent, telling a fascinating tale of how early humans lived, travelled and even found their significant others.
An interdisciplinary team of 44 researchers outlined its findings in “Ancient DNA reveals deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers.” The paper was published today in Nature and reports findings from ancient DNA from six individuals buried in Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia who lived between 18,000 and 5,000 years ago.
“This more than doubles the antiquity of reported ancient DNA data from sub-Saharan Africa,” said David Reich, a professor at Harvard University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute whose lab generated the data in the paper. “The study is particularly exciting as a truly equal collaboration of archaeologists and geneticists.”
The study also reanalyzed published data from 28 individuals buried at sites across the continent, generating new and improved data for 15 of them. The result was an unprecedented dataset of DNA from ancient African foragers — people who hunted, gathered or fished.
Their genetic legacy is difficult to reconstruct from present-day people because of the many population movements and mixtures that have occurred in the last few thousand years.
Thanks to this data, the researchers were able to outline major demographic shifts that took place between about 80,000 and 20,000 years ago. As far back as about 50,000 years ago, people from different regions of the continent moved and settled in other areas and developed alliances and networks over longer distances to trade, share information and even find reproductive partners. This social network helped them survive and thrive, the researchers wrote.
Elizabeth Sawchuk, an author of the study who is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta and a research assistant professor at Stony Brook University, said a dramatic cultural change took place during this timeframe, as beads, pigments and other symbolic art became common across Africa. Researchers long assumed that major changes in the archaeological record about 50,000 years ago reflected a shift in social networks and maybe even changes in population size. However, such hypotheses have remained difficult to test.
Kondoa Irangi rock art in present-day Tanzania features the cultural expressions of hunter-gatherers and pastoralists over a 2,000-year span.
“We’ve never been able to directly explore these proposed demographic shifts, until now,” she said. “It has been difficult to reconstruct events in our deeper past using the DNA of people living today, and artefacts like stone tools and beads can’t tell us the whole story. Ancient DNA provides direct insight into the people themselves, which was the missing part of the puzzle.”
Mary Prendergast, an author of the paper and associate professor of anthropology at Rice University, said there are arguments that the development and expansion of long-distance trade networks around this time helped humans weather the last Ice Age.
“Humans began relying on each other in new ways,” she said. “And this creativity and innovation might be what allowed people to thrive.”
The researchers were also able to demonstrate that by about 20,000 years ago, people had stopped moving around so much.
“Maybe it was because by that point, previously established social networks allowed for the flow of information and technologies without people having to move,” Sawchuk said.
Prendergast said the study provides a better understanding of how people moved and mingled in this part of Africa. Previously, the earliest African DNA came from what is now Morocco — but the individuals in this study lived as far from there as Bangladesh is from Norway, she noted.
“Our genetic study confirms an archaeological pattern of more local behaviour in eastern Africa over time,” said Jessica Thompson, an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University, and author of the study and one of the researchers who uncovered the remains. “At first people found reproductive partners from wide geographic and cultural pools. Later, they prioritized partners who lived closer, and who were potentially more culturally similar.”
The research team included scholars from Canada, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, the United States, Zambia and many other countries. Critical contributions to the study came from curators and co-authors at African museums who are responsible for protecting and preserving the remains.
Potiphar Kaliba, director of research at the Malawi Department of Museums and Monuments and an author of the study, noted that some of the skeletons sampled for the study were excavated a half-century ago, yet their DNA is preserved despite hot and humid climates in the tropics.
“This work shows why it’s so important to invest in the stewardship of human remains and archaeological artefacts in African museums,” Kaliba said.
The work also helps address global imbalances in research, Prendergast said.
“There are around 30 times more published ancient DNA sequences from Europe than from Africa,” she said. “Given that Africa harbours the greatest human genetic diversity on the planet, we have much more to learn.”
“By associating archaeological artefacts with ancient DNA, the researchers have created a remarkable framework for exploring the prehistory of humans in Africa,” said Archaeology and Archaeometry program director John Yellen of the U.S. National Science Foundation, one of the funders behind this project. “This insight is charting a new way forward to understanding humanity and our complex shared history.”
An Ancient Papyrus Reveals How The Great Pyramid of Giza Was Built
Stones weighing up to fifteen tonnes were hauled down the Nile on wooden boats to a man-made port. For centuries it has been one of the world’s greatest enigmas: how did a primitive society with little technology build the Great Pyramid of Giza — the oldest and only survivor of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World? At 146 metres high, it was for nearly 4,000 years, the tallest man-made structure on Earth.
In what is considered by some to be one of the greatest discoveries in Egypt in the 21st century, archaeologists have unearthed the diary of Merer, an official involved in the construction of Giza’s great pyramid.
The 4,500-year-old papyrus is the oldest in the world and describes how wooden boats and an ingenious system of waterworks transported blocks of limestones and granite weighing up to 15 tonnes from 13 kilometres away. In it, Merer (which means beloved) describes how he and a crew of 40 elite workmen shipped the stones downstream from Tura to Giza along the Nile River.
In the last few years, the papyrus and other archeological excavations have revealed new information about how the pyramids were constructed. Here are some of the findings uncovered in the Nature of Things documentary Lost Secrets of the Pyramid.
Water was harnessed to transport the huge stones.
Every summer, when the Nile flooded, giant dykes were opened to divert water from the river and channel it to the pyramid through a manmade canal system creating an inland port that allowed boats to dock very close to the worksite — just a few hundred metres away from the growing pyramid.
A recreation of the port from the documentary Lost Secrets of the Pyramid
The construction of artificial ports was a huge turning point for Egyptians, opening up trade and new relationships with people from distant lands.
Wooden boats were built with rope instead of nails.
The limestone was carried along the River Nile in wooden boats built with planks and rope that were capable of hauling two-and-a-half tonne stones. Using ancient tomb carvings and the remains of an ancient dismantled ship as a guide, archaeologist Mohamed Abd El-Maguid has recreated one Egyptian boat from scratch.
3D scans of the ship planks revealed that the boats were full of holes that lined up perfectly with each other. Instead of nails or wood pegs, these boats were sewn together with rope like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
With 1,000 holes and five kilometres of rope the new boat was assembled and Abd El-Maguid and in Secrets of the Pyramid, attempts to re-create every step of Merer’s journey down the Nile with two-tonne limestone rock.
Transporting huge rocks on an ancient boat across the Nile reveals how difficult the process really was
These boats were rowed carefully with the current down the Nile to the worksite. Once the rocks were unloaded, the wind helped propel the vessel back to the quarry.
Workers were valued and lived nearby in a huge settlement
Archaeologist Mark Lehner has uncovered artefacts that provide evidence of a vast settlement that held as many as 20,000 people. Average workers lived in huge dormitories, but team leaders like Merer lived in relative luxury with homes of their own.
Thousands of tiny bits of detritus of everyday life reveal that these hungry workers were well taken care of. An entire city was formed near the pyramid site to provide food and drink.
For most of the workers, building the pyramids was a source of prestige; these people have valued servants of the state.
Workers belonged to teams
Ankhhaf, Pharoah Khufu’s half-brother is mentioned in Merer’s diary and is thought to have been in charge of the operation. He divided the workforce into ‘phyles’ teams of 40 men — which someone like Merer oversaw.
Artefacts with team names on them have been discovered by archaeologist Pierre Tallet at a remote desert outpost in Wadi Al-Jarf about 250 kilometres away. Merer’s phyle was called “The Followers of the Boat named after the Snake on its Figurehead.”
Four phyles formed a gang of elite labourers. Each team has specific roles in the construction of the pyramid or the transportation of materials to the worksite.
Thousands of men, working together for over 20 years, succeeded in building the tallest, heaviest structure on earth. They transformed the landscape, and in doing so, also created a new society which archaeologist Mark Lehner says is the real achievement, “Once they had put all these systems and all this infrastructure in place there was no going back. They became more important than the pyramid itself and set Egyptian civilization off on a course for the next two or three millennia.”
Scents Help Researchers Identify Contents of Egyptian Vessels
More than 3,400 years after two ancient Egyptians were laid to rest, the jars of food left to nourish their eternal souls still smell sweet. A team of analytical chemists and archaeologists has analysed these scents to help identify the jars’ contents1. The study shows how the archaeology of smell can enrich our understanding of the past — and perhaps make museum visits more immersive.
The 1906 discovery of the intact tomb of Kha and Merit in the Deir el-Medina necropolis near Luxor was a landmark moment in Egyptology. The tomb of Kha — a ‘chief of works’, or an architect — and Merit, his wife, remains the most complete non-royal ancient burial ever found in Egypt, revealing important information about how high-ranking individuals were treated after death.
“It’s an amazing collection,” says Ilaria Degano, an analytical chemist at the University of Pisa, Italy. “Among the objects, there are even examples of Kha’s ancient Egyptian linen underwear, embroidered with his name.”
This papyrus from the tomb shows Kha and his wife Merit worshipping the lord of the afterlife, Osiris.
Unusually for the time, the archaeologist who discovered the tomb resisted the temptation to unwrap the mummies or peer inside the sealed amphorae, jars and jugs there, even after they were transferred to the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy. The contents of many of these vessels are still a mystery, although there are some clues, says Degano. “From talking with the curators, we knew there were some fruity aromas in the display cases,” she says.
Odour analysis
Degano and her colleagues placed various artefacts — including sealed jars and open cups laden with the rotten remains of ancient food — inside plastic bags for several days to collect some of the volatile molecules they still release.
Then the team used a mass spectrometer to identify the components of the aromas from each sample. They found aldehydes and long-chain hydrocarbons, indicative of beeswax; trimethylamine, associated with dried fish; and other aldehydes common in fruits. “Two-thirds of the objects gave some results,” Degano says. “It was a very nice surprise.”
The findings will feed into a larger project to re-analyse the tomb’s contents and produce a more comprehensive picture of burial customs for non-royals that existed when Kha and Merit died, about 70 years before Tutankhamun came to the throne.
This isn’t the first time that scent compounds have revealed important information about ancient Egypt. In 2014, researchers extracted volatile molecules from linen bandages that are between 6,300 and 5,000 years old that were used to wrap bodies in some of the earliest known Egyptian cemeteries2. The molecules confirmed the presence of embalming agents with antibacterial properties, showing that Egyptians were experimenting with mummification some 1,500 years earlier than had been thought.
One of the jars whose contents were analysed using a mass spectrometer.
Odour analysis is still an underexplored area of archaeology, says Stephen Buckley, an archaeologist and analytical chemist at the University of York, UK, who was involved in the 2014 study. “Volatiles have been ignored by archaeologists because of an assumption they would have disappeared from artefacts,” he says. But “if you want to understand the ancient Egyptians, you really want to go into that world of smell”.
For example, sweet-smelling incense derived from aromatic resins was essential for the ancient Egyptians. “Incense was necessary for temple ceremonies and for some mortuary rituals,” says Kathryn Bard, an archaeologist at Boston University in Massachusetts. Because resin-producing trees didn’t grow in Egypt, this necessitated ambitious long-distance expeditions to obtain supplies.
Enriched exhibits
Aside from revealing more about past civilizations, ancient smells could add a dimension to the visitor experience at museums. “Smell is a relatively unexplored gateway to the collective past,” says Cecilia Bembibre at University College London. “It has the potential [to allow] us to experience the past in a more emotional, personal way.”
But reconstructing ancient smells is not easy, says Bembibre. Degradation and decomposition can be a smelly business, so the scents from an artefact today do not necessarily match what Bembibre calls the original “smellscape” of a tomb.
With the right knowledge and understanding, it should be possible to pull the original and the decomposition scents apart, says Buckley. Whether visitors would actually want to experience the full and potentially unpleasant smellscape of an ancient tomb is still up for debate. “Curators might want to give people a choice over how far they want to push the smell experience,” says Buckley.
Egypt uncovers the 4,000-year-old painted tomb of a royal palace official
Five painted tombs were recently unearthed in Saqqara, an ancient Egyptian necropolis just outside of Cairo, according to a report by Reuters.
The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said that a recent excavation of burial shafts resulted in the finding of the tombs, along with more than 20 sarcophagi, toys, wooden boats, masks, and more.
The tombs are at least 4,000 years old, dating back to the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate period, a so called dark period in ancient Egyptian history as the regime of the Old Kingdom collapsed and political instability led to the destruction of monuments, artworks, and more. As such, not much remains from this time.
Mostafa Waziri, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
These tombs, however, are well-preserved and particularly well-decorated, with the additional inclusion of small statues and pots. Some of the paintings seem to represent food offerings.
The tombs, which reside near the pyramid of King Merenre I, are believed to have belonged to senior officials and court advisors.
The identity of two of those buried in the tombs has been ascertained. One was a top official named Iry, whose tomb included a limestone sarcophagus.
The other was occupied by a woman named Petty, who was both a priest of Hathor and a kind of beautician for Menere I.
Menere I is believed to be the father of Pepi II, the most notable pharaoh of this age whose reign is said to have lasted for more than 90 years.
The Egyptian government has been actively excavating Saqqara over the past several months.
In November, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced that it had found the tomb of a treasurer to the New Kingdom pharaoh Ramses II, which included several intact murals, in Saqqara.
These recent discoveries come amid the government’s “Follow the Sun” campaign that is aimed at attracting tourists to come see the archaeological wonders of ancient Egypt, both those well-known and recently discovered.
The country’s economy largely depends on this tourism, which has been impacted for over a decade beginning with the Arab Spring protests there.
More recently, the pandemic’s slowing down on international travel and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—a large portion of tourists to Egypt are Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian—have also affected the tourism industry there.
