A mummy discovered in a vast burial ground of Egypt’s pharaohs could change how ancient history is understood

A new analysis of an ancient Egyptian mummy suggests that advanced mummification techniques were used 1,000 years earlier than previously believed, rewriting the understood history of ancient Egyptian funerary practices.

The discovery centres around a mummy, known as Khuwy, believed to have been a high-ranking nobleman. He was excavated at the necropolis, a vast ancient burial ground of Egyptian pharaohs and royals near Cairo, in 2019.

Scientists now believe that Khuwy is much older than previously thought, dating back to Egypt’s Old Kingdom, which would make him one of the oldest Egyptian mummies ever to be discovered, The Observer reported.

The Old Kingdom spanned 2,700 to 2,200 B.C.E and was known as the “Age of the Pyramid Builders.”

Khuwy was embalmed using advanced techniques thought to have been developed much later. His skin was preserved using expensive resins made from tree sap, and his body was impregnated with resins and bound with high-quality linen dressings.

The new analysis suggests that ancient Egyptians living around 4,000 years ago were carrying out sophisticated burials.

“This would completely turn our understanding of the evolution of mummification on its head,” Professor Salima Ikram, head of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, told The Observer.

“If this is indeed an Old Kingdom mummy, all books about mummification and the history of the Old Kingdom will need to be revised.”

“Until now, we had thought that Old Kingdom mummification was relatively simple, with basic desiccation – not always successful – no removal of the brain, and only occasional removal of the internal organs,” Ikram told The Observer. Ikram was surprised by the amount of resin used to preserve the mummy, which is not often recorded in mummies from the Old Kingdom.

She added that typically more attention was paid to the exterior appearance of the deceased than the interior.

“This mummy is awash with resins and textiles and gives a completely different impression of mummification. In fact, it is more like mummies found 1,000 years later,” she said.

Ikram told The National that the resin used would have been imported from the Near East, most likely Lebanon, demonstrating that trade with neighbouring empires around that time was more extensive than previously thought.

The discovery has been documented in National Geographic’s new series, Lost Treasures of Egypt, which starts airing on 7 November. Tom Cook, who produced the series for Windfall Films, told The Observer that Ikram initially could not believe that Khuwy dated back to the Old Kingdom because of the advanced mummification techniques.

“They knew the pottery in the tomb was the Old Kingdom but [Ikram] didn’t think that the mummy was from [that period] because it was preserved too well,” Cook told the outlet.

“But over the course of the investigation, she started to come round [to the idea].”

Khuwy’s ornate tomb featured hieroglyphics that suggested the burial took place during the Fifth Dynasty period, spanning the early 25th to mid-24th century B.C.E, The Smithsonian said.

Archaeologists also found pottery and jars used to store body parts during the mummification process that dated back to that time.

Ikram’s team will conduct more tests to confirm that the remains do belong to Khuwy.

She told The National that one possibility was that another person could have been mummified and buried centuries later in a re-purposing of the tomb.

“I remain hesitant until we can conduct carbon-14 dating,” Ikram told the outlet, adding that it would likely take six to eight months.

New Discoveries Found Under Demolished Historic Palace In Egypt – Al-Monitor

An Egyptian archaeological mission working on the site of the Tawfiq Pasha Andraos Palace – which was recently demolished – unveiled a number of amphoras and lamps dating from the Byzantine era.

Mustafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said on October 17 that the find is part of a series in the city of Luxor, in southern Egypt. He said excavations were underway at the site.

In August, Egyptian authorities demolished the 120-year-old Tawfiq Pasha Andraos Palace near the Luxor Temple and overlooking the Nile, based on a decision by the Ministry of Antiquities that archaeological sites lay beneath it.

The palace hosted Saad Zaghloul, leader of the 1919 revolution after British authorities banned his travel. It contained many rare items and a gold-plated car, among other valuables. In 2013, the bodies of Andraos’ two daughters, killed in mysterious circumstances, were found inside the palace.

The palace of Andraos, which was a member of the Luxor House of Representatives from 1921 to 1935, is not the first to be demolished by the Egyptian authorities. In 2009, the Mubarak government destroyed the nearby palace of Yassa Andraos, Tawfik’s brother, as part of a plan to turn Luxor into an open museum.

But the move was controversial. “Even the Louvre museum has monuments underneath and has never been demolished,” Bassam al-Shammaa, Egyptologist and tour guide, told Al-Monitor.

“Nothing justifies destroying antiquity for the good of another, especially since Egypt has witnessed successive historical civilizations. It is simply unthinkable to demolish antiquity because there is another in below.

Shammaa added that Luxor Palace has located a short walk from famous Roman monuments opposite the first western edifice of Luxor Temple.

The most famous monument belongs to Emperor Hadrian and is dedicated to the god Serapis, whose statue can be found in the northwest corner of the Luxor Temple courtyard, very close to the Andraos Palace. The Roman monument, according to Shammaa, was built in AD 126.

Ahmed Amer, an archaeological researcher at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, said the finds marked a new stage for archaeology.

Recent findings, he said, offer new details about the lives of ancient Egyptians, both religious and secular. He mentioned a large and varied amount of antiquities that have been discovered in the Saqqara area, south of Cairo, in recent years.

Moreover, in the city of Luxor was found the lost city or the “City of Gold”, Amer added. All the antiquities discovered stimulate both science and tourism, he said, and many archaeological finds are scientifically examined but not presented to tourists.

Other recent finds under Tawfik Pasha Andraos Palace, Amer said, include a set of Roman bronze coins, part of a Roman-era wall, and an ancient storehouse. Lamps are made of different materials, and pottery is probably the most common, he said.

According to Amer, the lamps are dishes filled with oil and salt, on which floats a wick. These lamps often depicted various scenes from everyday life, images of animals and altered plant motifs. The oil is placed in the centre hole of the dish for lighting, with the wick protruding from a front hole.

Giant ram head statues found on ‘Avenue of Sphinxes’ in Egypt

Three giant statues of ram heads — at least one of which had a cobra on top — have been discovered south of Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egyptologists announced. 

Karnak Temple was built between roughly 4,000 and 2,000 years ago, and much of it is dedicated to Amun-Ra, a god associated with the sun and Thebes, the capital of ancient Egypt (now the modern-day city of Luxor). The temple complex covers over 250 acres (100 hectares). 

On Oct. 11, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced that three giant ram heads had been found by an Egyptian archaeological team south of a gateway built by the Ptolemies, a dynasty of pharaohs descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals that ruled Egypt between 305 B.C and 30 B.C. 

In ancient times, these ram heads were part of three larger statues that had the bodies of creatures that looked a bit like sphinxes.

The statues featured in a large avenue of ram-headed statues that went south, running for 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometres) between Karnak Temple and Luxor Temple, Mustafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told the news site al-Monitor. 

This avenue is often called the “avenue of the sphinxes” and consisted of around 700 statues.

“An estimated 700 sphinxes lined the route between Karnak and Luxor temples and its magnificence can scarcely be imagined,” wrote Elizabeth Blyth, an independent scholar in her book “Karnak: Evolution of a Temple” (Routledge, 2006). While many of the surviving sphinxes date to the reign of Nectanebo I (380-362 B.C.) artwork suggests that the avenue existed at least as early as the 18th dynasty (1550-1295 B.C.), wrote Blyth. 

Egyptologists are in the process of conserving the ram heads and will put them back on statues showing the bodies of the creatures, Waziri said in the statement. 

READ ALSO: EGYPT’S SECRETS REVEALED: POSSIBLY A SECOND SPHINX & MYSTERIOUS HIDDEN CHAMBERS??

Archaeologists unearthed another discovery — the remains of a cobra statue — Waziri announced Oct. 17 on his Facebook page. This cobra statue would have originally been on top of one of the ram heads, so the conservation team plans to put it back on, Waziri said. 

The age of the statues is being investigated, but Waziri told Al-Monitor that the design of one of them suggests that it may date back to the reign of Amenhotep III, who ruled Egypt between 1390 B.C and 1352 B.C.,

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s list of Egyptian rulers, and was the grandfather of King Tutankhamun. Excavation, analysis and conservation work is ongoing. 

World’s oldest ‘pet cemetery’ discovered in ancient Egypt

A dig near the famous ancient Egyptian port city of Berenice has turned up a mysterious animal cemetery dating to the 1st century AD.

It emerged in the dunes to the northwest of the important ancient Red Sea port of Berenice, which saw traffic from far and wide, with ships coming from East Africa, Europe, and India.

Ninety per cent of the nearly 600 burial sites explored unearthed cats, though there were also dogs and macaque monkeys, a few of them definitely imported from outside Africa.

The find was published by a team led by Marta Osypinska, an archaeozoologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, in the journal World Archaeology.

Several characteristics make this discovery uniquely mysterious. For one thing, none of the animals was mummified, as they are at other archaeological sites, such as temples. Here, too, there was a greater variety of species and funeral practices. Also, unlike at other burial sites, there were no humans among the beasts.

While the animals obviously had a special place in their society, the paper says, to think of them the way we think of pets today might not be quite right. These “companion animals,” as the researchers call them, probably played more of a utilitarian role than the pampered pets of today.

Still, the animals were definitely treated well in death.

They’re accompanied by craft objects like pottery that is thought to have protected them, and the creatures also have adornments like beaded necklaces made of stone, glass, and faience and shell. They were uniformly found in a sleep-like position.

Other experts second the conviction that the site is truly something new.

“It’s something completely different than what we see elsewhere,” Bea De Cupere, an archaeologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, who was not involved with the project, tells Atlas Obscura.

READ ALSO: GRAVES OF NEARLY 600 CATS AND DOGS IN ANCIENT EGYPT MAY BE THE WORLD’S OLDEST PET CEMETERY

“I’ve seen thousands and thousands of bones in my career, and maybe 10 cats,” she says.

According to her research, the ships that came and went in these ports usually had cats aboard for pest control, suggesting that these may have been partly working animals.

World’s First known case of a pregnant mummy discovered by researchers

Researchers have discovered the world’s first-known pregnant mummy, dating from the first century in Egypt. The find was unexpected, as inscriptions on the mummy’s coffin suggested the remains inside belonged to a male priest, according to a new study.

The mummy was donated to the University of Warsaw in Poland in 1826; only recently did archaeologists with the Warsaw Mummy Project conduct a detailed analysis of the mummy while studying the National Museum in Warsaw’s collection of animal and human mummies.

X-ray and CT scans of the mummy revealed that the remains inside belonged to a female and did not match the coffin and cartonnage case that was made for a male.

The mummy was obviously not the remains of a priest named Hor-Djehuty from ancient Thebes, whose name was inscribed onto the coffin, the researchers said. 

“It was a complete surprise because we were looking for ancient diseases or causes of deaths,” lead author Wojciech Ejsmond, co-director of the Warsaw Mummy Project said. “Also, we thought that this is a body [of] a priest.”

The mummy turned out to be the remains of a female who died when she was between 20 and 30 years of age and was about 6.5 to 7.5 months pregnant, based on the circumference of the fetus’s head.

“It’s the first such preserved case,” Ejsmond told Live Science in an email. There have previously been skeletons of pregnant women found, but no mummies with preserved soft tissue, he said.

The scans showed four mummified bundles — likely her lungs, liver, stomach with intestines, and heart — inside the female mummy. Those were extracted, embalmed and then placed back inside the mummy’s abdominal cavity, which was a customary practice in ancient Egypt. But the fetus had not been similarly removed from the uterus.

The researchers haven’t determined the sex of the fetus or why it was left in the womb. 

The researchers hypothesize that the fetus may have been thought of as “still an integral part of the body of its mother since it was not yet born,” according to the study.

A baby that didn’t yet have a name may not have been thought of as a distinctive individual, as ancient Egyptian beliefs held that naming was an important part of being human.

“Thus, its afterlife could only have happened if it had gone to the netherworld as part of its mother,” the authors wrote. Another hypothesis is that a fetus of that age would have been difficult to extract due to the thickness and hardness of the uterus, and so the people mummifying the mother may not have been able to extract the fetus without damaging her body or that of the fetus, they wrote.

The archaeologists are also not sure why this mummy was inside a male’s coffin; however, it’s thought that up to 10% of mummies are found in the “wrong” coffins, due to illegal excavations and looting, according to the study. What’s more, there was damage to the wrappings on the mummy’s neck, likely caused by robbers who may have stolen some amulets, according to the study.

The authors have called her the “Mysterious Lady of the National Museum in Warsaw” because there’s still much that’s unknown about her. “Her mummy represents a fine example of ancient Egyptian embalming skills, thus suggesting her high social standing,” the authors wrote. She was also buried with a “rich set” of amulets, according to the study.

It’s also not clear why she died. “High mortality during pregnancy and childbirth in those times is not a secret,” Ejsmond told Science in Poland. “Therefore, we believe that pregnancy could somehow contribute to the death of the young woman.”

The team now hopes to analyze small samples of blood that were preserved in the mummy’s soft tissues to try to figure out the cause of death.

This find “allows us to gather first-hand evidence” of prenatal health in ancient times, Ejsmond told Live Science. “We can make comparative studies with contemporary cases, look for traces of ancient medical procedures to study the history of medicine.”

Ancient religious ritual tools unearthed by Egyptian archaeologists

Waziri stated this discovery is considered to be a major find in Egypt as it has the instruments that were utilised in conducting the daily religious rituals.

The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities released a statement on September 18, Saturday stating that the Egyptian archaeologists discovered some ancient ritual tools and equipment which were previously used in religious rites at a temple area in Kafr el-Sheikh governorate, north of Cairo, Egypt. 

As per Xinhua, Fragments of a limestone pillar which are built in the shape of the goddess Hathor, a bunch of faience incense burners, a pair of clay pots, a number of statuettes, a fully golden Udjat eye, and the remnants of golden scales were among the items which are unearthed. 

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Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziri stated that this is considered to be a major find since it comprises the instruments that were really utilised in conducting the daily religious rites for goddess Hathor.

As per the Daily News Egypt website, these ancient ritual tools were most likely stashed behind a mound of stone blocks which is situated to the south of the goddess Wajit’s shrine.  

Other artefacts unearthed in the Pharaonic site

As per Ayman Ashmawy, the head of the ministry’s Ancient Egyptian Antiquities Sector, they also discovered ivory reliefs portraying everyday life, which comprises women carrying services for rituals, there are carvings of plants, birds, and animals.

A large limestone horizontal structured lintel was even found in which hieroglyphic texts are inscribed and components of a painting of a king conducting religious practices in the temple.  

The archaeologists also unearthed and identified hieroglyphic writings with the names and titles of Ancient Egyptian rulers going back over 2,500 years.

Daily News Egypt further reports that the inscription of the names and titles consists of King Psamtik I‘s five titles, as well as the names of the two 26th dynasty rulers ‘Wah Ib Ra’ and ‘Ahmose II.’

A big limestone well for holy water which was used for the rituals and a mud-brick bathtub structure were also unearthed, according to Hossam Ghoneim, director-general of Kafr el-Sheikh antiquities and leader of the archaeological mission. 

Mostafa stated Saqqara necropolis as a magnificent tomb 

Meanwhile, Egypt’s Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Khaled al-Anany reopened King Djoser’s south tomb for tourists on September 13, Monday, marking a stunning milestone for the Saqqara necropolis.

According to Mostafa Waziri, the “magnificent” tomb, situated in the southern corner of the 3rd-century pharaoh, is the earliest stone structure from the “ancient world.” It’s worth noting that King Djoser founded Egypt’s Third Dynasty and built the groundwork for the world’s first pyramid, the step pyramid of Saqqara. 

Waziri addressed reporters at the opening ceremony by saying that the beautiful structure is the ancient world’s oldest stone structure, and it was termed the ‘Southern Tomb’ after its excavation by English archaeologist Cecil Mallaby Firth in the year 1928.  

They rebuild the faces of Egyptian mummies from their 2,000-year-old DNA

Three ancient Egyptians’ faces have been brought to life using 2,000-year-old DNA. Scientists have used DNA dating back over 2,000 years to bring the faces of three ancient Egyptian males to life.

The trio of samples, estimated to be between 2,023 and 2,797 years old, is thought to be the first time contemporary procedures have been employed on the human DNA of this antiquity.

JK2134, who lived between 776 and 569 BC, JK2888, who lived around 97-2 BC, and JK2911, who lived between 769 and 560 BC, were the names given to the three.

Parabon NanoLabs employed cutting-edge technology and a forensic artist to forecast the men’s appearance around the age of 25 to reveal the features of the ancient Egyptian mummies.

The mummies come from the Abusir el-Meleq, an ancient Nile hamlet. The researchers discovered that their origin was more similar to the modern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern people than Egyptians.

They were described as having light brown complexions, dark hair and eyes, and no freckles.

“These results are highly consistent with Schuenemann et al’s conclusions that ‘ancient Egyptians shared more ancestry with Near Easterners than modern-day Egyptians, who received additional sub-Saharan admixture in more recent times and that they had an allele for lighter skin,” according to a press release from Parabon.

Before they were sequenced and “matched to the human reference genome,” raw data from three ancient Egyptian mummies was received from the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA). Each sample was subjected to enzymatic damage repair.

It was argued that the work was only possible because of biometric developments in the field of low-coverage imputation.

“Parabon has been the leader in forensic microarray analysis for years, and with the advent of this new imputation method, we can now handle even the most complex samples, ancient or forensic,” said Dr. Janet Cady, a Parabon bioinformaticist and WGS analyst who spearheaded the work.

Parabon used their “Snapshot DNA Phenotyping pipeline” on the three ancient mummy samples after the “imputation” stage. Snapshot, which was created to deal with missing data in difficult forensic cases, “predicted each mummy’s ancestry, colour, and face morphology,” according to the researchers. The men’s front and side profiles, as well as a facial heat map, were revealed by the three-dimensional “face morphology.”

“It’s fantastic to see,” said Dr. Ellen Greytak, Parabon’s director of bioinformatics. This is a condensed version of the information.

Archaeologists Discover 2200-Year-old Egyptian Shipwreck in Mediterranean Sea

A Doomed ship that sank after it was hit by gigantic stone blocks following an earthquake 2,200 years ago has been found in Egypt. The wreck was discovered by archaeologists at the site of Thonis-Heracleion, a city that crashed into the water as a result of the megaquake.

Scattered across a series of interlinked islands off Egypt’s northern coast, the metropolis was once the country’s gateway to the Mediterranean.

It was lost to a cataclysmic event towards the end of the second century BC that buried it under layers of sand and mud.

Thonis-Heracleion was rediscovered by underwater archaeologists in the early 2000s and expeditions continue to uncover rubble and artefacts.

Earlier this month, archaeologists announced the discovery of a galley and burial ground at the site beneath the Mediterranean Sea. The expedition was led by the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology with help from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

They believe the ship plunged to the seafloor “after being hit by huge blocks from the famed temple of Amun”, according to the EIUA.

Located in the middle of the city and dedicated to the god of Amun, the massive temple was one of the dozens of buildings lost to the deadly quake.

The wreck was once a fast galley, a long and sleep vessel with large sails built to skim across the water at high speeds. It now lies beneath just over 16 feet (five metres) of clay and rubble from the temple, researchers said.

They located the ship used a new type of sonar technology.

“The finds of fast galleys from this period remain extremely rare,” said EIUA President Franck Goddio.

The team believe the warship was moored channel that flowed along the south side of the Temple of Amun.

When an earthquake struck the city, the hard clay it was built on began to behave more like a liquid, toppling buildings across the city.

Large stone blocks that tumbled from the temple likely crashed onto the boat, causing it to sink.

It’s not clear whether anyone was on board at the time. A burial ground containing various trinkets and other artefacts was also uncovered by researchers.

It was in use as far back as 2,400 years ago and contained elaborately decorated pottery and a gold amulet depicting Bes, an Egyptian god associated with childbirth and fertility.