The 27 painted wooden coffins were found in an 11-meter-deep well in the necropolis of Saqqara, 20 miles south of Cairo. Last week, 13 sarcophagi were discovered, then another 14. All unopened, Egypt’s ministry of antiquities said Sunday.
Saqqara was the burial place of the city of Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt for nearly three thousand years. The enormous necropolis, included in the World Heritage List of Unesco, is known for its many richly decorated tombs as well as for the step pyramid of Djozer from 2,700 BC, the oldest pyramid in the world, which has just been reopened to the public after a long restoration.
Painful moment
News of the find comes at a painful moment with the discovery last week that Egyptian authorities are in the process of constructing two rollercoaster highways across the Pyramids Plateau, the desert area outside Cairo where the famous Pyramids of Giza and the death city of Saqqara lie. .
The construction activities came to light when journalists saw bulldozers at work, but seem to have started out of sight of the public already last year. They are part of a mega plan pushed by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and the mighty military to relieve the traffic congestion of the capital’s 20 million inhabitants. An earlier plan was left in the drawer in the 1990s after worldwide protests.
The two highways cut the Pyramids Plateau in three. The northern highway runs 2.5 km south of the Pyramids of Giza and connects to the Cairo ring road. The southern one runs between the Step Pyramid of Yozzer and the Red Pyramid and the Buckling Pyramid of Snofroe in Dasjoer, and connects the October Sixth suburb with the new administrative district of New Capital.
Irreparable damage
Archaeologists fear the construction will cause irreparable damage to one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. Unexamined sites will be paved, such as the city districts of Memphis, burial grounds of the 13th Dynasty and the area around the Nilometer, an installation that kept track of the Nile water in Antiquity. The highways will also cause air pollution and open up the area to looters.
Unesco has already asked questions, according to Reuters news agency. However, according to Secretary General Mustafa Waziri of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, the highways are “very, very important” to Egypt’s development. “And know that we take good care of our antiquities all over Egypt.”
Dutch archaeologists have been conducting research in Saqqara for years. Lara Weiss, curator of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and project leader of the excavations of the RMO in Sakkara, is against road construction on World Heritage site. ‘But it is always a trade-off. I imagine there are good reasons for the construction of those roads. I just hope they take the opportunity to do a thorough investigation and document everything before it disappears. ‘
Discoveries
Archaeological discoveries are still made every year in Egypt. Many sites have not yet been investigated exhaustively. For example, the grave of a high priest was found in Saqqara in 2018 and dozens of mummified animals were found in 2019. Thirty mummies from the 22nd Dynasty were found near Luxor last year, hailed as the largest find in a century.
Such archaeological discoveries are invariably used by the Egyptian government to promote tourism. This has been hit hard in recent years, due to increasing insecurity after the coup against President Mubarak in 2011, attacks by IS and now the corona crisis.
All archaeological sites were closed for months due to corona. The new Great Egyptian Museum was due to open in Giza at the end of this year. That long-awaited event, which should bring tourism back to the level of 2019 (13.6 million tourists), has been moved to next year.
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