Sarcophagi buried for 2,500 years unearthed in Saqqara

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-54227282

by stevekemp • 6 years ago

115 60 6 years ago

I grew up near Saqqara (few miles away). It's amazing that there are still things to be discovered there. We would actually often hear that artifacts would be discovered and just sold/smuggled. But i guess there is just so much stuff buried near and around Saqqara that there is still more to discover.

toyg• 6 years ago

It’s the same in Roma or Napoli. Despite thousands of years of literal looting, there is still loads of amazing stuff buried underneath.

vital• 6 years ago

Ancient Architects' (a YouTube channel) summary - https://youtu.be/GYr3PBzNyI0

qwertox2• 6 years ago

Interesting comments on that page.

hourislate• 6 years ago

Zahi Hawas has quite the reputation of being a phony. Many lay blame directly at him for refusing to allow the exploration and analysis of some ancient sites and artifacts that would run counter to the narrative he supports. An example is that a civilization that existed before the Egyptians is responsible for things like the Sphinx and Great Pyramids. He also refuses access to certain areas of these sites to prevent further exploration from what I understand. I know many folks can't stand him and say he is full of shit.

I don't know enough about the subject to have a strong opinion but would like to understand what is gained from not allowing more exploration of the tunnels and rooms under the Sphinx, etc.

pcan77• 6 years ago

This is the wrong year for this LOL

ceejayoz• 6 years ago

What’s one more curse at this point?

jagannathtech• 6 years ago

You never know... so always be careful of what you wish for

ardit33• 6 years ago

on a more practical side, i wonder if by unearthing older stuff, old variants of the plague get unearthed as well....

irrational• 6 years ago

Might as well get them all done at once?

qwertox2• 6 years ago

Why do we think that it is just fine that we open these tombs? I do have a problem with that attitude. If they had been found 500 years ago, we'd probably have almost nothing of real value from a scientific point of view.

Are we so much better nowadays that we can allow us to alter the state of the tomb without significantly destroying it?

viach• 6 years ago

What are the alternatives? As soon as these tombs found you can either open them now or set up 24/7 security around. The latter will be difficult to justify economically.

liability• 6 years ago

"Somebody will loot it, so it may as well be us"? If that's the best we can do, maybe we should stop looking for them in the first place. Let the corpses lay in peace, our modern approach to this lacks dignity.

forgot_account2• 6 years ago

Triple-strand concertina wire isn't that expensive, put that around the perimeter with a single entry control point. Two guards on shift, 4 hours on/8 hours off, twice per day = 4 bodies. Double that to cut the days worked down to 3-5 per week with some flex capacity, keep people well-rested and alert. A quick search indicates an Egyptian military sergeant earns roughly $220/month, so 8 guys @$250 month = $2000 in wages monthly, and a pretty small outlay for equipment (the concertina wire, some rifles, flashlights, comm gear- radios/cellphones, maybe a tablet to verify access rosters).....Even hooking up some perimeter sensors to a computer workstation and generator power wouldn't be more than a low 5-figure investment.

Basic physical security should not be an unreasonable cost burden when there is so much national economic and social interest in preserving Egyptian history.

sho_hn• 6 years ago

Good question. I read a few books on excavations and discoveries in Egypt over the modern centuries recently, and the quantity and degree of destruction from sheer careless to lack of method is quite staggering. I walked away with the impression that we lost more artifacts than we retained.

Archeology eventually invented itself and practitioners got more careful as time went on, but then seeing photos embedded into the article of opening coffins on site ...

thaumasiotes• 6 years ago

Archeology eventually invented itself

Perhaps. It didn't take long.

A king of Babylon in the 6th century BC was already sponsoring archaeological research into his legendary predecessor Sargon the Great.

canjobear• 6 years ago

Are we so much better nowadays that we can allow us to alter the state of the tomb without significantly destroying it?

We’re still not perfect of course, but modern archaeology is extraordinarily careful and meticulous. If we wait for perfect procedures we may be waiting forever.

monadic2• 6 years ago

Tourism $$$.

You can see many other sites that specifically allocate the majority of dig work to the future on the premise that our future technology will better be able to process and preserve our findings.

I suspect that tombs in particular are large tourism draws, or can yield attractive museum exhibits.

ekianjo• 6 years ago

If they had been found 500 years ago, we'd probably have almost nothing of real value from a scientific point of view.

500 years ago they would have been looted by whoever found them. At least now it follows some kind of process.

downut• 6 years ago

My understanding is that almost all Egyptian tombs, at least, were looted, as the euphemism goes, "in antiquity". Tutankhamun's being a very big exception.

The story I learned while doing deep background for my own trip to Egypt is that "in antiquity" means roughly the next period, usually between dynasties, when religious respect for the centralized royalty passed through lows. So for Egypt, that could be even 4000 years ago.

I found this astounding at the time. Egypt has a way of expanding a person's sense of time. I am learning China is sort of the same thing.

hliyan• 6 years ago

I did a thought experiment: if this were my tomb or a tomb of a loved one, I wouldn't want it disturbed for at least a few hundred years. After that, we become a part of history and I'm okay with archeologists of the distant future using my remains to understand us better.

frutiger• 6 years ago

if this were my tomb or a tomb of a loved one, I wouldn't want it disturbed for at least a few hundred years

A curious position. I use provocative words, not to antagonise but in a probably vain attempt to inspire:

Why does the dust your body becomes deserve any special treatment? Was the dust that became the food that some day became you as precious?

It is not the dust that gives your life meaning but the glances, the words and the hope you will have given; to people, to ideas, and even to yourself.

The wonder of existence is not in the constituent; it is in the arrangement.

thesagan• 6 years ago

I agree. Most of these tombs are better in the ground, unknown and undiscovered. I understand we can build knowledge from these artifacts, but there may be some unforeseen value in abiding by the benign wishes of ancient peoples.

I don't trust modern society to store these artifacts for more than a few hundred years without losing them to war, theft, modification, infrastructure issues, or whatever. The modern world is relatively unpredictable and chaotic compared to the past, in my mortal opinion.

That said, it's nice to have some of these out of the ground, for us still living. But pulling up everything we find feels like science-sponsored grave robbing to stock our treasury of knowledge, which is valuable but not holy.

andrewflnr• 6 years ago

Your question of "are we so much better nowadays" will continue to be true for basically all of time, unless you think archaeology will actually plateau at molecular-scale site recording. That means the choice you offer is not to learn now or later, but to learn from these sites now or never at all.

d3ntb3ev1l• 6 years ago

What could go wrong opening them in 2020

sgt• 6 years ago

Opening is fine, but removing them from a specific spot will definitely trigger some kind of cave-in.

jojobas• 6 years ago

It was probably a joke about everything already screwed plus movies like Mummy.

antman• 6 years ago

We should thank the advances in signal processing, ground penetrating radars and LIDARs that have given us such a plethora of new archeological discoveries we see in the media. Egypt's climate and lack of wood which made it expensive and unreachable as a building material, as particularly helpful factors for the preservation history. Through Egyptian sources that have a more detailed chronology historical analysis of surrounding areas is also assisted. Egypt is a magestical place and I am eagerly waiting for the completion of the new Cairo museum to revisit it.

mothsonasloth2• 6 years ago

I think cryogenically frozen people will be the mummies for the futur.

Imagine you're in the year 4000 and you goto a museum.

"Here in the 2000s museum we have the head of Walt Disney, he was a famous warlord who destroyed his enemies and demanded caricatures of animals like the extinct Mouse and Dog to be drawn. He had many castles built around the old world in places like Florida, France and China"

tokai• 6 years ago

Wont they rot when the power goes out?

kaielvin• 6 years ago

They are preserved in liquid nitrogen. There is no need for electricity, although the liquid nitrogen must be refilled once in a while (something like once a month I think). Liquid nitrogen is pretty simple and cheap to produce. Now of course if society collapses before we are able to bring those people back to life, then they will indeed rot.

onion2k3• 6 years ago

Walt Disney was cremated.

rootsudo• 6 years ago

I read the post in jest/sarcasm, but I am aware many people do think he really was frozen.

So 50/50?

ransom1538• 6 years ago

You missed the point of the post.

yyyk• 6 years ago

There's a funny old book with a very similar (almost exactly the same) premise:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108831.Motel_of_the_Myst...

ksaj• 6 years ago

I just read that book recently, before covid. I originally read it when I was young, and found a copy to reread through inter-branch library loan. It's a really fun read.

virtuallynathan• 6 years ago

I wonder what the “more secrets” are. I suspect with the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, and other older sites, we may discover the current timeline for ancient Egypt doesn’t go back far enough. The Turin kings list is pretty interesting. Some geologists suggest the Sphinx may be older than Egyptology suggests at present: https://www.robertschoch.com/sphinx.html

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

They create enigmatic press releases on a schedule, with the aim of increasing interest and tourism. There are literally millions of preserved burials in Egypt.

gibolt2• 6 years ago

I feel we are quite lucky that Egypt is a relatively stable country throughout the time that modern tools have become available to find ancient burial sites.

They are able and incentivized to use proper scientific methods and slow exhuming to preserve as much information about an ancient human culture as possible.

Considering how much political and societal turmoil has been and still is in the surrounding regions, all of these finds could have easily been pilfered and lost as they had been through Egypt's earlier history.

fakedang2• 6 years ago

If you look at it, it's largely due to the nature of unrest in Egypt vs elsewhere in the region. Egypt's unrest is largely formed by local Egyptians, who are otherwise extremely proud of their cultural past dating back to the Nile Valley civilization, a past that was also widely celebrated within the Western world. Places like Syria and Lebanon on the other hand have had massive foreign influence and foreign players influencing their rebellions. Of course they wouldn't give a damn about what happens to those relics. Not to mention, local Phoenician/Syrian/Babylonian cultures aren't as popular worldwide as their Egyptian counterparts, hence there isn't as much dedication towards preserving them - sometimes even the local population partakes in the destruction, especially if the relics in question are of another faith.

It would be a different world altogether perhaps, had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the Roman infrastructure in the Levant were preserved well. Ironically, one of the major proponents of reviving interest in Babylonian culture in the recent past was Saddam Hussein, who engaged in rebuilding most of the city of Babylon.

code_duck• 6 years ago

In 1989,my 6th grade social studies class (in the US) used a textbook that said Saddam Hussein was a valuable ally of the US, generally a great person, and had raised literacy rates in Iraq.

leptons• 6 years ago

It is great that Egypt is fairly stable and takes this stuff seriously, but how much of it is "just business" for Egypt, with the new $500 million (USD) museum being built: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Egyptian_Museum Letting that stuff get stolen is a national tragedy and has a real cost in terms of tourist dollars.

Egypt is a top-of-the-bucket-list destination for me, and I'd spend plenty of money there at that museum and many of the tourist sites (after COVID obviously), if I actually felt safe going there. It still seems a little bit iffy from my american point of view. I haven't researched it in a few years but last time I did it seemed not advisable for Americans to go there.

gibolt2• 6 years ago

Exactly what I meant by 'incentivized'. Their marketing is and has been top notch.

Just a little bit less continuous organization over the years and no one would care or everything would be pillaged

cbanek• 6 years ago

I've always been fascinated with Egyptology. What really amazes me about this is the picture with the gorgeously painted sarcophagus! It's still stunning, in a picture, and from so long ago.

dandare• 6 years ago

I know sometimes archaeologists leave at least a portion of new discoveries unopened for future generations with better technology. Does this practice have a name? Is there some standard or is it up to each individual team / government to act in this prudent fashion?

Sarcophagi buried for 2,500 years unearthed in Saqqara

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