Egyptian archaeologists discover EIGHT MUMMIES in 3,500-year-old tomb near ancient city of Luxor

Really cool find in Egypt, a 3,000 year old grave was excavated and found a whole lot-O-cool mummy stuff. I m under the impression that there is more under the sand than in the museums. It is like a small chunk of culture when they find these kind of tombs.

It was opened to add more mummies during the 21st Dynasty, about 3,000 years ago, to protect them during a period when tomb-robbing was common.
Antiquities Minister Khaled el-Enany said: “It was a surprise how much was being displayed inside.

The coffins were in good shape considering they are 3,000 years old. Wonder if they smell bad?

The coffins were mainly well-preserved, though some had deteriorated and broken over the years.
Archaeologists also examined a mummy wrapped in linen which was inside one of the coffins.
White, orange, green, and patterned pots were also found in the tombs.

1,000 little funerary statues were in the tomb.

www.thesun.co.uk...
The tomb, discovered in the Draa Abul Nagaa necropolis near the famed Valley of the Kings, also contained colourful wooden coffins and more than 1,000 funerary statues.

I could have never guessed luxor could be in egypt.

Luxor is about halfway down the Nile from Cairo.

Those are beautiful photos! The big yellow coffin is one of the older ones and dates to late 2nd Intermediate Period or early New Kingdom (they used yellow as a background for a certain period of time.)

another story aout the find These people would have been very wealthy, perhaps an official and his family. The later intrusive burial may also be of a higher status individual who died suddenly - it's not uncommon for the Ancient Egyptians to shove older mummies out of the way and bury someone new in the grave. Some of the text on the walls would be altered to show the new name and occasionally things would be recarved.

The "statues" are actually figurines called "ushabtis"; having a lot of them shows that someone was very wealthy. They would do the work for this person in the afterlife.

a reply to: Byrd

I wondered if it was one of those tombs people in antiquity relocated mummies en masse to avoid more looting and desecration

a reply to: xbeta

Ok.

a reply to: Byrd

Really great find. Are the ushabtis all the same? I mean are they individual people or servants?

Very cool find, it's amazing how much ancient stuff we can find today looking in the right places​, hopefully this gives more funding to archeologists and more neat Egyptian stuff... Thanks for sharing.

I absolutely love stories like this! How many more wonderful things are still buried, waiting and ready to be rediscovered?
Amazing!

a reply to: Slinki

I would wager there is a bunch of hidden artifacts in Egypt. And not all are in the ground. I would imagine there is a bunch of stuff held in museum storage that doesn't fit the history we are sold and told.

If I've lived in the past I wold be a tomb-raider. So much pleasure to spoil someone' fanatic spiritual schizophrenia...

originally posted by: seasonal

I am really impressed with how vivid the colours are after so many centuries, the yellow in particular, it made me wonder what they used. Interesting stuff, it turns out.

Orpiment is a deep orange-yellow colored arsenic sulfide mineral with formula As2S3. It is found in volcanic fumaroles, low temperature hydrothermal veins, and hot springs and is formed both by sublimation and as a byproduct of the decay of another arsenic mineral, realgar. It takes its name from the Latin auripigmentum (aurum − gold + pigmentum − pigment) because of its deep-yellow color.

Orpiment was traded in the Roman Empire and was used as a medicine in China even though it is very toxic. It has been used as a fly poison and to tip arrows with poison.[citation needed] Because of its striking color, it was of interest to alchemists, both in China and the West, searching for a way to make gold.

For centuries, orpiment was ground down and used as a pigment in painting and for sealing wax, and is even used in Ancient China as a correction fluid.[4] It was one of the few clear, bright-yellow pigments available to artists until the 19th century. However, its extreme toxicity and incompatibility with other common pigments, including lead and copper-based substances such as verdigris and azurite,[5] meant that its use as a pigment ended when cadmium yellows, chromium yellows and organic dye-based colors were introduced during the 19th century.

en.wikipedia.org...

The irony I suppose is that yellow was symbolic of the eternal but, as an artist, to illustrate that property, you had to dice with death.

Like all aspects of art in Ancient Egypt, the use of colour in Egyptian paintings was highly symbolic and strictly regulated. Egyptian painters relied on six colours in their palette: red, green, blue, yellow, white and black. Red, the colour of power, indicated life and victory, plus anger and fire. Green symbolized new life, growth, and fertility, while blue represented creation and rebirth, and yellow stood for the eternal, such as the sun and gold. Yellow was the colour of Ra and of all the pharaohs, which is why their sarcophagi were constructed from gold to symbolize the everlasting and eternal pharaoh who was now a god. White hues represented purity, symbolized all things sacred, and were usually used in religious objects used by priests. Black was the colour of death and symbolized the underworld and the night.

www.visual-arts-cork.com...

Nice!

Thanks

originally posted by: Anaana
I am really impressed with how vivid the colours are after so many centuries, the yellow in particular, it made me wonder what they used. Interesting stuff, it turns out.

It was Yellow Ochre, a fairly common mineral. Here in Texas, there's some Pecos River Rock Art with this wonderful color.

The tradition of using yellow as a background color lasts for less than 500 years. There's a change in the type of coffins and sarcophagi... now we start to see 'anthropoid' (human-shaped) coffins used for non-royals. They also began to use cartonnage - a material made from papyrus or linen and 'glued' (rather like papier mache) with resins or another adherent. This surface is smoother than ordinary wood, and colors painted on it tend to look fresh and bright after thousands of years.

originally posted by: Byrd

originally posted by: Anaana
I am really impressed with how vivid the colours are after so many centuries, the yellow in particular, it made me wonder what they used. Interesting stuff, it turns out.

It was Yellow Ochre, a fairly common mineral.

Yes, the yellows on the fresco/panel are clearly common yellow ochre which is widespread and easy to find in Egypt but it was the "vivid" yellows that I was interested in. Given around 40,000 years of use, ochre yellow is to be expected.



If you look at the sarcophagus in the picture, particularly the face of the one in the foreground, the yellow is more a shade of saffron with patches of red in some cases, that's more the colour I was commenting on. The link you provided, to the paper on colour use in Egypt, agrees with the link that I provided, that by the time of the New Kingdom, from which these new discoveries are believed to date, Orpiment has been added to the Egyptian painters pallette. Since it is reactive to other metals, discolouration occurs over time when it is in contact with other metalic bearing pigments, which may explain the red patches. It was evidently the practice to layer the Orpiment over the Yellow Ochre to create a glaze that had a golden glitter in the sunlight, during the 18th Dynasty only the richest would have been able to afford it, but as you yourself stated, every indication suggest that these were the very wealthy.

www.iaea.org...