While the project of the formidable Museo with which it hopes to attract 30 million visitors each year, Egypt announced this thursday the discovery of four other tombs of pharaohs and a mummy over 4,300 years old. The find was presented at a press conference in which the former Egyptian antiquities minister spoke. Zahi Hawass, world celebrity when it comes to mummies and pharaohs, who pointed out that the discoveries were in the necropolis of Saqqaraan area regarding 30 kilometers from Cairo known for the famous pyramid of Pharaoh Djoserone of the monuments considered as the oldest of humanity.
Archaeologists dated the four tombs found to the fifth and sixth dynasties, between the years 2,500 and 2,100 before the Christian era.
Wearing his usual hat ‘Indiana Jones style’, the media Hawass recounted that the tomb in which the mummy was found covered with gold “It was 15 meters deep, and it had never been opened.”
“In those tombs with various ornate parts they buried Khnumdjedef, the high priest of Pharaoh Unas, whose pyramid is in the same area,” Hawass said, noting that during the excavations the archaeologists also found a limestone sarcophagus with a state of preservation. “exactly 4,300 years ago.”
when they opened it, “They discovered inside a mummy covered in gold, which we believe is one of the oldest and best preserved, leaving aside the royal mummies,” Hawass noted. the necropolis of saqqaralocated just over 15 kilometers south of the famous pyramids of Giza, It is considered a world heritage site by Unesco.
More than 40 2,000-year-old mummies found in Egypt
The Egyptian authorities announced in recent months several relevant archaeological findsespecially in Saqqara, but also in Luxor, in the south of the country.
The Ministry of Antiquities reported on Tuesday the discovery in this second town of the remains of a “entire roman city”dating from the first centuries of the Christian era.
This succession of announcements, according to experts, it might be due to a more political and economic motivation than a scientific one. Is that Egypt, with 104 million inhabitants, suffers a serious economic crisis and the tourism sector is one of the main engines of its economy.
In this context, the country has announced many important archaeological discoveries in recent years, as part of the efforts to revive its tourism industry, and the government its Grand Egyptian Museum, due to open this year, attract 30 million tourists a year by 2028.
Critics have accused the government of prioritizing media findings to attract more tourism, rather than academic research.
The Grand Egyptian Museum, which would open this year, is the great bet to attract tourists from all over the world
Egypt is in a vast campaign to try, in addition, to recover traditional pieces among the antiquities discovered many years ago, which ended up in the main museums of the world. “The French, the British, they all stole,” they maintain in Egypt, that the last century suffered the theft of thousands of invaluable pieces.
Some of these antiquities, such as the Luxor Obelisk in Paris or the Temple of Debod in Madrid, were not looted, but were gifts from the Egyptian authorities to friendly countries. Others found their way to European museums within the framework of the colonial distribution system. And the bulk, hundreds of thousands of pieces, smuggled out of the country to feed “private collections around the world,” says researcher Abdel Gawad.
Other treasures they dream of recovering
In a new crusade, former minister Hawass launched a petition in October for the return of the Rosetta stone and the Dendera zodiac to Egypt. In that campaign Hawass has already added 78,000 signatures and wants to launch another petition for the bust of Nefertiti. All three pieces have been the subject of controversy for decades.
The Rosetta Stone, a stele carved in 196 B.C. C. in ancient Greek, demotic Egyptian and hieroglyphics, It has been on display since 1802 in the British Museum in London. with the poster ‘Taken in Egypt in 1801 by the British Army’.
A spokesman for the British Museum assures AFP that it is a “diplomatic gift”. But for Abdel Gawad, it is nothing more than “a spoils of war”
the bust of Nefertitimeanwhile, landed on the Neues Museum in Berlin through colonial division, Germany asserts. For Hawass, that sculpture, painted in 1340 B.C. C., and which German archaeologists took in 1912, “left Egypt illegally”.
The dendera zodiac It arrived in Paris when, in 1820, the prefect Sébastien Louis Saulnier sent a team to tear out that bas-relief from a temple in southern Egypt with explosives. It is a representation of the celestial vault of more than 2.5 meters wide and high, and has been hanging from the ceiling of the Louvre since 1922. In Dendera, however, there is a plaster copy.
“This is a crime,” Hanna denounces. According to her, what was acceptable at her time can no longer be “compatible with the ethics of the 21st century.”
AFP/HB
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