A photographer, driver and I left the chaos of Cairo for the green fields of Fayoum Oasis, about an hour and a half outside the capital. It is an agricultural area where people live quite simply, farming their land, selling crops and living in small communities. To get to the grave site we had to drive another half hour to Lahun village – a primitive and ancient community that dates back to the Middle Kingdom of the pharaohs. People still live as farmers here, riding their donkey carts with their wares under the watchful eye of the King Senusret II pyramid, a deformed hunk of rock created for the King in the Middle Kingdom (1991-1783 BC).
The area around the pyramid was excavated in 1889 but abandoned when the British archaeology team found little of interest.
The site was revisited last November when a group of Egyptian archaeologists led by Dr Abdelrahman al Ayedi started digging. Dr al Ayedi said he was inspired to go back to the site because he had faith that there was something there to be found.
Sure enough, four months later, he was standing in a baseball cap and worn out clothes, a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, giving his workers orders to be careful as they dusted down the 53 tombs they had unearthed.
I stood on the barren hillside, along with my fellow journalists, and stared down as a couple of workers at the bottom of the three-metre shaft gently lifted the lid of a coffin inscribed with prayers in hieroglyphics.
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