Feature: Discovery of an intact tomb at Saqqara

drhawass.com (Zahi Hawass)

With video.

This past year we found a new tomb in Saqqara, in the Gisr el-Mudir area. I was there when we opened a sealed limestone sarcophagus. Before the event, I could not sleep because I could not stop thinking about the excitement of that moment. When I arrived, I came down about 11 meters underground, where we began to open the sarcophagus, which had not been touched in 2600 years.

If there was to be a mummy inside the coffin, they would have to be rich, because the limestone of the sarcophagus was very high quality, which means it would have been very expensive. To remove the lid, which is very heavy, many people had to work together to shift it.

When you open something like this it is very exciting, You never know what amazing secrets are hidden inside. The only way to truly understand the feeling is to experience it for yourself.

The mummy inside the coffin was kept safe, it is beautifully preserved. We plan to examine it using the CT scan machine to see inside, because most mummies of this period contained many amulets on the body inside the wrappings.