14 DAY TRIAL // The Saqqara necropolis, situated south of the Egyptian capital of Cairo, dates back to the 6th Dynasty, which reigned over the areas some 4,300 years ago. A vast stretch of land was covered with temples, tombs and pyramids, in what would today look like an over-sized and gigantic graveyard. Over the years, it has yielded numerous important archaeological finds, but on Sunday diggers came across the jackpot – an underground tomb that contained the mummies of 22 people, aligned in niches along its walls, alongside 8 sarcophagi, which most likely housed mummies as well.
Thus far, the research team has only opened one of the sealed containers, but there's a very good chance that all the other 7 are “inhabited” as well. Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities released the news on Monday, after archaeologists got a chance to explore the construction more thoroughly. They failed to find secret passageways and niches, but said that they would continue to look over the coming weeks.
The tomb containing the recent finds was found at the bottom of a 36 foot-deep shaft, and unveiled another surprise for the investigators. Although the mummies found were neatly arranged into their rocky niches, egyptologists say that this is highly unusual for corpses dating back from the 26th Dynasty (roughly around 640 BC). Rather, this way of entombing a person was used in the older days, millennia before the found mummies were incinerated.
The researchers have also failed to figure out why so many were placed in a single room. They had to be important persons in order to deserve the “attention” of being embalmed, but they also must have been low-ranked officials, if so many shared their burial monument. Usually, each mummy is placed in its individual sarcophagus, and laid to rest alone. As a result of lacking a sealed container of their own, the 22 bodies found in the niches were fairly damaged, as opposed to the one recovered from the only opened sarcophagus.
The discovery was made in a largely un-excavated area of Saqqara, which further goes to show that Egyptian officials were right when they said that only about 30 percent of all monuments the country had in the past had thus far been uncovered, and that the rest still lay under the sands, waiting to be found.