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Six 3000-BC tombs unearthed in Egypt |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Friday, 18 June 2004 |
Australian archaeologists discover six new tombs on 5000-year-old necropolis built hundreds of years before Pyramids south of Cairo.
CAIRO - A team of Australian archaeologists have discovered six previously unknown tombs dating back to 3000 BC at the ancient cemetery of Memphis, Egypt's first capital city.
The six new tombs found on the 100-hectare necropolis known as Helwan, 25 kilometres south of Cairo, were built hundreds of years before the Pyramids.
Dr. Christiana Kohler, of the Australian Centre for Egyptology at Macquarie University and the director of the project, said: "In Egypt today, discovering unexcavated tombs of such an early date is very rare. After four years of tough fieldwork we have finally hit pay dirt."
Amongst the six new tombs to have been excavated is that of a mature female who was buried in a large wooden chest. The richness and number of her grave goods suggest that she was a wealthy matron of early Memphis.
Dr Kohler said the most significant discovery was an intact 30 centimetre long flint knife.
"Very few of these beautifully crafted knives have survived, and its presence helps us to date this tomb to the First Dynasty of the Kings of the ancient Egyptian state."
Another tomb contained the well-preserved skeleton of a young female who was aged between 16 and 18 years when she died. In the simple wooden coffin her family had placed small calcite juglets, jars and bowls for scented oils and cosmetics as well as an ivory spoon and bone spatula in the belief that she would want to apply make-up and be well groomed in the afterlife.
Why she died so young remains a mystery, but her bones will be studied next season for clues to the cause of death.
Dr Kohler said early analysis by a physical anthropologist of some of the human remains from the site suggest the inhabitants of Memphis were surprisingly healthy. "The good health that these people had is unusual because we are looking at a pre-industrial society where you usually get a lot of sick people," she said."But in Memphis they were all very well built and quite tall. Even the average woman was something like 1.65 to 1.75 centimetres tall."
The very early date of the site, and the fact that many of the people buried at the Helwan cemetary were "ordinary people", means that none of the bodies were mummified, Dr Kohler said.
"The kings of that period appear to have started experimenting with mummification, but ordinary people - and these are the people that we are looking at - didn’t do that at all."
After finishing work on the site in late January this year, Dr Kohler and her team worked for a month in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo where they drew and photographed around two hundred pieces of jewellery from Helwan.
This was done as part of an ongoing effort to record for the first time the thousands of objects that were found in the 1940s and 1950s by the first excavator of the cemetery at Helwan, Egyptian archaeologist Zaki Saad.
Dr Kohler believes that careful study of these finds combined with continuing excavations will help to create a detailed picture of early Memphis's social structure, funerary customs and history.
"This is a huge responsibility that I take very seriously," she said. "Our work is especially important because the site threatened by illegal and uncontrollable urban sprawl, so we are rescuing it from destruction.
"What we are trying to do is reconstruct the very beginning of the history of Egyptian civilisation."
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=10353 |
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