News from the ancient world
Egypt · c. 5000 BC to AD 641 · 17 stories
New discoveries from ancient Egypt and Nubia: pharaohs and pyramids, tombs at Saqqara and Luxor, mummies, papyri, Ptolemaic Alexandria and Coptic monasteries.
The decorated tomb of Weni, a mayor and priest, also held two rare wooden statues, and his skeleton shows marks of repeated heavy physical strain.
An Old Kingdom wooden statue of a standing man from Saqqara, similar in kind to those found in Weni's tomb. Photo: Shrook M. Mahboub, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Egypt · c. 1279–1213 BC · Tell El-Faraoun, Sharqiya Governorate, Egypt
The surviving upper half is about 2.1 metres tall and is estimated to weigh five to six tons. It may once have stood in Ramesses' capital, Per-Ramesses.
Egypt · Roman period · El Bahnasa (Oxyrhynchus), Minya Governorate, Egypt
At ancient Oxyrhynchus, a Spanish-Egyptian team also found jars of cremated human remains wrapped in cloth with cat bones, a rite rarely seen in the area.
Egypt · 2nd century BC to 6th century AD · Tell el-Farama (Pelusium), North Sinai, Egypt
A 35-metre basin fed by the Nile once held silty water for the god Pelusius, in a building archaeologists first took for the city's senate house.
Egypt · 5th century AD · Al-Qalaya, Hosh Issa, Beheira, Egypt
The 13-room building at Al-Qalaya in Beheira also held wall paintings, a two-metre marble column and a Coptic inscription that may be an epitaph.
Egypt · 3rd century BC to 11th century AD · Athribis (Nagaa Sheikh Hammad), Sohag, Egypt
The Egyptian-German mission says Athribis has now yielded 43,000 ostraca since 2005, including more than 130 that deal with astronomy and the zodiac.
Egypt · 1st–3rd century AD · Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt
About 30 inscriptions in three ancient Indian languages, dated to the 1st to 3rd centuries AD, show that visitors from India reached the royal tombs of Roman Egypt.
Egypt · c. 1070–715 BC · Qurna, Luxor, Luxor Governorate, Egypt
The coffins still hold their mummies, date to Egypt's Third Intermediate Period, and most bear titles, chiefly 'singer of Amun', instead of their owners' names.
Egypt · Third Intermediate Period, Twenty-second Dynasty · Tanis (San al-Hagar), Egypt
A French team found 225 figurines inscribed for the Libyan king at the foot of an uninscribed sarcophagus, which probably belonged to him.
Egypt · c. 2445–2421 BC · Abu Ghurab, Abusir, Giza Governorate, Egypt
An Italian team has cleared more than half of the 4,400-year-old Fifth Dynasty building, which groundwater kept out of reach after its location was identified in 1901.
Egypt · c. 3300 BC · Badari, Asyut Governorate, Egypt
Wear marks and six coils of leather thong on the 63 mm tool from Badari point to bow drilling more than two millennia before some of Egypt's best-preserved drill sets.
Egypt · c. 3000 BC · Wadi Khamila, South Sinai, Egypt
Found in Wadi Khamila by an Egyptian antiquities inspector, the scene carries an inscription naming the god Min as ruler of the copper region, a Bonn Egyptologist says.
Egypt · 5th–6th century AD · Al-Qarya bi-Al-Duweir, Sohag Governorate, Egypt
Egyptian archaeologists in Sohag have excavated a complete mudbrick monastic complex, reportedly from the 5th or 6th century AD, with halls, vaulted cells and water basins.