A
3,400-year-old tomb holding the remains of more than a dozen possibly mummified
people has been discovered on Sai Island, along the Nile River in northern
Sudan.
Archaeologists
discovered the tomb in 2015, though it wasn't until 2017 that a team with the
Across Borders archaeological research project fully excavated the site.
The
island is part of an ancient land known as Nubia that Egypt controlled 3,400
years ago. The Egyptians built settlements and fortifications throughout Nubia,
including on Sai Island, which had a settlement and a gold mine.
The tomb,
which contains multiple chambers, appears to hold the remains of Egyptians who
lived in or near that settlement and worked in gold production.
The
artifacts found in the tomb include scarabs (a type of amulet widely used in
Egypt), ceramic vessels, a gold ring, the remains of gold funerary masks worn
by the deceased and a small stone sculpture known as a shabti.
The ancient
Egyptians believed that shabtis could do the work of the deceased for them in
the afterlife. Some of the artifacts bore Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions
that revealed the tomb was originally created for a man named Khnummose, who
was a "master gold worker."
The
remains of Khnummose (which may have been mummified) were found next to those
of a woman who may have been his wife. Some of the other people found in tomb
may have been relatives of Khnummose, the researchers said, adding that they
planned to conduct DNA analyses of the remains.
"We
will try to extract ancient DNA from the [bones] of the bodies in
question," said Julia Budka, professor for Egyptian Archaeology and Art
History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. "If the [ancient]
DNA is preserved, this will help us a lot.
Otherwise, it all remains
tentative," said Budka, who noted that the samples are already at the
Department for Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of
Human History in Jena, Germany.
The
archaeologists said they aren't sure how many of the bodies were mummified.
"The
state of preservation is very difficult here," Budka said. "I am
waiting for the report of my physical anthropologists. For now, the position
and also traces of bitumen speak for some kind of mummification for all persons
in Tomb 26 who were placed in wooden coffins."
Bitumen is a type of
petroleum that the ancient Egyptians sometimes used in mummification.
Many
of the coffins are also poorly preserved, and it's uncertain exactly how many
of the people were buried in coffins, Budka said.
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