Archaeologists have found the oldest mummy in Egypt: 4300 years old

Pharaoh’s tomb discovered near Cairo

Scientists believe that archaeologists may have managed to find the oldest mummy in Egypt. The 4,300-year-old mummified remains were discovered at the bottom of a 15-meter shaft near the step pyramid at Saqqara.

Egyptologists have unearthed a pharaoh’s tomb near the country’s capital, Cairo, containing perhaps the oldest and most complete mummy ever discovered in Egypt, the head of the excavation team said.

The 4,300-year-old mummy was found at the bottom of a 15-meter shaft in a recently discovered group of Fifth and Sixth Dynasty tombs near the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, The Guardian writes. This was reported to journalists by the director of the group, Egyptologist Zahi Hawass.

The mummy of a man named Gekashepes was in a limestone sarcophagus, which was sealed with lime mortar.

“This mummy is possibly the oldest and most complete mummy found in Egypt to date,” says Zahi Hawass, one of Egypt’s former antiquities ministers.

Among other tombs found was one that belonged to Khnumdzhedef, inspector of officials, overseer of the nobility and cleric during the reign of Unas, the last pharaoh of the fifth dynasty. The sarcophagus was decorated with scenes from everyday life.

Another tomb belonged to “the keeper of secrets and assistant to the great ruler of the palace,” according to The Guardian.

Numerous statues were found among the tombs, including one depicting a man, his wife and several servants, the statement said.

Recall that the other day the media talked about the amazing finds of scientists who conducted a digital scan of the unfolded mummy of a young man who lived in ancient Egypt 2300 years ago, known as the “Golden Boy”. Scientists led by a professor of radiology at the Medical Faculty of Cairo University, Sahar Salim, came to the conclusion that the boy who lived for thousands of years came from a wealthy family that had a high social status, since the mummy’s body was decorated with 49 precious amulets. The Golden Boy was first discovered in 1916 in southern Egypt in a cemetery used from 332 to 30 BC. in Nag el-Hasse. But since then, the mummy has been kept without research in the basement of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Professor Salim and her team used computed tomography to examine the insides of the mummies without unwrapping them. Based on the degree of bone fusion in the skeleton and the absence of wisdom teeth in the mouth, it turned out that the ancient boy was about 14 or 15 years old. The study also determined that the teen had not been circumcised – which experts say is relatively rare in mummies and suggests the teen may not have been Egyptian. This suggests that non-Egyptians could also have been mummified.