BASEL, SWITZERLAND—The mummified remains of at least 50 people have been found in tomb KV40 in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings by a team from the University of Basel. The tomb, which dates to the 18th Dynasty, consists of five subterranean chambers. The remains were found in the center chamber and three of the side chambers, but they were badly damaged by a fire that may have been started by the plunderers. Inscriptions on storage jars in the tomb named more than 30 people who had been buried there, including members of the families of Thutmosis IV and Amenhotep III, who were otherwise unknown. “We discovered a remarkable number of carefully mummified newborns and infants that would have normally been buried much simpler. We believe that the family members of the royal court were buried in this tomb for a period of several decades,” Egyptologist Susanne Bickel told Red Orbit. The tomb was eventually reused as a cemetery in the ninth century B.C.
