CAIRO, EGYPT—According to a Live Science report, a team of Egyptian and German archaeologists excavating the Egyptian site of Dahshur’s royal pyramids and sprawling necropolis near Cairo has unearthed a 4,300-year-old tomb belonging to a priestess and royal official decorated with depictions of everyday life in ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom. The burial is a mastaba, a flat-topped rectangular mudbrick tomb with sloping walls. Based on its style and pottery found within, Stephan Seidlmayer, formerly of the German Archaeological Institute, and his colleagues have dated it to around 2300 B.C., during the late 5th or early 6th Dynasty. The atypical wall paintings illustrate scenes of sailing on the Nile River, market interactions, and donkeys trampling grain in order to thresh it. They are accompanied by a hieroglyphic inscription indicating the owners of the burial goods as a man named Seneb-Neb-Af, an official who dealt with tenant administration, and his wife Idet, who is referred to as a priestess of the sky goddess Hathor, or “Lady of the Sycamore.” Seidlmayer confirmed that the next step in the decades-long excavation of the site will likely focus on excavating the burial shafts in search of mummies. For more on excavations of Egypt’s Old Kingdom funerary complexes, go to “In the Reign of the Sun Kings.”
