SAQQARA, EGYPT—Ahram Online reports that an eight-foot-long piece of an Old Kingdom obelisk has been discovered at the Saqqara necropolis. Inscriptions on one side of the side of the red granite monument name Queen Ankhnespepy II, who lived around 2350 B.C. and ruled as regent for her young son. “This is probably why her pyramid is the biggest of the necropolis after the pyramid of the king himself,” said Philippe Collombert of the University of Geneva. The researchers think the obelisk originally stood about 15 feet tall. An indentation on the obelisk's tip suggests it was capped with copper or golden foil. “Queens of the 6th Dynasty usually had two small obelisks at the entrance to their funerary temple, but this obelisk was found a little far from the entrance of the complex of Ankhnespepy II,” added Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. Waziri suggested stonecutters may have moved the obelisk from the queen’s funerary temple, perhaps during the New Kingdom or Late Period, when much of the stone in the Saqqara necropolis was recycled. For more, go to “Afterlife on the Nile.”
