Archaeologists have discovered an intact, ancient Egyptian tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the first since King Tutankhamuns was found in 1922, BBC Online reports Friday evening.
A team led by the University of Memphis in USA found the previously unknown tomb complete with unopened sarcophagi and five undisturbed mummies.
The Valley of the Kings near Luxor in southern Egypt was used for burials for around 500 years from 1540BC onwards. The tomb, the 63rd discovered since the valley was first mapped in the 18th century, was unexpectedly found only five metres away from King Tutankhamuns.
Patricia Podzorski, curator of Egyptian Art at the University of Memphis, said the team had not been looking for it. – They were… clearing away some workmen’s huts from the 19th Dynasty that were both to the left and right side of the tomb. Underneath these workmens huts, they found a shaft, she explained.
Four metres below the ground was a single chamber containing sarcophagi with coloured funerary masks and more than 20 large storage jars bearing Pharaonic seals. The sarcophagi were buried rapidly in the small tomb for an unknown reason.
Ms Podzorski said the tomb was thought to date from the 18th Pharaonic Dynasty, the first dynasty of the New Kingdom which ruled between 1539BC and 1292BC and made its capital in Thebes, the present city of Luxor.
Egypts chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass said that the mummies “might be royals or nobles moved from their original graves to protect them from grave robbers”, BBC adds.
