The discovery made headlines around the world when it was first announced in July 2018: Archaeologists had unearthed an ancient Egyptian “funeral home” deep beneath the sands of Saqqara, a sprawling necropolis—city of the dead—located on the banks of the Nile less than 20 miles south of Cairo.
In the two years since, thorough analysis of the finds and new discoveries in a nearby shaft filled with tombs have yielded a trove of information about the business of death in ancient Egypt. For centuries, archaeology in the land of the pharaohs was focused on uncovering inscriptions and artifacts from royal tombs rather than the details of day-to-day life. Mummification workshops probably existed at necropolises all over Egypt, but many were overlooked by generations of excavators rushing to get to the tombs underneath.
Now, with the discoveries at Saqqara, that’s changing as the archaeological evidence for a vast funeral industry is unearthed and documented in detail for the first time.
A priest named Ayput was interred in a stone sarcophagus carved in the shape of a human, a style known as anthropoid. The mummy’s wrapping were coated with tar or resin, giving it a dark color.
“The evidence we uncovered shows the embalmers had very good business sense,” says Ramadan Hussein, an Egyptologist based at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “They were very smart about providing alternatives.”
“The evidence we uncovered shows the embalmers had very good business sense,” says Ramadan Hussein, an Egyptologist based at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “They were very smart about providing alternatives.”
Couldn’t afford a deluxe burial mask crafted with gold and silver? You might be offered the “white plaster and gold foil” deal instead, Hussein says.
Not enough cash to store your innards in jars of lustrous Egyptian alabaster? How about a nice painted clay set instead?
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KINGDOM OF THE MUMMIES
Follow Ramadan Hussein and his team as they explore the subterranean chambers of Saqqara in a new four-part series. Kingdom of the Mummies premiers in the U.S. Tuesday May 12 at 10/9c on National Geographic. The series launches globally—in 142 countries and 43 languages—in June.
“We’ve been reading about this in the [ancient] texts,” Hussein says, “but now we can really contextualize the business of death.”
An unexpected discovery
Hussein began working at Saqqara in 2016, searching for tombs dating to around 600 B.C. and hidden deep underground. The deep shafts had been largely ignored by earlier Egyptologists, who often focused on burials from older periods in Egyptian history. His team’s work is profiled in a new, four-part National Geographic series, Kingdom of the Mummies, which premiers in the U.S. Tuesday May 12. While probing an area last examined in the late 1800s, Hussein and his team discovered a shaft carved into the bedrock that was filled with sand and debris.
After removing 42 tons of fill, the archaeologists arrived at the bottom of the 40-foot shaft and found a roomy, high-ceilinged chamber. It, too, was choked with sand and boulders that had to be removed. Among the rubble were thousands of broken pieces of pottery, each of which had to be carefully documented and conserved. The painstaking excavation took months.
When at last the chamber was empty, the team was surprised to discover that it wasn’t a tomb. The room had a raised, table-like area and shallow channels cut into the bedrock along the base of one wall. In one corner, a barrel-sized bowl was filled with charcoal, ash, and dark sand. An older tunnel—part of a network of passages that honeycomb the rock beneath Saqqara—moved cool air through the space.
The clues suggested to Hussein that the chamber had been a mummification workshop, complete with an industrial-strength incense burner, drainage channels to funnel blood, and a natural ventilation system.
“If you’re doing evisceration down there, you need air moving in to get rid of insects,” Hussein says. “You want constant movement of air when you’re dealing with cadavers.”
Over the past year, pottery experts were able to piece together the ceramic sherds, reconstructing hundreds of small bowls and jars, each one inscribed with a label.
“Every single cup or bowl has the name of the substance it held, and the days of the embalming procedure it was used,” Hussein says. “Instructions are written directly on the objects.” (Related: Archaeologists uncover an embalming recipe some 5,600 years old.)
Article originally published on nationalgeographic.com
Written by: ANDREW CURRY
Mon, Jun. 1, 2020
