French researchers have unearthed a reburied sarcophagus from the Middle Kingdom in Luxor (Egypt), as part of research carried out after the discovery, in 2018 and 2019, of sarcophagi on the same site, we learned on Sunday December 29 from a member of the mission.
The discovery took place on December 16, at the very end of a mission which lasted two months, confirmed to AFP Frédéric Colin, director of the Institute of Egyptology at the University of Strasbourg (east of the France) having participated in the mission, confirming information from the regional daily The Latest News from Alsace.
The excavation campaign was organized jointly by members of the University of Strasbourg and the French Institute of Oriental Archeology (IFAO).
A “remarkable” discovery
For the Egyptologist, this discovery is “outstanding“in several respects. It brings a “lighting” has “an important anthropological question” who is to know “how the ancient Egyptians behaved towards the mummified body and burials of their ancestors when they discovered ancient coffins and had to expropriate them from their final resting place during major public works”explained Mr. Colin to AFP.
It is indeed a reburial. The discoveries, made in 2018 and 2019 in Luxor, of five sarcophagi from the New Kingdom (from the 14th century to the 9th century BC), were already reburials.
It is also for “better understand the nature and scope of the 2018 and 2019 discovery, investigating whether the five sarcophagi constituted an isolated tomb or part of a larger, more systematic set of reburials”that this new mission took place.
A set of stratified layers accumulated over more than 3,000 years (a stratigraphy) of more than eight meters was thus excavated “during three excavation campaigns”over six months.
“And the beginning of the answer appears on the last day of excavation of the third campaign” with this discovery. The researchers did not “as soon as the layer where the coffin was located, its excavation will resume at the start of the next campaign in October 2025”clarified Professor Colin.
As for the coffin from the Middle Kingdom (late 21st century-late 18th century BC), it was “protected in a custom-built wooden chest.”
Its content will be studied in 2025 “in collaboration with archaeoanthropologists (archaeologists specializing in the excavation of human bodies), by modeling in 3D all stages of the research, as (the) team has been doing systematically since 2018”.
Belgium
