![]() Situated on the banks of the Nile, Saqqara was an active burial ground for more than 3,000 years and is a Unesco World Heritage Site. Hawass said the finds date from the fifth and sixth dynasties, corresponding to the 25 th to 22nd centuries BC. Other major findings from the excavation include statues, amulets, and a well-preserved sarcophagus. The largest is said to belong to a priest, inspector and supervisor of nobles called Khnumdjedef.Īnother belonged to a senior palace official called Meri who was given the title “secret keeper”, allowing him to carry out special religious rituals. Three other tombs were found at the vast Saqqara burial site. It had been sealed in mortar for more than four millenia “just as the ancient Egyptians left it”. The mummy, of a man named Hakashepes, was covered in layers of gold and concealed within a large limestone sarcophagus, Hawass said. "This mummy may be the oldest and most complete mummy found in Egypt to date," Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former antiquities minister, said in a statement on Thursday. ![]() ![]() The remains were discovered at the bottom of a 15-metre shaft in a recently uncovered group of tombs at the Saqqara necropolis, south of Cairo.
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