However, rather than revealing the name of the deceased, the glyphs were utterly nonsensical. Where the neck of the interred mummy would be, a necklace had been painted on the coffin lid, and imitation hieroglyphs were inscribed lower down. In addition, some of the coffins had been looted, and were empty.īut for all their decay, there was enough decoration remaining on one of the coffins to make out some details. For the ones found in the Dry Moat, the wooden coffins had decayed, and they weren't placed in tombs, but directly in the sand. This is where they found the poorly preserved mummies, buried outside the pyramid. In the dig of September 2018, Kuraszkiewicz and his team were excavating an area between the Pyramid of Djoser (at over 4,600 years old, that's the oldest pyramid in the world) and the Dry Moat, a rectangular ditch 20 metres deep (65 ft) and 40 metres wide that surrounds the ancient pyramid. It's an incredible repository of the region's history, filled with stunning tombs beautifully preserved in the dryness of the desert, revealing a great deal about ancient Egyptial burial practices. Polish archaeologists have been working in Egypt for decades to help excavate the Saqqara necropolis, a vast 'city of the dead' that served the ancient capital of Memphis - and several royal dynasties - for thousands of years. Dąbrowski/Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology) 'They were only subjected to basic embalming treatments, wrapped in bandages and placed directly in pits dug in the sand.' 'Most of the mummies we discovered last season were very modest,' Egyptologist Kamil Kuraszkiewicz of the University of Warsaw told the Polish Press Agency in July this year. Perhaps this is the resting place for people from the working or middle class, rather than the elite. Archaeologists have found dozens of 2,000-year-old burials near the necropolis of Saqqara that are much more minimal, even clumsy.

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