Intact sarcophagi unearthed near Cairo

[Eldorado]

More than 100 intact sarcophagi have been unearthed near Cairo, dating back more than 2,500 years.

This latest find comes just over a month after archaeologists in the area found 59 other well-preserved and sealed wooden coffins.

90secs Video report at the BBC: Link

[Still Waters]

4 hours ago, Eldorado said:

More than 100 intact sarcophagi have been unearthed near Cairo, dating back more than 2,500 years.

This latest find comes just over a month after archaeologists in the area found 59 other well-preserved and sealed wooden coffins.

90secs Video report at the BBC: Link

Related:

 

[Wepwawet]

I'm starting to feel uneasy about this stream of "discoveries" as it does look like just ploy to get the tourists back. That's not a bad thing of course, but to start stripping a necropolis of it's dead just for PR is too much. These are ten a penny late period coffins and mummies, they are not historically important people and there is not much information to be gleaned from these "discoveries", I mean, if you dig in a cemetery you'll find bones, no surprise there. There have been some good finds of course, but not trumpeted in the same way, for instance the discovery of an underground "air conditioned" wabet, but joe public doesn't care about this, only about MUMMIES, spooky!

If this removal of the dead from the necropolis continues, then Saqqara will just become a site with holes in the ground and some pyramids, and the GEM, and other museums, will have become the necropolis, and when the next serious civil disturbances occur in Egypt, the mummies and their coffins will be easy targets to get ripped to shreds and burnt by the mob, as happened at the Mallawi museum in 2013.

[Myles]

4 hours ago, Wepwawet said:

I'm starting to feel uneasy about this stream of "discoveries" as it does look like just ploy to get the tourists back. That's not a bad thing of course, but to start stripping a necropolis of it's dead just for PR is too much. These are ten a penny late period coffins and mummies, they are not historically important people and there is not much information to be gleaned from these "discoveries", I mean, if you dig in a cemetery you'll find bones, no surprise there. There have been some good finds of course, but not trumpeted in the same way, for instance the discovery of an underground "air conditioned" wabet, but joe public doesn't care about this, only about MUMMIES, spooky!

If this removal of the dead from the necropolis continues, then Saqqara will just become a site with holes in the ground and some pyramids, and the GEM, and other museums, will have become the necropolis, and when the next serious civil disturbances occur in Egypt, the mummies and their coffins will be easy targets to get ripped to shreds and burnt by the mob, as happened at the Mallawi museum in 2013.

I had to look that up.  Wow, what a shame.  

Here is the states, we are told the looting and vandalism is just a part of peaceful protests.

As violent clashes roiled Egypt, looters made away with a prized 3,500-year-old limestone statue, ancient beaded jewelry and more than 1,000 other artifacts in the biggest theft to hit an Egyptian museum in living memory.

The scale of the looting of the Malawi Museum in the southern Nile River city of Minya laid bare the security vacuum that has taken hold in cities outside Cairo, where police have all but disappeared from the streets. It also exposed how bruised and battered the violence has left Egypt.

For days after vandals ransacked the building last Wednesday, there were no police or soldiers in sight as groups of teenage boys burned mummies and broke limestone sculptures too heavy for the thieves to carry away.

The security situation remained precarious Monday as gunmen atop nearby buildings fired on a police station near the museum.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/devastating-museum-looting-latest-casualty-of-egyptrsquos-chaos/

[RoofGardener]

ROFL

It seems kinda ironic that a newspaper in Seattle is reporting on unrest in Egypt  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Seattle#:~:text=The city of Seattle is,which also devolved into riots.

Edited November 16, 2020 by RoofGardener

[Wepwawet]

One of the museum security guards was also killed by the mob.

This lays bare a serious problem, for while the Muslim Brotherhood is now banned, those people who were members are still here, just as they remained after the organization was previously banned in the early part of the 20th Century. During the "revolution" and during the time of Morsi, many magazines were looted, as well as tombs visible above ground. So the problem is that in a time of chaos, or of a government that does not care for ancient artifacts or human remains, anything that is in a museum or is visible and accesible, is in danger. The shaft tombs being excavated at Saqqara have to be searched for, and it takes work that the mob will probably not bother with when there are many more easier targets. So, leaving these burials protects them, but then any decent information that can be gained by excavation, such as the discovery of the wabet, will remain lost to us. Continue excavating and everything discovered becomes a target for future mobs, and it will happen again as the world gets worse, not better. I'm sure that well within a thousand years from now nothing will remain of all the artifacts, mummies and treasures that currently sit in museums. The gold found in the tomb of Tutankhamun will, for a while, adorn some barbarians hovel, and then become lost to history, like all the treasures of Greece and Rome.

So while we like to see these artifacts, removing them from well concealed tombs is the beginning of their destruction, and our enjoyment of them now is short lived. Just remember that if it were not for decent civilized Cairenes forming a human wall around the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, it would have been completey looted and all the royal mummies and Tutankhamun's treasures lost, yet even so some of the mob did get in through the roof and steal and damage some of the Tutankhamun treasure. The line between reason and civilization, and unreasoning barbarity is very fine and easily broken.

But, we like to explore, we like to see mummies and treasure, so the exhumation of Ancient Egypt will continue. That's a bit of a rant I guess, but it is an issue, our short term pleasure in these artifacts against the long term, or even short term, loss of everything, and that's a certainty.

[_Chez_]

Sounds like it's a dead hole !!!