RESEARCHERS have unearthed around 20 ancient tombs in the city of New Damietta, Egypt.
The burials date back to 688 BCE, or around the 26th dynasty, according to a Google-translated statement from the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
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Dr. Mostafa Waziri, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that the discovered tombs varied between mud brick composition and simple pits.
Mud brick tombs were a common architectural model in the Sawi era, and more specifically, the 26th dynasty.
Perhaps most notably, researchers found gold foil grave artifacts in the tombs.
The foils were molded into the shape of Ancient Egyptian gods, such as Isis, who was one of the most important deities.
Other foils seemed to represent Bastet, a cat goddess, and the falcon-headed god Horus.
“It is quite clear in contemporary religious texts that the Egyptian gods were thought [to] have flesh of gold,” Campbell Price, curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester, told Live Science.
And the unearthed artifacts were believed to affect the divinity of the deceased by “providing protection from the gods depicted but also integrating the deceased among the gods,” Price added.
Other finds included pottery vessels and many funerary amulets of different shapes, sizes and stones.
Some of the amulets featured scarabs, the grandfather’s column, the headrest and the two feathers of Amun.
Other represented the deities Isis, Nephthys, Gehuti and Tawert.
Furthermore, miniature models of canopic vessels, which were used for preserving the viscera of the deceased during the mummification process, were also discovered within the tombs.
Dr. Waziri called the discovery an important scientific and archaeological addition to the history of Damietta Governorate.
At this time, it is unclear who the tombs were made for.
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