Archaeology was recently sent into raptures when, for the first time since Tutankhamon was found, a pharaoh’s tomb was discovered and confirmed as such.
And despite that happening just one month ago, and ‘King Tut’ being found 103 years before that, archaeologists have confirmed that they have found yet another pharaoh’s tomb.
The banner year that started when Thutmose II’s final resting place was identified in February near the Valley of the Kings has continued as another royal sepulcher has been found—this time in the Mount Anubis necropolis in Abydos.
However, this king’s name hasn’t been identified yet. According to the Smithsonian the tomb dates to the Middle Kingdom’s Second Intermediate Period, which spanned roughly 1630 to 1540 BCE.
Professor Mohamed Abdel Badie from the Supreme Council of Antiquities, stated that studies conducted on the newly found tomb in Abydos indicate that it belonged to one of the kings whose reign predated King Senebkay, whose tomb was discovered in Abydos by the mission in 2014.
He noted that it is much larger than other previously known tombs attributed to the Abydos Dynasty, which was located in the southern part of the Middle Kingdom and which was eventually overtaken by invasions from the north conducted by the “Hyskos,” a western Asian people who brought new culture, technology, and on occasion, strife and turmoil to the timeless ancient lands along the Nile.
“The king’s name was originally recorded in painted scenes on plastered brickwork that decorated the underground entrance to the limestone burial chamber,” Josef Wegner, an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania who led the excavation, tells Live Science. “However, the hieroglyphic texts were damaged by ancient tomb robbers, and not enough survives to read the king’s name.”
It’s possible that sophisticated AI programs could decipher enough of what’s left behind, but the challenge remains that not much is known about the Abydos Dynasty, so there is little to base any guesses or assumptions on.
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Physically, the tomb was located 20 feet underground in a limestone chamber lined with mud-brick vaults. Very few possessions interred with the numerous dead, most of whom were children, had been left by tomb robbers, but pottery fragments and amphorae indicate that the king was connected to a large local production center of brick and ceramic kilns.
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