Ancient Egyptian Relic Hidden for Millennia Emerges from Unexpected Scottish Cigar Box Mystery
Who would’ve guessed that deep inside a dusty old cigar box in Scotland, you’d stumble across a fragment of ancient Egypt’s secrets? Not your typical “found treasure” tale, but archaeologist Abeer Eladany’s serendipitous discovery of a tiny piece of cedar wood—one of only three artifacts ever pulled from inside the Great Pyramid’s Queen’s Chamber during an 1872 excavation—feels like unearthing a missing puzzle piece to history itself. What’s truly mind-boggling? This modest wooden relic predates the pyramid by centuries, challenging everything we thought we knew about the timeline of this wonder’s construction. And to think, it was hiding in plain sight, mislabeled, tucked away in a university archive all these decades. It begs the question: how many other ancient marvels are waiting to be found inside the most unlikely places?
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The piece of cedar wood is one of only three items that were removed from the Great Pyramid during a 19th-century excavation.
University of AberdeenThe artifact was gifted to the university over 70 years ago.
If there’s one thing you don’t expect to find inside an old cigar box, it’s an ancient Egyptian artifact. But that’s exactly what happened when archaeologist Abeer Eladany was sorting through the museum archives at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen.
“It had effectively been hidden in plain sight in the wrong collection,” she said of the discovery. “I’m an archaeologist and have worked on digs in Egypt but I never imagined it would be here in north-east Scotland that I’d find something so important to the heritage of my own country.”
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