“Unlocking Secrets of the Afterlife: Archaeologists Unearth Ancient Egypt’s First Fully Preserved Funeral Home in the Mysterious City of the Dead!”
The artifacts revealed a whole roster of options for those anticipating their journey into the afterlife. From gold foil and white plaster burial masks to the costly gold and silver ones, or affordable painted clay jars to store one’s innards to expensive Egyptian alabaster — the customer was always right.
“The evidence we uncovered shows the embalmers had very good business sense,” said Ramadan Hussein, an Egyptologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “They were very smart about providing alternatives.”
Saqqara sits on the banks of the Nile, around 20 miles south of Cairo. It’s believed mummification workshops like the one found under its sands have likely been overlooked for generations, in favor of the royal tombs waiting to be dug up below.
For Hussein, who started his work at Saqqara in 2016, the results of this years-long effort have been nothing short of remarkable. His focus was on tombs dating to 600 B.C. that were largely ignored by his peers and hidden deep underground.
It was while examining an area last probed in the 1800s that Hussein and his team found a shaft that was carved into the bedrock. Filled with debris and sand, the resourceful Egyptologist had an inkling something was waiting below. Little did he know he’d found a mummification workshop for the working man.
“We’ve been reading about this in the [ancient] texts,” he said, “but now we can really contextualize the business of death.”
National GeographicThis is just one of the dozens of mummies discovered in the ancient funeral complex, where over 50 in all sorts of conditions were found buried.
The excavation took months and the removal of 42 tons of fill but ended in the discovery of a 40-foot shaft and large chamber with high ceilings. Thousands of pottery fragments, shallow channels cut into the bedrock, and a table-like area were found. The network of passages provided a cool breeze.
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