Archaeologists have unearthed the huge tomb of an unknown pharaoh at an Egyptian necropolis, a team of researchers said on Thursday, in the second discovery of a king’s tomb this year.
The team of Egyptian and American archaeologists found the tomb, which the researchers estimate is 3,600 years old, nearly 23 feet underground at Abydos, one of the oldest cities of ancient Egypt. The city, about 300 miles south of Cairo, was a burial place for early pharaohs, and a necropolis developed at Anubis Mountain to the city’s south.
Researchers uncovered the tomb at the mountain, at the base of a high desert cliff where strong winds carry gusts of sand. In some places around the necropolis, sand has buried structures more than 16 or 19 feet deep.
The burial chamber features a decorated entryway, several rooms and soaring 16-foot vaults made of mud bricks. It dwarfs a tomb unearthed at Abydos over a decade ago, which was hailed at the time as the first material proof of a “lost” dynasty of kings there.
“It’s a new chapter in investigating this dynasty,” Josef Wegner, a curator at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia and the leader of the American side of the excavation, said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s pretty exciting.”
Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities briefly described the findings at Abydos earlier this month, but researchers at the Penn Museum announced more about the discovery on Thursday.
Similarities between the newly unearthed tomb and the one discovered in 2014, which belonged to a king named Seneb-Kay, have led the archaeologists to conclude that the as-yet-unknown pharaoh may have been an earlier member of the so-called Abydos dynasty.
In the newly discovered tomb, painted scenes on plastered brickwork decorate the entrance to the limestone burial chamber, showing the goddess Isis and her sister Nephthys, who were often paired in funerary rites.
“This tomb and Seneb-Kay’s tomb are the earliest surviving royal tombs that actually have painted decorations inside,” Mr. Wegner said.
But there were no identifiable skeletal remains at the newly unearthed site and, like a tomb found near the Valley of the Kings this year, the one at Abydos has suffered major damage over the centuries.
At Abydos, grave robbers picked the tomb largely clean. A grand recess in the burial chamber for canopic jars — vessels for organs, typically held in a gilded box — stood empty. Archaeologists have found pottery and inscriptions around Abydos showing that, during the late Roman period around 1,700 years ago, people were digging into tombs to extract the limestone, granite and quartzite within.
And although the name of the ruler in the newly excavated tomb had once been visible in yellow bands of hieroglyphic texts, the actions of ancient grave robbers had rendered it illegible.
“They did just enough damage to the decoration that we have just the very base of what would have been the identifying text columns,” Mr. Wegner said.
The frustrated team of researchers expressed “some cuss words,” Mr. Wegner added. “But the archaeological record doesn’t always yield exactly what you hope for, so you keep going.”
“This is a really significant find,” said Kathryn Howley, an archaeologist at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. It helped illuminate an era when ancient Egypt was fragmented between competing powers who left less material for researchers to study today, she added.
“In other words, we don’t have a huge amount of source material to work with, and that’s why a new discovery like this is so exciting,” she said. “It really has the potential to rewrite the history of ancient Egypt.”
Mr. Wegner, noting that Seneb-Kay’s skeleton suggested that he may have died in combat, said the period appeared to be “a phase of warrior pharaohs fighting it out.”
But the new findings suggested, he added, that the Abydos dynasty was not “a kind of flash in the pan where you’ve got a handful of kings breaking off from whatever original territory they belonged to.”
While the extent of the land controlled by those buried here is not known, “the Abydos dynasty kings only appeared to rule a region around the city, rather than all of Egypt,” said Matthew Adams, an archaeologist who works on an unrelated project in the area. “But their use of the title of ‘king’ suggests they had aspirations to something greater.”
And although these kings were not recorded in ancient Egyptian king lists, the monumental qualities of the new tomb “are unusual and enormous, especially for a ruler for whom we know no other monumental architecture,” Ms. Howley said. “The discovery raises questions we didn’t even know to ask before.”
Mr. Wegner said there were several candidates for who had been interred in this tomb, including kings named Senaiib and Paentjeni who dedicated monuments at Abydos. He added that the team would work to manage and protect the area, and that it had plans to keep excavating in search of other tombs.
“It’s always our dream to find one that’s intact or partially intact,” he said. “There may yet be tombs like that.”
