A Mystery Fit For A Pharaoh

The first tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings since King Tut’s is raising new questions for archaeologists about ancient Egypt’s burial practices.”

Andrew Lawler in Smithsonian Magazine:

Pharaoh_interior_1The child-size coffin in KV-63 held the flashiest artifact: a second, nested coffin coated in gold leaf. It was empty. Instead of the usual mummies, the other coffins opened so far contain only a bizarre assortment of what appears to be debris and constitute a 3,000-year-old mystery: Why fill coffins and jars with rocks and broken pottery, then carefully seal them up? Why hew out a subterranean chamber only to turn it into a storeroom? And who went to all this effort? “It may not be the most glamorous find,” says Betsy Bryan, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University, “but it is a whole new kind of entombment—which raises all kinds of questions.”

More here.