August 24, 1999
In the 'Valley of the Mummies,' Revelations of a Golden Past
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By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
t an oasis 230 miles southwest of Cairo,
people in Roman times lived well on the
wealth they accumulated making wine from
dates and grapes. And in death, their bodies
were prepared well for the afterlife, mummified and fitted with elaborate
masks and waistcoats covered in
gold.
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The Associated Press
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Egyptian workers clean three 2,000-year-old Greco-Roman mummies discovered near the Bahariya oasis town of Bawitti.
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A vivid record of affluence, art
and religion in Roman Egypt has
been preserved in a large 2,000-year-old cemetery at the Bahariya
Oasis, which came to light three
years ago -- literally by accident. A
donkey being ridden on a dusty road
stumbled, and its leg slipped into an
opening to one of the many tombs
buried there under sand and rock.
After intensive excavations this
year, Egyptian archeologists have
disclosed the first details of what
they say is one of the most spectacular discoveries in Egypt in recent
decades. Detailed pictures of the
tombs and mummies are being published this week in Archaeology, the
magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America.
"Never before have such a number of mummies been found in a
single site in Egypt," Dr. Zahi
Hawass, director of the Bahariya
excavations, said in an interview
last week. He is Egypt's Under Secretary of State for the Giza monuments, the pyramids near Cairo.
In the four tombs so far explored,
archeologists counted 105 mummies of men, women and children.
Entire families appeared to be together in repose. Some of the bodies
were wrapped in plain linen, but
many were decorated with gilded
masks and painted scenes on cartonage, which is the pasteboard
made of linen and papyrus that
served as mummy cases. No two
mummy decorations were alike.
Dr. Hawass said the cemetery
site included many more multichambered tombs and extended
over more than two square miles.
He estimated that as many as 10,000 mummies might be uncovered at what is being
called the Valley of the Golden Mummies.
Writing in Archaeology, Dr. Hawass described his first impressions of the rows of
mummies, many of them surrounded by
pottery, amulets and other grave goods. "I
could not believe that such beautiful specimens existed," he said. "The eyes of some
gazed at me as if they were alive."
His own eyes were drawn to the mummy
of a woman, about five feet tall, adorned
with a crown with four decorative rows of
red curls and a gilded mask that extended
over the chest to two circular disks representing breasts. The decorations incorporated images of cobras and the children of
gods.
"While the hairstyle was clearly Roman,
reminiscent of terra cotta statues of the
period," Dr. Hawass wrote, "the iconography of her mask, painted with deities that
protected the deceased and ease her passage into the afterlife, was pure Egyptian."
The team of archeologists said the mummies were remarkably well preserved, with
the smell of embalming resin still strong in
the tombs. But it appeared that the Romanized Egyptians applied less effort on preparing the mummified body itself and more on
exterior decorations. The discovery provided new evidence that funerary practices
from the last thousand or so years of the
pharaohs had continued well into the second
century A.D. The Roman rule of Egypt
began shortly before the birth of Christ.
The art of mummy paintings,
masks and other decorations in Roman Egypt has been familiar to
scholars for more than a century.
In 1888, the British archeologist
William Flinders Petrie found gilded masks at a Roman-period cemetery. "Ancient Faces: Mummy
Portraits from Roman Egypt," a
recent book published by the British Museum in London, described
the practice as being "derived
from pharaonic traditions of belief,
in which the mask served as a
substitute for the head of the deceased, endowing the individual
with the attributes of deities and
thereby assisting his or her passage to the afterlife."
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The New York Time
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But Egyptologists and other
scholars said the new find promised to yield important insights into
the lives of affluent Romanized
Egyptians, their religious beliefs
and funerary traditions.
"It's going to be very exciting,"
Dr. Roger Bagnall, a classics professor at Columbia University who
specializes in Egypt's Roman period, said of the prospects for gaining
a better understanding of Egyptian
culture.
As beautiful and interesting as
the gilded artifacts were, Dr. Bagnall said, he was more impressed
by the sheer size and condition of
the site.
"This may be the largest known
cemetery in Egypt that hasn't been
gotten to by plunderers before the
archeologists," he said.
Even the most celebrated Egyptian discoveries of this century --
the tomb of King Tutankhamen,
opened in the 1920's, and the tomb
of the many sons of Ramses II, still
being excavated -- were not pristine sites. Looters had left their destructive
marks and made off with some of the artifacts. But no one seems to have touched the
new-found Bahariya tombs, and no modern
community has risen on the site to get in the
way of excavations. For now, the tombs are
closed to the public and under guard.
Using new tools for pathological examinations, scientists should be able to
study the mummy skeletons for information on what the people ate, the
diseases they suffered and the
causes of their deaths.
The large number of mummies
should provide better demographic
data, including estimates on infant
and child mortality and life expectancy.
The architecture of the Bahariya
tombs also intrigued scholars. Dr.
Hawass said the four explored
tombs, cut into sandstone bedrock,
have somewhat distinctive styles,
but have similar passages and
chambers. The entrance of a typical
tomb was a hall about eight feet long.
This led to a "room of handing-over," where the family would have
delivered the mummy for transfer
from the world of the living to that of
the dead.
Beyond that were the burial chambers carved from sandstone.
The tombs generally had two
chambers, each with several smaller
rooms where the mummies were
laid out. One tomb had catacomblike
burial rooms, one above the other.
The entrance to one tomb was
flanked by images of Anubis, the god
of embalming. Dr. Hawass said it
was the first time he had seen this.
Though the mummies date to the
first and second centuries A.D., Dr.
Hawass said the site was probably a
burial place from the time Alexander the Great was in Egypt, in 322
B.C. A Hellenistic temple stands near
the cemetery.
Egyptian archeologists described
four general types of mummies
found at Bahariya. About 60 mummies excavated so far wear the gilded masks. A second type is characterized by the head-to-waist cartonage, which depicts scenes of various
gods such as Isis, Osiris and Toth,
who sat in judgment of the deceased.
A third type of mummy has no decoration but is resting in a human-shaped pottery coffin. Another type
is covered entirely in linen, much as
the mummies were in the time of the
pharaohs.
Dr. Bagnall of Columbia looked
forward to comparing the new discoveries with the mummies French
archeologists have excavated in recent decades at Douch, a former
Roman military post 120 miles west
of Luxor on the Nile River. The funerary practices seem to be similar,
he said, but the Bahareya cemetery
apparently holds a much richer
treasure of mummies.
Egyptian archeologists plan to resume excavations there in November. It may take them a decade to
explore the entire cemetery and assemble a clear picture of how the
affluent classes of Roman Egypt
lived and died.
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