Dozens of Mummies Found in Rock Tombs

A wooden casket decorated with six different gods was among those recently found in a cache of 52 rock tombs in Lahun, a site about 75 miles (120 kilometers) south of Cairo, Egyptian archaeologists announced.

Ancient Egyptians depicted gods on their coffins to protect them in the afterlife. The person in this coffin, who was likely buried 2,500 years ago during the 26th dynasty, worshiped an incarnation of the king of the gods, Amun-Ra, shown as a combination of a ram and a hawk with the sun on its head.

"We are in a funerary site, a cemetery, so it's very much connected to religious beliefs," said Abdul Rahman El-Aidy, who discovered and photographed the nearly 30 mummies at the site for Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA).


Another brightly painted coffin found at Lahun shows Osiris, god of the dead, in the form of large hawks, archaeologists said in April 2009.

Although the depictions of gods on their coffins varied over time, even the earliest Egyptians used decorated caskets to protect the physical body and the ka--a person's life-force--during the afterlife.

Egyptian archaeologist Abdul Rahman El-Aidy, who found the Lahun tombs, thinks the person inside the coffin above was a female who likely lived during Egypt's 22nd dynasty.




Decorations along the middle of the coffin on the right show what might appear underneath the black soot covering the one on the left: four gods that will protect the entrails removed during mummification.

"You had to protect every single part of a person," said Fayza Haikal, a professor of archaeology who was not involved in the Lahun discovery. "[Even when] you take it out of the body, it has to be protected by a divinity."

The mummy on the left was probably a more significant person, the archaeologists note, because it has at least one extra sarcophagus. The black soot over the body might be remnants of materials mixed for mummification, while the black paint on the face was associated with fertility and birth.