Discovery
Coffin details unveiled: Egypt on Saturday unveiled the details of 30 ancient wooden coffins with mummies inside discovered in the southern city of Luxor in the biggest find of its kind in more than a century.
A team of Egyptian archaeologists discovered a “distinctive group of 30 coloured wooden coffins for men, women and children” in a cache at Al-Asasif cemetery on Luxor’s west bank, the Ministry of Antiquities said in a statement on Saturday.
“It is the first large human coffin cache ever discovered since the end of the 19th century,” the Egyptian Antiquities Minister Khaled El-Enany was quoted as saying during a ceremony in Luxor.
The intricately carved and painted coffins, three thousand years old, were closed with mummies inside and were in “a good condition of preservation, colours and complete inscriptions,” the statement added.
They were for male and female priests and children, said Mostafa Waziri, the excavation team leader, dating back to the 10th century BC under the rule of the 22nd Pharaonic dynasty.
The coffins will undergo restoration before being moved to a showroom at the Grand Egyptian Museum, due to open next year next to the Giza pyramids, the ministry said.
The discovery is the latest in a series of major finds of ancient relics that Egypt hopes will revive its tourism sector, which has been badly hit by political instability
since the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak.
Earlier this month, Egypt unveiled two archaeological discoveries in Luxor including an industrial zone at the city’s West Valley, also known as the Valley of the Monkeys. (RTRS)
Greta calls for climate action:
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg stayed away from any direct criticism of Alberta’s oil sands and did not comment on Canada’s election as she took her message to the oil-rich Canadian province on Friday.
“We cannot allow this crisis to continue to be a partisan, political question,” Thunberg said in a speech before thousands of people on the steps of the provincial legislature.
“The climate and ecological crisis is far beyond party politics and the main enemy right now should not be any political opponents, because our main enemy is physics.”