Egypt reopens King Djoser’s tomb to tourists
CAIRO: Egypt on Tuesday reopened to tourists the 4,700-year-old southern tomb of King Djoser at the pyramid of Saqqara ater a 15-year renovation.
The tomb, south of Cairo, lies near the Third Dynasty pharoah’s famous Step Pyramid, Egypt’s earliest large-scale stone structure, which itself was closed for restoration until March 2020.
The southern tomb, built between 2667 BC and 2648 BC, is thought to have been built for symbolic reasons, or perhaps to hold Djoser’s internal organs, said Mostafa Waziri, secretarygeneral of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Egypt is keen to reinvigorate tourism following the coronavirus pandemic and has unveiled a series of new discoveries and a new museum in recent months.
FOUR-LEGGED WHALE: Egyptian scientists said the fossil of a four-legged prehistoric whale, unearthed over a decade ago in the country’s Western Desert, is that of a previously unknown species. The creature, an ancestor of the modern-day whale, is believed to have lived 43 million years ago.
The prehistoric whale, known as semi-aquatic because it lived both on land and sea, sported features of an accomplished hunter, the team’s leading paleontologist, Hesham Sallam, told reporters — features that make it stand out among other whale fossils.
The fossil was first found by a team of Egyptian environmentalists in 2008 in an area that was covered by seas in prehistoric times, but researchers only published their findings confirming a new species last month.
Sallam said that his team did not start examining the fossil until 2017 because he wanted to assemble the best and the most talented Egyptian paleontologists for the study.
“This is the first time in the history of Egyptian vertebrate paleontology to have an Egyptian team leading a documentation of a new genus and species of four-legged whale,” said Sallam.
The fossil sheds light on the evolution of whales from herbivore land mammals into carnivorous species that today live exclusively in water. The transition took place over roughly 10 million years, according to an article published on the discovery in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Egypt’s Western Desert region is already known for the so-called Whale Valley, or Wadi Al Hitan, a tourist atraction and the country’s only natural World Heritage site that contains fossil remains of another type of prehistoric whales.