CAIRO - An ongoing excavation in Damietta, Egypt, has uncovered 63 tombs from more than 2,500 years ago, alongside a trove of gold artifacts, coins and pottery. The artifacts could provide further insight into the “secrets of the ancient Egyptian civilization,” including the burial practices of the time, as well as the coastal city’s role in ancient foreign trade, according to Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, which announced the findings July 23. Among the 63 tombs, the excavators found funerary amulets, charms that were thought to protect the dead, and ushabti statues, also designed to accompany the dead in the afterlife, dated to the 26th Dynasty of the Late Period (664 to 525 BC).
The excavation also revealed 38 bronze coins — held within a ceramic vase — from the Ptolemaic era, one of the dynasties that reigned after the death of Alexander the Great from 323 to 30 BC. The excavation site, known as Tal al-Deir, is referred to as a necropolis, the term used for an elaborate cemetery of an ancient city. The cemetery was especially important during the 26th Dynasty but remained in use throughout the age of the Romans and Byzantines, according to the ministry.
The uncovered artifacts provide “a great deal of information” about the later periods of Egyptian history, said Salima Ikram, a distinguished university professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo who was not involved with the excavation. “Based on the kind of objects, especially the gold amulets, one can see that this was a wealthy necropolis and obviously the city attached to it had a great deal of social (stratification) (a society’s hierarchy of people that is determined based on social and political factors),” she added in an email. Within Tal al-Deir, archaeologists also unearthed a large tomb that held burials of individuals with a high social status, said Kotb Fawzy, an official with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities who oversees the excavation, in a statement.
The bodies were buried with gold foil figures that depicted religious symbols and ancient Egyptian idols..
