Word: tombs
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Egyptologists had long since lost interest in the site of Tomb 5, which had been explored and looted decades ago, and was about to give way to a parking lot. But for that parking lot, in fact, no one would have ever known the treasure that lay only 200 ft. from King Tut's resting place, just beyond a few rubble-strewn rooms that previous excavators had used to hold their debris...
...discovery of a lifetime. "We found ourselves in a corridor," Weeks remembers. "On each side were 10 doors, and at the end there was a statue of Osiris, the god of the afterlife." Two more corridors branched off from there, with 16 more doors on each one. Although the tomb is mostly unexcavated and the chambers are choked with debris, Weeks is convinced that there are more rooms on a lower level, bringing the total number to more than 100. That would make Tomb 5 the biggest and most complex tomb ever found in Egypt -- and quite conceivably the resting...
...Valley of the Kings, in which Tomb 5 is located, is just across the Nile River from Luxor, Egypt. It's never exactly been off the beaten track. Tourism has been brisk in the valley for millenniums: graffiti scrawled on tomb walls proves that Greek and Roman travelers stopped here to gaze at the wall paintings and hieroglyphics that were already old long before the birth of Christ. Archaeologists have been coming as well, for centuries at least. Napoleon brought his own team of excavators when he invaded in 1798, and a series of expeditions in the 19th and early...
Given such long and unrelenting scrutiny, most archaeologists had pretty much decided there were no major discoveries left to make in this part of Egypt. Britain's James Burton had burrowed into the site of Tomb 5 back in 1820, and decided that there was nothing inside. A dismissive Carter used its entryway as a place to dump the debris he was hauling out of Tut's tomb...
...archaeologist may have failed to convince the world this year that she had uncovered the tomb of Alexander the Great in Egypt, but now another has clearly hit pay dirt. Today, French archaeologist Jean Leclant unveiled a previously unknown, 4,000-year-old pyramid at Sakkara, a locale famous for its step-pyramid (an early model). Long hidden in the sand, the royal monument looks more like a pile of rock than the great pyramids on the Giza plateau, which lie north. Inscriptions found at the site dedicate it to Queen Meritites, who (for the genealogically-minded) may have been...