Spanish archaeologists discover three pharaonic tombs devoid of luxuries

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They appeared under the floor of a house from the Christian-Byzantine period. Three meters deep, a Spanish mission has found three graves buried more than 2,600 years ago. A few graves without luxuries - orphaned by sarcophagus, lucid trousseau and even murals - that have illuminated a new and particular architectural typology.

"It is a way of building the tombs that until now we did not know. For us, it is totally new ", acknowledges EL MUNDO Esther Pons, co-director with Maite Mascort of the mission of the University of Barcelona who, since 1992, excavates the site of Oxyrhynchus, in the Egyptian province of Minya, some 190 kilometers south of Cairo.

The tombs of the saito-pesa period (664-332 BC) -one of the last moments of the Pharaonic civilization, named after the monarch's court was established in the town of Sais, located in the Nile delta- were raised with slabs flat or sloping. "Until now, in this period, we have always found vaulted ceilings. In this case, however, they are flat or sloping roofs. It is a total change ," confirms Pons.

Three other tombs from the same period have been rescued under the ground from other later graves, from the Ptolemaic-Roman period. "Until now they have never appeared under the floor of tombs," slides the Egyptologist. In the six o'clock, the sobriety with which its inhabitants inaugurated their afterlife stands out . "We are at the end of the Saite era and the beginnings of the Persian. The type of burial begins to change."

"There are no sarcophagi. At most, they rest the bodies on a wooden plank so that they are not directly on the ground. There is no grave goods beyond the beads and beads of faience, stone and carnelian that belonged to a mesh that has already disappeared and some blue-green faience ushebtis [funerary figurines placed in the tombs of Ancient Egypt with the belief that their spirits would work for the deceased in the afterlife], "says Pons.

The tomb walls also project extreme nudity. "There are no texts or decorations. All the graves had a single burial chamber," says the expert. "Two of them were still sealed after 3,000 years. And there was only the dead, not even canopic glasses or ceramics." With little research to identify the four mummified and bandaged deceased they have found, the team has been able to establish that they are adults, men and women.

"It is impossible to know their identity but we think that they must have been relatively important people in their community because they had their own tomb, even if it was a single room," says Pons, who led one of the most veteran expeditions in Egyptology for a year. Spanish, financed by the Ministry of Culture and Sports, the Palarq Foundation, the Catalan Society of Egyptology and the Universities of Barcelona and Paul Valéry 3 in Montpellier.

During the last campaign, signed between last February and March, the mission has also dusted off two tombs from the Ptolemaic-Roman era - with one and two burial chambers - that capture the metamorphosis that begins to occur in the confines of the Egypt of the pharaohs. "Between the bandages of the mummies appear some seals of slime with a printed decoration of motifs and Egyptian funerary deities: the sign of life Ankh or the figures of Anubis, of a crocodile and hare," says Pons.

" They are seals of protection for the deceased in the afterlife, " adds the Egyptologist. The first ones appeared in the tombs last year and, since then, they are surrounded by mystery. "We have no parallel. We have attended congresses and nobody knows anything about these types of stamps. We do not know if they are stamps typical of this area. Their representations of Egyptian deities tell us that there is syncretism between the Egyptian and Roman cultures."

The graves reveal a panorama that is still being investigated by the team of archaeologists, anthropologists, restorers, epigraphers, architect and surveyor. "One of the mummified individuals wore a polychrome helmet-mask; another of the individuals was covered in cardboard, also polychrome, with figures of Egyptian deities and inscriptions in Greek," reveals Pons.

The findings that shed light on architecture and funeral rituals have been located in the Upper Necropolis, sitting on a mound of one of the largest sites in Egypt , located on the left bank of the Bahr Yussef, an arm of the Nile that flows into the El Fayum oasis. Oxyrhynchus, today haunted by the growth of the municipality of El Bahnasa, was a prosperous crossroads for merchants who were heading towards the oases of the western desert and in their geography family graves of the enclave's governor-priests emerged.

Napoleonic expedition

The Oxyrhynchus ruins were discovered by Vivant Denon, one of the intellectuals who accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on his expedition to Egypt in the early 19th century. Subsequent excavations unearthed thousands of papyri that are still being studied in the UK.

Eight years ago, the Spanish mission starred in one of its most spectacular discoveries : a ritual burial of thousands of river fish, associated with the goddess Tueris, the main divinity of the city in the Ptolemaic-Roman era. "We found an offering of 50,000 oxyrhinc fish, arranged on top of each other and more than half pseudomomified. It is an offering that has never been found in Egypt. It is a unique case. We had to contact the greatest specialist, who came to the excavation and never thought find what we found. "

Oxyrhynchus' soil is still far from revealing all its secrets. "It is one of the five largest sites in Egypt. It has had a very extensive chronology in a systematic way. There has never been abandonment. Different cultures and chronological stages have been superimposed on top of each other," recalls Pons. "Precisely its surface is so large because it has always been inhabited , to this day. And there is still 90% of Oxyrhynchus to be excavated," he concludes.

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