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Tidesticky t1_iquywj3 wrote

She looks happy. As would I in similar circumstances. It seems you can't swing a cat in Egypt without uncovering something thousands of years old.

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aaronupright t1_iqvmwy6 wrote

Replying to madchad90 (#20,953)

I believe Alexander the Great is about midway between the Pyramids construction and our era.

​

And I think Herodotus is almost the midpoint of recorded history.

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Scp-1404 t1_iqw30co wrote

I presume when they say "It has lain within a burial chamber, undisturbed, for thousands of years" they mean after the grave robbers got to it.

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JordanMaze t1_iqwc4yo wrote

Dream discovery is funny cause dream did a face reveal

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urkldajrkl t1_iqwdjsv wrote

"But that shaft proved so deep, at 8 metres, that it took a week just to remove all the sand, using a bucket attached to a hand-operated rope winch. El Aguizy then squeezed herself into that bucket and made a dangerous, slow descent down the shaft. At the bottom, she was astonished to find the sarcophagus."

Translation - the workers removed the sand, found the sarcophagus, but pretended they didn't, so she could be lowered in to make the "discovery".

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silverfang789 t1_iqwdqzj wrote

So he was Rameses' exchequer? Accounting was as important in the ancient world as it is today.

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Fallingdamage t1_iqwvh5w wrote

Replying to Scp-1404 (#21,699)

Seems like every time we come across a new tomb, robbers have already been there. Took mankind thousands of years to find this, but grave robbers beat em to it every time.

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Saint_Genghis t1_iqwy307 wrote

Replying to [deleted] (#21,972)

Ehh, it's presumed to be that old by a small fringe group, current archeological evidence suggests it was created during the reign of Khafre, who also constructed the second largest pyramid on the Giza plateau. It may be older than that, but if it is it would be by a mere couple of centuries to the early dynastic period, definitely not thousands of years.

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kantorr t1_iqwyl4g wrote

Replying to Fallingdamage (#22,893)

Grave robbers from thousands of years ago who might have had contemporary sources of info about the locations. As well as state sponsored grave robbery by subsequent pharaohs (some pharaohs didn't really like their predecessors)

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GeneralRetreat t1_iqwyvjx wrote

Replying to Fallingdamage (#22,893)

Not terribly surprising when many of the grave robbers would have been contemporaries of the burial itself. Combine that with corruption among tomb builders or guards and you end up with a lot of 'lost' tombs that were emptied out long before they're rediscovered again.

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Fallingdamage t1_iqwzj4p wrote

Replying to kantorr (#23,017)

"Hey guys I just watched this funeral yesterday afternoon. There was some really nice stuff in there. Lets go move that 15 ton rock out of the way and take it all!"

That and their civilization was thousands of years old, had mastered so many arts, yet in all their millenia never figured out how to seal a tomb properly.

Except maybe Giza. Im sure there is some crazy stuff buried under it.

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kantorr t1_iqx0aq8 wrote

Replying to Fallingdamage (#23,059)

Once the Egyptian kingdom was in it's decline (a hundreds of years period) grave robbery was extremely common and pharaohs and state officials had to find secret places to bury themselves. The on site crews and architects were sometimes killed after completion iirc. In the very early days, pyramid building was a massive public affair because the state had the money to engage in those large structures that could take decades to build. But tombs and pyramids got smaller and smaller as time went on, even settling with burying officials in valley walls rather than constructing whole buildings.

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Fallingdamage t1_iqx4hp7 wrote

Replying to kantorr (#23,092)

There is always a lot of documentation on what we've found and think we know about the inside of the big pyramids, but if we were actually to deconstruct them brick by brick, what do you think we would find? (hypothetical)

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kantorr t1_iqx7cy5 wrote

Replying to Fallingdamage (#23,241)

I am not an expert in Egyptology, but here's my take: For the big, old ones, I'm not sure we'd find much new. There were several purposes for the older, very large pyramids: they were a monument to the pharaohs godly nature and their divine right to rule, they aided pharaoh and others entombed in the passage to the afterlife, and served as propaganda to stand for centuries.

If a pharaoh could not build a lasting tomb, it was a sign of weakness and posed a risk to the pharaohs afterlife. This wasn't a problem in the early period because Egypt was wholly dominant in it's area. Nubia and the surrounding deserts rendered gold, jewels, and stones in untold quantities and the early pharaohs enjoyed this easy abundance of wealth.

The pyramid itself was big on account of it needing to be imposing and monumental, not really for any other purpose. I don't imagine we'd find much additional that we couldnt already with penetrating radar and metal detectors. Grave goods, the sarcophagus, and murals were the most important parts of the entombment. Grave goods, such as figurines, gold, food, clothes, weapons, scepters, were entombed because they were thought to carry over to the afterlife to aid the pharaoh (or whoever was entombed, such as other state officials) on their perilous journey to meet Osiris and spend eternity in the field of reeds. Likewise, the painted murals on the walls of the tomb gave powers and blessings to the pharaoh as well as command of obedience to his ghostly followers. I imagine the wildest find would be evidence of some other variety of these kinds of tomb superstitions.

The newer tombs that had to be built and sealed in secrecy probably would have spent more effort to hide grave goods due to how quickly they might be raided.

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bobrobor t1_iqxbvyi wrote

Replying to Tidesticky (#20,316)

Well she didnt discover the sarcophagus lol The workers who we’re removing the sand did. People who made the “dangerous” 10 meter journey multiple times before her.

After the shaft was cleared, they lowered her into the already uncovered object and she “was astonished to discover” it.

It’s nice to be the head of a project.

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Thatguyjmc t1_iqxdltf wrote

Ptah-em?

I hardly know em!

(I'll be here all week. Try the veal!)

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nothoughtsjustchaos t1_iqxjew7 wrote

Leave 👏 the 👏 dead 👏 to👏 rest 👏 in 👏 peace 👏

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Harsimaja t1_iqxn9ii wrote

Replying to lendmeyoureer (#20,907)

Yes, it gets brought up under every Reddit post on either ancient Egypt or “facts that don’t sound true but are” or anything about bizarre time gaps.

Part of it of course is that people think Cleopatra was just like Nefertiti, rather than an ethnic Greek/Macedonian after natively-ruled Egyptian civilisation was over. Same story as the Aztec empire only being a particular civilisation in the last century and a bit before Cortes, when people assume it stands for all of (actually very ancient) broader Meso-American civilisation, and similar for the even shorter-lived Incas standing for the even longer-lived broader Andean civilisation.

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Immediate_Thought656 t1_iqxokfi wrote

I saw that the Egyptian antiquities dude was getting ready to announce finding Nefertiti’s tomb. If this is that same find, I’m sure he’s bummed it wasn’t Nefertiti’s.

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Dicho83 t1_iqxs2ty wrote

Replying to Harsimaja (#23,948)

Ancient Egyptian civilization also existed before known written history.

Largely, because some Pharos had writings from previous eras intentionally destroyed or defaced.

So we really don't know how old Egyptian civilization really was, other than surviving references from other post-writen word civilizations....

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Harsimaja t1_iqxsqr0 wrote

Replying to Dicho83 (#24,126)

Well, Egyptian writing ‘proper’ seems to have developed gradually from proto-writing over the course of the 4th millennium BC, so in a sense we have as good an idea as can likely be well-defined. We don’t have the very earliest ‘fully written’ records (and we’d never be able to prove they were first if we could even clarify what that meant) but we do have some bounds… and since the writing system seems to have gradually expanded to encompass the whole language, it’s fuzzy in reality in any case.

EDIT: I suppose one could argue that the moment Egyptian developed the monoliterals, it was technically a full writing system. Not sure how we’d ever possibly know exactly when that was, though.

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mrbear120 t1_iqxsz3k wrote

Replying to Fallingdamage (#22,893)

There was a time shortly after the period where these tombs were created that the Egyptian government hired their own grave robbers to shore up the kingdoms funds. Thats where the bulk of this came from.

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mrbear120 t1_iqxtpqe wrote

Replying to bobrobor (#23,541)

Well shes the head of the project and chose the precise spot and method to uncover it, she just didn’t do the physical labor. She absolutely did discover it.

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The13thReservoirDog t1_iqxuc43 wrote

Replying to Scp-1404 (#21,699)

grave robbers is rich.

Pharaohs ransacked their own ancestors graves and placed the loot inside their own tombs.

even the priests would come back and take some bits, by the time the real bandits got to the tomb, most of it was already gone

then the romans came and took what they could find

thats just how long these tombs have been hidden

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dontneedaknow t1_isggpn7 wrote

Replying to kantorr (#23,363)

Honestly, you could have just said it wasn't aliens. hah. People act like there wasn't likely thousands of people over the millennia who have used the pyramid as a crash spot, with easy access to what's inside, and to bring whatever inside.

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