Archaeologists found another Egyptian royal tomb—but who does it belong to?

The discovery of the tomb of an ancient pharaoh—the second report in as many months—leads a recent spate of archaeological finds from Egypt and casts new light on a formative period of the civilization along the Nile.

In December and January, a team of American and Egyptian archaeologists excavated the roughly 3,600-year-old tomb near the Abydos archaeological site, on the edge of the desert west of the Nile and about 20 miles northwest of the modern city of Luxor in southern Egypt. Egypt’s antiquities ministry announced the find in a Facebook post last month.

But the name of the pharaoh who was once entombed there is unknown, as are many of the details about the dynasty of kings he belonged to.

“Egypt was broken apart into multiple rival kingdoms when these kings were ruling,” says Joe Wegner, an Egyptologist at University of Pennsylvania who led the excavation. “There was a lot of conflict and turmoil.”

Excavations at Abydos

One of Egypt’s oldest cities, Abydos was a center for the cult of the god Osiris, a synthesis of different Egyptian beliefs about death, resurrection and kingship. The modern name comes from a Greek version of the ancient Egyptian name Abedju.

A royal necropolis—from the Greek words for “city of the dead”—was established near Abydos in about 1839 B.C. with the burial there of the powerful 12th dynasty pharaoh Senusret III. But Egypt soon fell prey to factional rulers.

Early Egyptologists excavated Senusret’s tomb at Abydos in 1901 and 1902, but the site was abandoned to the desert sands a few years later.

In the mid-1990s, however, Wegner’s team started a new phase of excavations at Abydos; as well as making new investigations of Senusret’s tomb, they’ve discovered the tombs of several “lost” kings, including the tomb of the pharaoh Senebkay in 2014.

All belonged to the same dynasty that ruled at Abydos, and their tombs date from the final phases of the royal necropolis there, roughly between 1650 B.C. and 1550 B.C., Wegner says.

A troubled time in Egyptian history

This was the end of the Second Intermediate Period—“a very murky period” in Egyptian history, when many kings survived only a few years after taking the throne, Wegner says.

The Nile Delta and most of Egypt north of Abydos were ruled at this time by the Hyksos—a foreign dynasty from the East—while most of the south was ruled by pharaohs from the ancient city of Thebes, a center of worship of the creator god Amun.

Little is known about the “lost” dynasty that ruled at Abydos during the this time, and it seems only Senebkay was recorded in the traditional lists of ancient Egyptian kings.

What archaeologists found in the tomb

The newfound tomb at Abydos is a little older than the Senebkay tomb, and it may have been for one of his ancestors—although the title of pharaoh did not always pass from father to son.

The structure now lies beneath about 20 feet of sand, with limestone walls cut into bedrock and a vaulted ceiling of mud-bricks.  No human remains were found in the tomb, and so no ancient DNA studies will be possible, Wegner says.

The tomb’s location, massive size, and hieroglyphic inscriptions written in plaster on bricks at the entrance to the limestone chamber identified it as the resting place of a pharaoh. Those inscriptions invoke the goddesses Isis and Nephthys, but the name of the king entombed there could not be read, Wegner says.

Massive buried ruins fit for a pharaoh

The newfound tomb is much larger than Senebkay’s tomb, which suggests it may have been for one of the dynasty’s founding kings.

It was extensively looted by tomb robbers in antiquity, and so now no grave goods, sarcophagus, nor mummy remains. But what survives hints at its lost splendor.

“I think it would have been a very richly-equipped burial for this period in ancient Egypt,” Wegner says. “The architecture is quite impressive, so I think it probably attracted tomb robbery relatively early, and probably multiple times.”

The tomb’s architecture and its decorations deepen the modern understanding of funerary practices “in this very ancient and sacred cemetery,” says Anna-Latifa Mourad-Cizek, a historian and archaeologist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the discovery.

Mysterious rulers from a chaotic time

The find will help Egyptologists better understand the Second Intermediate Period.

“This discovery is highly significant,” says Mourad-Cizek. “It adds to a very limited body of evidence on the rulers of this region, and on a fascinating period when Egypt was controlled by competing powers.”

The Second Intermediate Period came to a close around 1550 B.C., a few generations after this unnamed king was buried and perhaps soon after Senebkay ruled.

It ended with the expulsion of the Hyksos and Egypt’s unification under the Theban pharaoh Ahmose I, who founded the 18th dynasty of kings and Egypt’s New Kingdom—a prosperous age that lasted almost 500 years.

(These rebel queens of Egypt overthrew an empire.)

Wegner says that Egypt had somehow navigated this time conflict and internal fragmentation, and so the Second Intermediate Period was the key to understanding how the New Kingdom developed. 

“This period was the foundation to that,” he says. “Every new find gives us an additional piece of the puzzle.”

He also hopes the newfound tomb will lead to the discovery of tombs of other early pharaohs from the “lost” Abydos dynasty. “We’re pretty sure that there’s more of them,” he says. “The [previously found] Abydos tombs seemed to be in two main clusters, and this seems to be in an earlier cluster.”

Sacred royal tombs

Yale University Egyptologist Nicholas Brown, who also was not involved, noted parallels with the discovery of a royal tomb of Thutmose II earlier this year. That was the first royal tomb found at near the Valley of the Kings site since the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb—although any treasures from the latest tomb there have yet to be discovered.

Brown says the royal burial ground at Abydos was a precursor to the Valley of the Kings, which was established in the first stages of the New Kingdom.

“We see this pattern throughout Egyptian history, with families of royals establishing their own sacred burial sites,” he says.

Brown is currently leading excavations at Deir el-Ballas, on the banks of the Nile about halfway between Abydos and Luxor, where Theban kings may have launched some of their military campaigns against the Hyksos further north. 

“It is going to be very interesting to see how this all fits in with what we thought we knew about this period and the different factions that were ruling throughout ancient Egypt,” he says.