You won’t believe what was recently found in a province near Cairo. We are talking about 110 tombs from thousands of years ago, specifically from pre-harmonic and pyramid times, that were underground in an archaeological site called Koum el-Khulgan. This was the result of an archaeological mission in the area of Dakahlia Governorate that took place last April. All of the discovery was explained on a Facebook post by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The 5,000 years old tombs were where the Nile River drains into the Mediterranean Sea.
The graves had different shapes and sizes, and not all of them were from the same period. A few of them were from the Second Intermediate Period during 1782-1570 BC, while others were way older from 3200 BC.
The craziest thing about these rare oval and rectangular tombs is that they were filled with human remains of children and adults, along with some funerary objects, like pots, jewelry, amulets, vessels, stones, and more, one of them really valuable.
Inside one of the graves that contained a baby, there was also a small pot from the Buto period. All of these discoveries left the Supreme Council of Antiquities very surprised and happy since this cemetery is a very important historical place in Egypt, as Dr. Mustafa Waziri explained.
All of these tombs were from special transition periods, such as the end of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom after the country was taken by migrants from Western Asia, known as the time of the Hyksos, who got to Egypt by crossing the Sinai, along with one of the earliest periods of the country called Buto.
It is very difficult for historians to understand how Hyksos and Egyptians coexisted and the first ones adopted their Egyptian culture. Still, it was easy to discriminate between the tombs according to the period they belonged to, and if they were from the Hyksos or the Egyptians.
While the 37 Hyksos tombs were semi-rectangular with the corpses in an extended position, the graves from the Buto era were ovals with the remains in a fetal pose. However, both of the tombs had the people facing west. Other tombs of the Naqada period contained cylindrical and pear-shaped vessels.
All of the excavations also found groups of ovens, stoves, and mud-brick foundations. As of today, the local archaeologists are thrilled to keep digging in the nearby areas to find other special remains from early civilization.
