4,400-Year-Old Tomb of Egyptian Judge Found at Saqqara with Colors Still on the Walls
4,400-Year-Old Tomb of Egyptian Judge Found at Saqqara with Colors on Walls
Archaeologists in Saqqara have excavated a 4,400-year-old mastaba tomb belonging to Younmin, a Fifth Dynasty judge and court director, and his father Ity. The tomb features two chapels with high-quality reliefs of agricultural scenes and offering processions that still retain original colors. Though its location was known since Auguste Mariette's 19th-century work, this is the first comprehensive modern excavation, revealing the administrative roles of a family at the heart of the Egyptian state.
The surrounding walls were decorated with high-quality reliefs showing agricultural activities and processions bringing offerings into the tomb. Remarkably, many of these reliefs retain their original colors.
- karmelapple
So glad to see color photographs of the site.
One thing I'm not so glad to see is one paragraph that starts with this sentence:
"The distinction is important. Archaeological maps..."
That "The distinction is important" smells like AI writing... but maybe we all just have to accept that now?
- tym0
How are things like that, that were preserved (I'm assuming) by the dry sand they were buried under, then gets preserved by archaeologist for the future?
A lot of pigments react to oxygen, and the sandy winds must not be kind to this kind stuff so I'm curious.
I know they've had to close Lascaux to the public for example.
- sho_hn
I'm giving a talk this Sunday at KDE's Akademy conference of our use of KDE software in research at the Great Pyramid, if anyone's curious. It's a short talk slot and I cannot go very deeply into detail, to keep expectations low, but you can see cool photos of robots.
- NegativeLatency
I imagine they've done some tweaking before publishing (also appears the rock substrate has flaked off), was hoping to be able to pull some more detail out of the images with a vibe coded decorrelation stretch app I made from a post last week:
- nfujd7
4400 years ago! Check whats happening in the rest of the world and its pretty primitive in comparision.