WATANI International
6 June 2010
Archaeologists from Cairo University’s archaeology department have discovered the 3,300-year-old tomb of Ptahmes, the mayor of the ancient Egyptian capital Memphis, who also served as army chief, overseer of the treasury and royal scribe under Seti I and his son and successor, Ramses II, in the 13th century BC.
The discovery of Ptahmes’s tomb earlier this year in a New Kingdom necropolis at Saqqara, south of Cairo, solves a riddle dating back to 1885, when foreign expeditions made off with pieces of the tomb, whose location was soon forgotten. Some of the artifacts ended up in museums in the Netherlands, the United States and Italy as well as the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, providing the only clues about the missing tomb.
The inner chambers of the large, temple-style tomb and Ptahmes’s mummy remain undiscovered.
In the side sanctuaries and other chambers they uncovered, archaeologists found a vivid wall engraving of people fishing from boats made of bundles of papyrus reeds, as well as amulets and fragments of statues.