Scientists Begin Unveiling the Secrets of the Mummies in the Alexandria ‘Dark Sarcophagus’

The massives stone coffin found in July contains a woman and two men, including one who survived brain surgery

In , archaeologists in Egypt revealed that they had found something creepily interesting in the city of Alexandria: a massive 30-ton, black granite sarcophagus.

Discovered on a building site, it was the largest stone coffin ever found in the city. Internet speculation ran wild, with people suggesting it was cursed, that opening it could lead to the end of the world, or that the massive 8.5-by-5-foot tomb contained a super-mummy.

Many were disappointed that when the coffin was opened it revealed three normal human bodies floating in a soup of red sewage (though it did spark a petition asking Egyptian authorities to let people drink the red liquid from the dark sarcophagus in order to “assume its powers”).

Now that the hoopla has died down, researchers have revealed the initial results of their scientific analysis. While it’s not as exciting as finding Alexander the Great, the residents of the tomb still offer interesting insights. 

Nevine El-Aref at Ahram Online reports that a team of researchers led by Zeinab Hashish, director of the Department of Skeleton Remains Studies at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, analyzed the skulls, pelvises and other bones.

The bodies include one woman and two men who appear to have been deposited at different times and stacked on top of one another. The fact that a woman is included in the burial overturns an earlier hypothesis that the tomb’s inhabitants were soldiers.

The age for the woman was between 20 and 25; for one of the men, between 35 and 39; and the other man, between 40 and 44. That last skeleton has a hole in its skull, which healed long before the man died.

“This means that the cavity might be a result of a trepanation,” Hashish tells El-Aref. “This surgery is the oldest surgical intervention ever known since pre-history, but was rare in Egypt,” Hashish adds in a statement.

The remains are believed to date either to Egypt’s Ptolemaic period, 332 to 30 B.C., when it was ruled by a Greek dynasty, or the Roman period, when it was under the control of that empire, from 30 B.C. to 642 A.D.

Trepanation was a surgical procedure practiced throughout the ancient world, from South America to Africa and Asia, and it continued being practiced into the 16th century in some places.

The surgery involved cutting a hole into the skull for religious reasons or as a medical intervention—to relieve headaches, swelling of the brain and hypertension. There are only a handful of examples from Egypt, which makes this find special, although it’s impossible to know why this particular person received the treatment.

Bones weren’t the only item found in the coffin. Researchers also found a small gold artifact and three thin sheets of gold, each square embossed with an image.

Owen Jarus at LiveScience reports that one of the images may represent the seed pod of an opium poppy inside a shrine, which may have associations with death, sleep and rebirth. Another shows an unhooded snake with its mouth open, which could be a symbol of the goddess Isis and represent rebirth.

“As a rule of thumb, it would seem that snake jewelry was primarily a female thing,” Jack Ogden, the president of the Society of Jewellery Historians tells Jarus. “But I am not sure whether one could suggest that the presence of a snake here suggests it was connected with the female occupant of the sarcophagus.”

The third gold panel shows either a palm branch or a stalk of grain, both of which are related to fertility and rebirth.

The Ministry also weighed in on the disgusting red necro-Kool-Aid found in the sarcophagus, confirming that it is likely sewage water that infiltrated the coffin and mixed with decomposed mummy wrappings, though they plan to analyze the stuff more closely to figure out exactly what it’s made of.

The team also plans to continue studying the bones, using DNA tests to figure out whether the people inside the sarcophagus were related to one another. They will also use CT scans to learn more about the bones themselves. Even if those scans are successful, it leaves one big question out there—why were these bodies buried in such a huge, black sarcophagus?

It also seems the danger of the sarcophagus unleashing a curse upon the world has passed, since the coffin has been open for over a month and most of us are still around.

“I was the first to put my whole head inside the sarcophagus… and here I stand before you … I am fine,” Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities told reporters after opening it in July. “We’ve opened it and, thank God, the world has not fallen into darkness.”

Archaeologists Uncover 18,000 Ancient Egyptian ‘Notepads’

Researchers excavating the ancient Egyptian city of Athribis have discovered more than 18,000 ostraca—inscribed pottery shards that essentially served as “notepads,” writes Carly Cassella for Science Alert.

Ranging from shopping lists to trade records to schoolwork, the fragments offer a sense of daily life in the city some 2,000 years ago. Per Newsweek’s Robert Lea, the trove is the second-largest collection of ostraca ever found in Egypt.

Ancient Egyptians viewed ostraca as a cheaper alternative to papyrus. To inscribe the shards, users dipped a reed or hollow stick in ink. Though most of the ostraca unearthed in Athribis contain writing, the team also found pictorial ostraca depicting animals like scorpions and swallows, humans, geometric figures, and deities, according to a statement from the University of Tübingen, which conducted the excavation in partnership with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

A large number of the fragments appear to be linked to an ancient school. Over a hundred feature repetitive inscriptions on both the front and back, leading the team to speculate that students who misbehaved were forced to write out lines—a schoolroom punishment still used (and satirized in popular culture) .

“There are lists of months, numbers, arithmetic problems, grammar exercises and a ‘bird alphabet’—each letter was assigned a bird whose name began with that letter,” says Egyptologist Christian Leitz in the statement.

Around 80 percent of the ostraca are written in demotic, an administrative script used during the reign of Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII (81 to 59 B.C.E. and 55 to 51 B.C.E.). Greek is the second-most represented script; hieratic, hieroglyphics, Greek, Arabic, and Coptic (an Egyptian dialect written in the Greek alphabet) also appear, testifying to Athribis’ multicultural history, per Science Alert.

“We will be able to make a case study of daily life in late Ptolemaic/early Roman time[s] once we have analyzed all the texts or at least a larger part of it, which will take years,” Leitz tells Newsweek.

Tübingen archaeologists began digging at Athribis—located about 120 miles north of Luxor—in 2003. Initially, excavations were focused on a large temple built by Ptolemy to honor the lion goddess Repit and her consort Min.

The temple was transformed into a nunnery after pagan worship was banned in Egypt in 380 C.E. More recently, the team has shifted focus to a separate sanctuary west of the temple.

According to the statement, Leitz and his team found the ostraca near a series of “multi-story buildings with staircases and vaults” to the west of the main dig site.

Prior to the excavation, reports Science Alert, the only comparable collection of ostraca discovered in Egypt was a cache of medical writings found in the workers’ settlement of Deir el-Medineh, near the Valley of the Kings, in the early 1900s.

“This is a very important discovery because it sheds light on the economy and trade in Atribis throughout history,” Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Egyptian antiquities ministry’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, tells Nevine El-Aref of Ahram Online.

“The text reveals the financial transactions of the area’s inhabitants, who bought and sold provisions such as wheat and bread.”