CAIRO // Spanish archaeologists have discovered a millennia-old mummy in “very good condition” near the southern Egyptian town of Luxor, the antiquities ministry said on Sunday.
The find was in a tomb probably dating from between 1075-664 BC located on the west bank of the Nile river, 700 kilometres south of Cairo.
The mummy had been bound with linen stuck together with plaster.
It was in a brightly coloured wooden sarcophagus buried near a temple from the era of fourth-millennium warrior king Thutmose III.
The tomb was likely to have belonged to a nobleman, Amenrenef, who was “a servant of the royal household”, the ministry said.
The archaeological team’s head, Myriam Seco Alvarez, said the mummy was decorated with “many colourful decorations recalling religious symbols from ancient Egypt, such as the goddesses Isis and Nephtys displaying their wings, and the four sons of Horus”.
The earliest evidence of mummification in Egypt suggests that the practice of wrapping bodies to preserve them after death dates back as far as 4500 BC.
* Agence France-Presse