3,200-Year-Old Tomb Discovered in Egypt

Archeologists have found a 3,200-year-old underground tomb near the Pyramids of Giza and say it might be part of an entire, previously unknown necropolis.

“We are in front of a very big discovery,” the director of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, Mohammed Ibrahim Bakr, told reporters Saturday outside the tomb, cut into a sand-covered slope of rock above the village of Abu Sir.

The tomb consists of a limestone-paved courtyard and a room cut into the rock at one level and a series of four chambers underneath stretching deep into the desert hillside. It was built for a man named Nakh-Min, “overseer of chariots” and “messenger to foreign lands” for the Pharaoh Ramses II.

Ramses the Great reigned for 67 years in the 13th Century BC during the New Kingdom period of ancient Egypt, when the Pharaoh controlled a military empire stretching into what is now Jordan and Syria.