Heritage Daily sheds light on new archaeological discovery in Egypt

CAIRO – 5 December 2022: Heritage Daily shed light on a new archaeological discovery in Egypt.

A huge funerary building dating back to Ptolemaic Egypt and decorated with spectacular portraits of the long-deceased was recently uncovered at the Garza archaeological site in Fayoum.

Heritage Daily reported that the structure was discovered at the archaeological site of Garza, which has been under examination since 2016. Located about 50 miles south of Cairo, it was established in the third century BC as part of an agricultural reclamation project launched by Ptolemy II (309-246 BC).

The funerary building was constructed of stone blocks and descends several floors to the ground. A ring of arched doors leads to the burial chambers, some of which contain intricately decorated wooden coffins carved in ancient Egyptian and Greek letters. However, the most famous find is a group of well-preserved Fayoum Portraits, also known as Mummy Portraits.

These detailed drawings of the dead were painted directly on wooden coffins beginning in the Roman era in Egypt (100 BC). The striking portraits ranged in style from realistic to highly stylized and became icons of the period, many of which are housed in museums around the world.

This is the first significant discovery of the Fayoum Portraits in more than a century, since the excavations of the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie at Hawara in 1887, and the German archaeologist Von Kaufmann in 1910.

The team also found a clay statuette with the features of Isis and Aphrodite together inside one of the wooden coffins, along with a preserved cache of papyrus documents in both Demotic and Greek writing.