Sealed tomb filled with paintings and inscriptions discovered in Egypt

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iisaacfrond 6 days ago 81 commentsRead Article on labrujulaverde.com

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Discussion (81 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

glasffordd•about 13 hours ago

I was in Egypt in 2011, a couple months after the big riots. I was advised not to go and went anyway. It was well worth it. I went to the Great Pyramid at ten or eleven one morning and there were maybe a dozen people in the entire area. I went inside it completely alone, and the guard let me lie down inside the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber. I don't have a word for what the energy was like in there. Palpable to say the least. If I could do it over I'd have stayed in longer. I hired a driver and did the Red Pyramid and Saqqara the same way, alone. People can debate the ethics of opening tombs all day, but going inside one is something else. A new one still turning up in 2026 is just cool.

derektank•about 13 hours ago

There’s some debate as to whether the Red pyramid itself is even a tomb at all, given the same Pharaoh (Sneferu) also constructed the Bent and Meidum pyramids and there’s no evidence of a sarcophagus or other burial equipment in any of them. Which we wouldn’t know if we had never explored them.

adithyassekhar•about 10 hours ago

What made you want to lie down in a sarcophagus? Weren’t you afraid of any ancient bacteria from the mummy?

bombcar•about 10 hours ago

Any bacteria that survived that many thousands of years would just give you superpowers anyway, I've seen the documentaries.

mcphage•about 8 hours ago

> Weren’t you afraid of any ancient bacteria from the mummy?

I don't think we're certain that the sarcophagus ever contained a mummy.

jrapdx3•about 17 hours ago

The value of exploring tombs for the purpose of illuminating ancient cultures is inestimable. It seems humans have always been happy desecrating burial sites if not for treasure then to prove dominance over another tribe or nation.

Of course some exploitation is beyond permissible. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries there was an artist's pigment called Mummy Brown. It was sold for many decades, a rich, transparent brown unlike other brown pigments. It was made from actual mummies scrounged from unknown sources in Egypt. These were not the remains of royalty, rather these mummies were those of common people. Apparently until the early 20th century there was an ample supply of these remains to satisfy demand. Eventually the availability of mummies diminished and by 1915 the pigment quality became erratic and subsequently disappeared from the marketplace.

Comparatively, respectful exploration of ancient tombs is a whole different program than things our species has demonstrated a willingness to do.

jsiepkes•about 15 hours ago

Don't forget about the soldiers who died at Waterloo who were turned in to fertilizer [1].

[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/were-the-bones-of-soldiers...

vidarh•about 15 hours ago

And dentures:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33085031

inigyou•about 17 hours ago

The other reason there are few mummies left is that we ate them.

jrapdx3•about 17 hours ago

If you doubt that it's true, do a bit of research and find out if it's so.

Here's one source[0], there are others.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown

fragmede•about 15 hours ago

There's a difference between eating and using them as paint, though.

kakacik•about 15 hours ago

... or used as firewood

octocop•about 15 hours ago

Made me think of Ozymandias, king of kings.

acheron•about 14 hours ago

It’s not actually a rule that every HN thread has to start out with negative bullshit. You can just think it’s cool they found a new tomb!

Loughla•about 11 hours ago

HN is really good at contrary takes, regardless of the topic. I'm sure I've done some. I guess there's value in seeing the other side of most issues, but sometimes it does feel pretty knee-jerky.

canada_dry•about 10 hours ago

Asked gpt to see if it could discern Egyptian hieroglyphs from the image of the tomb wall...

https://i.postimg.cc/Pdw7sw-0W/image.png

The "possible standing figure" on the right seems plausible. Be interested in seeing what the actual painstaking restoration eventually reveals.

quuxplusone•about 10 hours ago

It's easier to just use your eyes, isn't it? The photo in the article is here: https://cdn.labrujulaverde.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2026/07...

There are two standing figures to the right (correctly identified by ChatGPT), and at least two kneeling figures with upraised arms stacked toward the left (ChatGPT puts the bottom figure's arms inside the "legs" of its bunny-shaped green circle).

Scroll down in the article to see a close-up on the kneeling figures.

There is no text visible in the photos from the article, although if you go on to read the text of the article you learn that text was found elsewhere in the tomb, such that we can confidently identify the owner's name (among other things).

canada_dry•about 9 hours ago

Mine was simply an exercise to see what gpt's vision would come up with vs. the expert analysis.

happa•about 19 hours ago

Am I the only one who thinks desecrating anyone's tomb is morally wrong?

Aardwolf•about 18 hours ago

If I were in a tomb for 2000 year I wouldn't even mind if they can learn about the history of my era 2000 years later

thinkingemote•about 18 hours ago

[delayed]

Leonard_of_Q•about 18 hours ago

When referring to really ancient tombs you're fortunately in a diminishingly small minority or we wouldn't know a fraction about some culture's history compared to what we know now. Whether it is Egyptian tombs like this one, Viking burial mounds, stone age Dolmen or any of the other ancient burial sites, those are where much of the knowledge of these cultures come from.

consp•about 19 hours ago

What's the moral guidance and purpose of a tomb of someone who's mourning has passed for over 3 millennia and who has been forgotten due to time?

dsign•about 18 hours ago

This. Forgetting is the biggest crime. Anything in the other direction is atoning.

vintermann•about 18 hours ago

Is it desecration, though? I'm all in favor of putting remains back once we've learned what we can from them, but I also think opening graves is fine if it's for a good reason (such as archaeology).

I don't approve of putting bodies on display or storing skull collections in cabinets in universities, but before we ship them off to be buried again it's good to take DNA samples!

killingtime74•about 19 hours ago

I was just thinking this, do we regularly breaking into tombs in the rest of the world? I guess some of the cathedrals themselves are tombs and are big tourist attractions.

rkuska•about 18 hours ago

There is a park in my city that used to be the city cemetery. They moved the cemetery to a new place due to capacity and turned the original one into a park.

I think it is a very common practice. Everyone will be forgotten eventually, no matter the fame.

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyr%C5%A1%C5%AFv_sad_(Brno-Vev...

cm2187•about 18 hours ago

Most cemeteries in Europe have been destroyed to make space for urbanisation. The underground of Paris is full of bones from those cemetaries (catacombs of Paris). It's fairly common as outside of a few aristocratic families, people keep a very short memory of their ancestry. I have a very vague knowledge of who my ancestors were back to the mid XIX century and nothing prior. Hard to have any emotional attachment to people you never heard about. So if no one cares, better to build a parking lot!

nly•about 18 hours ago

Some cemeteries in London reuse graves after just 75 years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Cemetery_and_Cr...

I also have very vivid memories as a child of walking through Brookwood Cemetary in south east England seeing a big machine crunching up headstones. Vast swathes of the place was flattened.

The cheat code here is called "topple testing" where stones can be flattened for public safety reasons

viciousvoxel•about 18 hours ago

Yes, we regularly (for some definition of "regularly") uncover human burial sites (both as part of planned archaeological excavations and accidentally during construction) all around the world, including Europe, Asia, and the Americas. If you're asking specifically about tombs then the answer is also yes.

wojciii•about 18 hours ago

These were probably the Trumps or Musks of old Egypt. They probably killed a lot of people to obtain their wealth. So .. no.