'Exceptional' discovery reveals more than 30 ancient Egyptian tombs built into hillside

Archaeologists have unearthed more than 30 ancient Egyptian tombs that cover an entire hill in Aswan, an ancient city on the Nile. The burials date to the Greco-Roman period and reveal clues about those who once lived in this vibrant trading port.

The finds include the mummies of what are likely families buried together; coffins; cartonnage, or a paper-mache material created from recycled papyri or fabric; amphorae, or clay vessels, decorated with vine-leaf designs; and artifacts such as offering tables.

"It was a rich place, an important place," said Patrizia Piacentini, an Egyptologist and archaeologist at the University of Milan who leads a joint Egyptian-Italian mission at the site. "All the people who intended to make trade between Northern Africa and subtropical Africa, this was the place [for them] and it was a place for all the history of ancient Egypt," she said.

Archaeologists learned about the burial site in 2015, following a slew of illegal excavations. The government asked local archaeologists to survey the area, and soon thereafter excavators discovered tombs dating to the late Greek and Roman periods (roughly 332 B.C. to A.D. 395).     

The former Egyptian minister of antiquities, Khaled el-Enany, then reached out to Piacentini, who began surveying the site with a large team of Egyptian and Italian archaeologists in 2019. The researchers found terraces of ancient tombs stratified into multiple levels on the hill near the modern Mausoleum of Aga Khan III.

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During the excavation, the archaeologists found ancient oil lamps that were possibly left behind by mourners.