Sarcophagi buried for 2,500 years unearthed in Saqqara

It’s the same in Roma or Napoli. Despite thousands of years of literal looting, there is still loads of amazing stuff buried underneath.

If you look at it, it's largely due to the nature of unrest in Egypt vs elsewhere in the region. Egypt's unrest is largely formed by local Egyptians, who are otherwise extremely proud of their cultural past dating back to the Nile Valley civilization, a past that was also widely celebrated within the Western world. Places like Syria and Lebanon on the other hand have had massive foreign influence and foreign players influencing their rebellions. Of course they wouldn't give a damn about what happens to those relics. Not to mention, local Phoenician/Syrian/Babylonian cultures aren't as popular worldwide as their Egyptian counterparts, hence there isn't as much dedication towards preserving them - sometimes even the local population partakes in the destruction, especially if the relics in question are of another faith.

It would be a different world altogether perhaps, had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the Roman infrastructure in the Levant were preserved well. Ironically, one of the major proponents of reviving interest in Babylonian culture in the recent past was Saddam Hussein, who engaged in rebuilding most of the city of Babylon.

It is great that Egypt is fairly stable and takes this stuff seriously, but how much of it is "just business" for Egypt, with the new $500 million (USD) museum being built: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Egyptian_Museum Letting that stuff get stolen is a national tragedy and has a real cost in terms of tourist dollars.

Egypt is a top-of-the-bucket-list destination for me, and I'd spend plenty of money there at that museum and many of the tourist sites (after COVID obviously), if I actually felt safe going there. It still seems a little bit iffy from my american point of view. I haven't researched it in a few years but last time I did it seemed not advisable for Americans to go there.

They create enigmatic press releases on a schedule, with the aim of increasing interest and tourism. There are literally millions of preserved burials in Egypt.

Interesting comments on that page.

What are the alternatives? As soon as these tombs found you can either open them now or set up 24/7 security around. The latter will be difficult to justify economically.

Good question. I read a few books on excavations and discoveries in Egypt over the modern centuries recently, and the quantity and degree of destruction from sheer careless to lack of method is quite staggering. I walked away with the impression that we lost more artifacts than we retained.

Archeology eventually invented itself and practitioners got more careful as time went on, but then seeing photos embedded into the article of opening coffins on site ...

> Are we so much better nowadays that we can allow us to alter the state of the tomb without significantly destroying it?

We’re still not perfect of course, but modern archaeology is extraordinarily careful and meticulous. If we wait for perfect procedures we may be waiting forever.

Tourism $$$.

You can see many other sites that specifically allocate the majority of dig work to the future on the premise that our future technology will better be able to process and preserve our findings.

I suspect that tombs in particular are large tourism draws, or can yield attractive museum exhibits.

> If they had been found 500 years ago, we'd probably have almost nothing of real value from a scientific point of view.

500 years ago they would have been looted by whoever found them. At least now it follows some kind of process.

My understanding is that almost all Egyptian tombs, at least, were looted, as the euphemism goes, "in antiquity". Tutankhamun's being a very big exception.

The story I learned while doing deep background for my own trip to Egypt is that "in antiquity" means roughly the next period, usually between dynasties, when religious respect for the centralized royalty passed through lows. So for Egypt, that could be even 4000 years ago.

I found this astounding at the time. Egypt has a way of expanding a person's sense of time. I am learning China is sort of the same thing.

I did a thought experiment: if this were my tomb or a tomb of a loved one, I wouldn't want it disturbed for at least a few hundred years. After that, we become a part of history and I'm okay with archeologists of the distant future using my remains to understand us better.

I agree. Most of these tombs are better in the ground, unknown and undiscovered. I understand we can build knowledge from these artifacts, but there may be some unforeseen value in abiding by the benign wishes of ancient peoples.

I don't trust modern society to store these artifacts for more than a few hundred years without losing them to war, theft, modification, infrastructure issues, or whatever. The modern world is relatively unpredictable and chaotic compared to the past, in my mortal opinion.

That said, it's nice to have some of these out of the ground, for us still living. But pulling up everything we find feels like science-sponsored grave robbing to stock our treasury of knowledge, which is valuable but not holy.

Your question of "are we so much better nowadays" will continue to be true for basically all of time, unless you think archaeology will actually plateau at molecular-scale site recording. That means the choice you offer is not to learn now or later, but to learn from these sites now or never at all.

Wont they rot when the power goes out?

Walt Disney was cremated.

There's a funny old book with a very similar (almost exactly the same) premise:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108831.Motel_of_the_Myst...

Opening is fine, but removing them from a specific spot will definitely trigger some kind of cave-in.

What’s one more curse at this point?