Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a 3,000-year-old “lost city” buried under the sands in Luxor, home to the Nile Valley’s famed Valley of the Kings, the latest pharaonic-era wonder to be unearthed as the country seeks to revive its tourism industry.
“The Egyptian mission under Dr Zahi Hawass found the city that was lost under the sands,” the archeology team said. “The city is 3,000 years old, dates to the reign of Amenhotep III, and continued to be used by Tutankhamun and Ay.”
It remains to be seen whether it will capture the world’s imagination as Tutankhamen’s golden mask and other artifacts have done for decades since his tomb was discovered in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings in 1922.
The announcement comes less than a week after Egypt staged a grandiose parade to move 22 royal mummies to a new Cairo museum that celebrates the country’s ancient heritage.
The head of the mission noted that excavations started in September 2020 and were meant to discover Tutankhamun’s mortuary temple.
“The excavation started in September 2020 and within weeks, to the team’s great surprise, formations of mud bricks began to appear in all directions,” Egypt’s antiquities ministry said in a statement.
“What they unearthed was the site of a large city in a good condition of preservation, with almost complete walls, and with rooms filled with tools of daily life,” it added further
“Many foreign missions searched for this city and never found it,” Zahi Hawass, an Egyptian archaeologist and former minister of state for antiquities affairs who led the mission, said in the statement.
Last week, Egypt transported the mummified remains of 18 ancient kings and four queens across Cairo from the Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation, a procession dubbed the “Pharaohs’ Golden Parade”.
Egypt has made a string of major discoveries over the past few years as it hopes to revive its vital tourism industry, which was badly hit by two uprisings and the COVID-19 pandemic.
