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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Most of these tombs have already, since ancient times, been looted and desecrated and most things inside including any human remains have long since been removed. It looks like this tomb is also in this category as all that remains of note are on the walls which cannot be easily removed.
I seem to recall a story that even at the time when they were building pyramids in ancient Egypt that they had a problem with looters of the older tombs.
Additionally: The use of the word "Sealed" in the title is not present in the text and I propose is click bait for attention and an emotional reaction. Looks like that strategy still works.
> they had a problem with looters of the older tombs
In the Valley of the Kings, I think they had a problem with the builders looting the same tombs they had just built.
Cursory searching found overseer Paneb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paneb ... if I pieced it together right, he was in trouble for looting a tomb within 20 years of its construction.
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.
ive been to a few dolmen and places like those, a lot of them were already desecrated thousands of years ago and then desecrated again 2000 years ago etc. id much rather have those bones and artifacts dug up and placed somewhere they wont be destroyed and the symbolism of the structure can still remain to be appreciated.
well, it's clear from the objects still being in the tombs when the raiders came to plunder that they dead did not take the items into the afterlife with them. This clearly shows they are not being used by the original owners.
Kind of; gravesites are cleared out every once in a while when the families have moved on, iirc over here you buy the rights to a gravesite for like 50-70 years. The coffins / remains are then reburied in a mass gravesite, buried deeper, or (if chosen) cremated.
IMO once anyone living has given up caring about you it's fine, and in particular once your burial site has been long forgotten and becomes an archeological discovery then that requirement has generally been satisfied (outside of a few cultures).
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.
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!
I 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 seems to be "topple testing" for health and safety reasons.
It's the UKs largest cemetery and in a shocking state:
There is a park in Brussels where you literally walk on alleys paved with tombstones from the Jewish cemetery. You can still see some of the inscriptions there.
On the continent, afaik most countries work on a lease system, you rent a plot for a few decades (which may or may not be renewable). Some countries have a “perpetual” lease with an ongoing fee, a few years after the payment stops the plot gets cycled.
‘Course space requirements are also a factor, if you have a family plot in a depopulated village in the countryside odds are good plots will be cheap and renewable forever.
Old church with over hundred years old tombstones around it is literally an English landmark. Even in central London. Tombstones you mention belong to people from wrong social class.
I am not even sure about social class. In any case these old cemeteries are preserved probably more as historical artefacts, like an old Roman wall would be in London, rather than out of respect for the dead.
I've spent some time on genealogy, and really beyond grandparents and maybe great grandparents it's mostly curiosity and for the interesting stories, and I only care about the graves to the extent that it makes solving the puzzles easier. It's not like there is anyone alive in my family who knew older ancestors of mine than my great grandparents.
For my part I've only ever seen even my dads grave once, and feel no need to go back there, though I understand why some might feel it matters to have the grave of someone they knew in person because of the emotional attachment.
It's a bit of a paradox: burial rites are among the earliest and most fundamental elements of any society we know of; but long-term maintenance of burial sites has always been a challenge. That's probably because, after all the fanfare to honour the dead (which is mostly a way to minimize immediate social disruption), everyone eventually moves on.
When my dad died, the funeral mattered to me. But the grave does not. Of course to some it does, but it doesn't take long before everyone it mattered to are dead too. I think it's fine to keep graves for those who cares, but that shouldn't really obligate society to keep them around very long.
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.
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.
Christianity has an ancient tradition of relics in which even in the absence of an actual corpse people will just pick up some random bone and be like "this was some old ladies actual hand, it has magic powers now" and then parade it around the city every year.
I just got back from a triple to Naples where there's a church that had a secret skull collecting cult under it for decades, it's a tourist attraction now. Yes it is still full of peoples skulls.
So yes, it seems like there is a statute of limitations on our obedience to the dead.
US and UK phrenologists encouraged a lot of grave descration, often not even waiting for a corpse to be interned before shipping the remains out.
Yagan’s murder by colonial settlers was, even by the day’s standards, an act of hideous violence. That his head was subsequently removed and dispatched to England as a biological curio, a specimen to aid the discredited voodoo science of phrenology – whereby racial intelligence and personality could purportedly be determined by cranial distinctions – added indignity to death.
Easy to write off as the bizzarro actions of those gosh darned old timey folks ...
A naked life size bronze of Aboriginal warrior Yagan, resting a spear across the back of his shoulders. It is quite evident that the head of Yagan is not the original one (rather oversized, has a far too long a neck and is an altogether different shade). I must say that because the statue’s head has been stolen twice (and given the way Yagan died), the sculpture now takes on a strange and ironic overtone.
We are closer to the Cleopatra than she was to the construction of the great pyramids. Some of those tombs are unfathomably old and anyone who cares has turned to dust a dozen times over.
Unless you believe as they did, I don't see a problem with opening up a tomb.
Long after any living person has any memory or recollection of such a place? No, it’s not really wrong anymore. I think it is good to be respectful about it though.
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!
Yeah I don’t know if it is necessary “wrong,” but I am a little skeptical of the automatic assumption that disrupting tombs and putting them in museums is a good thing.
There is some educational value, of course, but it’s more just a relic of our “analyze everything, respect nothing” era.
If the past is another country, we certainly aren’t respecting the natives’ wishes.
That’s a bit over-selling it. The Panthéon and the Invalides are not really touristic attractions. The Louvre, Versailles, and the Eiffel Tower are much more effective for that purpose. They are used for culture building, not to make money.
Besides, only ashes remain of Napoleon and even the bodies that are there are entombed. They are necropoles, not shows. There isn’t much to see there.
Plenty of high-profile cemeteries do, Highgate Cemetery in London for example charges a fee despite just being a normal (if high-profile) cemetery. The French don't charge for access to Père-Lachaise however, which is the rough equivalent in Paris.
St. Paul's in London has tombs in it, and it charges a fee! It's a super normal practice.
How else could you manage the amount of people who would go?
I don’t think anyone can lay claim to a plot of land in perpetuity. Reverence should and does fade over time. Maybe when you are initially buried, that plot of earth belongs to you for a while, but after hundreds of years, it’s the other way round: you belong to the earth.
By the way, I don’t think you deserve downvotes for expressing your opinion.
Why would we think that? The people in them (for the very few tombs that haven’t been visited or looted already) don’t care; they’ve been dead for millennia.
Cleopatra was a Ptolemaic Greek descendant in a family so obsessed with blood purity that they married brothers to sisters to avoid mixing with 'native' Egiptians. You make the call.
Her family had been in Egypt for 250 years, that's a long time for genetic admixture. Otoh, Continuing the tradition established by previous Egyptian dynasties, the Ptolemies engaged in inbreeding including sibling marriage, with many of the pharaohs being married to their siblings and often co-ruling with them.
Ptolemy I Soter (305–282 BC)
[... 20 people ...]
Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator (51–30 BC)
Birmingham native and civil rights activist Angela Davis, known as a part of the Black Power movement of the early 1970s, was shocked to learn that she is descended from a passenger on the Mayflower, one of the first settlers in America.
It is, and it's not impossible there was some, but we have pretty decent records of her ancestry, we know the Ptolemys were shocked by the idea of intermarrying with the local population, and we have busts and paintings and coin profiles of her, so we have evidence of what she looked like as well as pretty much anyone from that era.
I don't think we're certain that the sarcophagus ever contained a mummy.
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.
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/were-the-bones-of-soldiers...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33085031
Here's one source[0], there are others.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown
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.
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).
Most of these tombs have already, since ancient times, been looted and desecrated and most things inside including any human remains have long since been removed. It looks like this tomb is also in this category as all that remains of note are on the walls which cannot be easily removed.
I seem to recall a story that even at the time when they were building pyramids in ancient Egypt that they had a problem with looters of the older tombs.
Additionally: The use of the word "Sealed" in the title is not present in the text and I propose is click bait for attention and an emotional reaction. Looks like that strategy still works.
In the Valley of the Kings, I think they had a problem with the builders looting the same tombs they had just built.
Cursory searching found overseer Paneb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paneb ... if I pieced it together right, he was in trouble for looting a tomb within 20 years of its construction.
Edit: I'm asking about the title of this article.
Otherwise, you are a terrible "criminal" by your own standard.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Timur
EDIT: typos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Cemetery_and_Cr...
I 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 seems to be "topple testing" for health and safety reasons.
It's the UKs largest cemetery and in a shocking state:
https://lostlcp.com/brookwood-cemetery-reburials/
‘Course space requirements are also a factor, if you have a family plot in a depopulated village in the countryside odds are good plots will be cheap and renewable forever.
For my part I've only ever seen even my dads grave once, and feel no need to go back there, though I understand why some might feel it matters to have the grave of someone they knew in person because of the emotional attachment.
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...
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Milady_Horákové_(Ostrava)
I just got back from a triple to Naples where there's a church that had a secret skull collecting cult under it for decades, it's a tourist attraction now. Yes it is still full of peoples skulls.
So yes, it seems like there is a statute of limitations on our obedience to the dead.
Easy to write off as the bizzarro actions of those gosh darned old timey folks ...
~ https://publicartaroundtheworld.com/public-art-in-australia/...but yeah, they just keep stealing that head.
Unless you believe as they did, I don't see a problem with opening up a tomb.
The fate of all things is to become dust.
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!
There is some educational value, of course, but it’s more just a relic of our “analyze everything, respect nothing” era.
If the past is another country, we certainly aren’t respecting the natives’ wishes.
Using a tomb to expand our knowledge of the ancient world seems like small potatoes in comparison. Overton window is already far off
Besides, only ashes remain of Napoleon and even the bodies that are there are entombed. They are necropoles, not shows. There isn’t much to see there.
St. Paul's in London has tombs in it, and it charges a fee! It's a super normal practice.
How else could you manage the amount of people who would go?
By the way, I don’t think you deserve downvotes for expressing your opinion.
She was of Greek origin, a descendant from Alexander’s general Ptolemy.
Edit to append a topical story:
Birmingham native and civil rights activist Angela Davis, known as a part of the Black Power movement of the early 1970s, was shocked to learn that she is descended from a passenger on the Mayflower, one of the first settlers in America.
https://www.al.com/life/2023/02/civil-rights-activist-angela...
You can see several of these here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra
I suspect it was prior to recorded history.
But Egyptians themselves weren't black either. There was one black dynasty from Kush, but "indigenous" Egyptians themselves weren't black.