Beaded woman's mystique calls across 25 centuries

CAIRO - The green eyes stare unblinkingly from the beaded mask. The dark eyebrows and terracotta face look as fresh as ever.

Yet the female figure covered in turquoise beads and swaddled in black linen, nestling in a wooden sarcophagus, is probably 2500 years old.

Egypt's chief archaeologist, Dr Zahi Hawass, yesterday proudly unveiled what he called one of the best-preserved mummies ever.

He stood among treasures uncovered by accident by an Australian team of archaeologists in Saqqara, the burial site of Memphis, once the capital of ancient Egypt.
The Australians, who were exploring a 4200-year-old tomb, pushed aside a pair of ancient statues last week and found a door which led them to the tomb holding three cedar coffins, each containing a mummy.

Inside one was the magnificently preserved beaded woman.

Wooden boxes by the coffins contained vital organs.

"The chest of the mummy is covered with beads. Most mummies of this period - about 500BC - the beads are completely gone, but this mummy has them all," Hawass said.

The tombs of Saqqara, the vast necropolis in the desert 50km south of Cairo, were constructed over thousands of years. Excavations have been going on for two centuries.

Professor Naguib Kanawati, the head of the team from Macquarie University in Sydney which found the mummies from the 26th Dynasty (664-525BC), said their site had been under excavation for the past 10 years.

The door was hidden behind statues of a man believed to have been Meri, tutor of King Pepi II, who was the last ruler in Egypt's 6th Dynasty, and the tutor's wife.

After Pepi II's rule, the site was covered by 15m of sand, until it was used again as a cemetery 2600 years later.

"By that time the art of mummification was perfected to the extreme," Kanawati said.

The identity of the mummies has not yet been ascertained, and they are to undergo ultrasound and x-ray testing, which may reveal their age, and the possible cause of death.

But there is speculation that they may be teachers.

"These were not particularly wealthy people," said Kanawati. "They are not commoners ... They are middle-class people, but not royalty."

- INDEPENDENT