Documentary, Saqqara: 52 unexplored tombs and the forgotten mummies of Teti

At the foot of a half-collapsed pyramid, workers clear the sand by hand, bucket after bucket. Beneath their feet, vertical shafts plunge more than ten metres deep. At the bottom, painted wooden coffins, stacked and intact, have been waiting for three thousand years. The documentary 52 tombes inexplorées : les momies oubliées de Saqqarah refont surface (52 unexplored tombs: the forgotten mummies of Saqqara resurface), directed by François Pomès and produced by Label News and Label Image, follows the team of Egyptologist Zahi Hawass during one of the most spectacular excavation campaigns of recent years, around the pyramid of the pharaoh Teti.²

Available in full on the SLICE Histoire channel (in French), this film of just over an hour does more than list the finds. It focuses on the individuals who rest in these coffins: thanks to inscriptions, bones and X-ray examinations, the archaeologists reconstruct stories of life and death, those of a richly buried newborn, a mother and son reunited in the same coffin, and a woman laid to rest in a burialBurialThe intentional deposition of a body, sometimes with offerings; a marker of symbolic behaviour.→ prepared for a man.² This article looks back at what the documentary shows and at the historical context of these discoveries.

Saqqara, the necropolis of Memphis

Saqqara lies on the west bank of the Nile, some thirty kilometres south of Cairo. For more than three thousand years, this desert plateau served as the cemetery of Memphis, the great capital of ancient EgyptAncient EgyptA civilisation that developed along the Nile for almost three millennia, from unification around 3100 BC to the Greco-Roman era; it bequeathed the pyramids, temples and hieroglyphic writing.→. It is one of the largest necropolisesNecropolisA large organised burial ground, a "city of the dead", often spanning several periods.→ of the ancient world: the dead were buried here from the earliest dynasties to the Roman period, and the site contains the Step PyramidStep pyramidEgypt's first great stone monument, raised for King Djoser at Saqqara by Imhotep (Third Dynasty), by stacking diminishing mastabas.→ of Djoser, the first great stone monument in history, as well as thousands of private tombs and galleries of sacred animals.¹

The ground at Saqqara is so dense with remains that every excavation season brings surprises. Already in 2020, Egyptian archaeologists had brought up dozens of sealed Late Period coffins from burial shafts, some of which were opened in front of the international press. The area around the pyramid of Teti, explored by Zahi Hawass's team since 2010, was to reveal an equally exceptional group, but from an earlier period.¹

Teti, a king worshipped for a thousand years

Teti was the first ruler of the Sixth Dynasty, at the end of the Old KingdomOld KingdomThe first great period of unified pharaonic Egypt (c. 2700-2200 BC, 3rd-6th Dynasties), the golden age of the great pyramids and of a strongly centralised state.→, around the 23rd century BC. His pyramid, now reduced to a mound of rubble, contains a burial chamber whose walls are covered with the Pyramid Texts, religious spells meant to ensure the dead pharaohPharaohThe title of the ruler of ancient Egypt, regarded as a living god guaranteeing cosmic order (Maat), supreme head of state, army and worship.→ eternal life among the gods.³

After his death, Teti became the object of a cult that lasted long beyond his reign. More than a thousand years later, in the New Kingdom, he was still worshipped, and many Egyptians wished to be buried near his pyramid, which was regarded as a sacred place. Resting in the shadow of a deified king was an honour and perhaps a guarantee for the afterlife.¹ It is this posthumous favour that explains the extraordinary concentration of tombs found around the monument.

A queen rescued from oblivion

One of the revelations of the campaign concerns the funerary complex of a previously unknown queen. Near the pyramid of Teti, the team uncovered a small pyramid with a stone temple and three mud-brick storerooms that held offerings and tools. For years, no name had been found there. Then, a few weeks before the official announcement in January 2021, the archaeologists read the name of Queen Naert, wife of Teti, on a temple wall and on a fallen obelisk near the entrance.¹

Zahi Hawass said he had never heard of this queen, whose discovery adds an important piece to the history of Egypt.¹ For Egyptology, every new name counts: it completes a royal genealogy that is still full of gaps and is a reminder of how many Old Kingdom figures remain to be discovered.

Fifty-two shafts, more than fifty coffins

But the heart of the documentary is the shafts. Around the queen's pyramid, the team uncovered 52 burial shafts, 10 to 12 metres deep, cut into the rock. At the bottom lay more than fifty wooden coffins from the New Kingdom, around 3,000 years old.¹ According to the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, it was the first time that coffins of this age had been found in such numbers at Saqqara, a necropolis until then best known for its Old Kingdom and Late Period tombs.

The coffins are decorated with paintings of deities and extracts from the Book of the Dead, the collection of spells that guided the deceased on the journey to the afterlife. The documentary shows how delicate their extraction is: each coffin must be consolidated, documented and hoisted to the surface without damaging the fragile wood or the painted layer. In a newly found shaft, the team also discovered a large limestone sarcophagussarcophagusA stone coffin, often carved, meant to hold the body of a high-ranking deceased person.→, the first of its kind found in these shafts.¹

Objects for daily life and eternity

Around the coffins, the excavations yielded abundant funerary goods: wooden masks, a shrine dedicated to the god Anubis, protector of necropolises, bird-shaped objects, a bronze axe, paintings and hieroglyphic inscriptions. They also found pieces of senet, a board game very popular in ancient Egypt that was given a religious dimension: winning a game meant triumphing over the trials of the afterlife.¹

The Book of the Dead of Pwkhaef

The most moving find is probably a papyrus about four metres long and almost a metre wide, containing Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead. Its owner, a man named Pwkhaef, is also named on one of the sarcophagi and on four statuettes.¹ Chapter 17 is one of the most important in the collection: it presents the deceased as identified with the creator god and gives him the knowledge needed to cross the underworld.

The Book of the Dead, which the Egyptians rather called the "Spells for Going Forth by Day", was a precious possession. The wealthiest had a personalised copy written and illustrated in their own name. Finding such a document in a Saqqara shaft, next to its owner's coffin, makes it possible to link a name, an object and a burial, something that remains rare in archaeology.

Reading mummies without unwrapping them

The documentary emphasises a dimension that has profoundly changed Egyptology: medical imaging. In the past, studying a mummy meant unwrapping it, at the risk of destroying it. Today, X-rays and CT scans make it possible to examine the body through the bandages without touching it.²

These examinations reveal age at death, sex, certain diseases and traces of injuries, but also embalming techniques and the amulets slipped between the bandages. They turn each mummyMummyA body preserved from decay, naturally (cold, aridity, peatPeatA waterlogged organic soil formed by accumulated plants; it seals and remarkably preserves wood and ancient remains.→) or artificially; the frozen Pazyryk kurgans yielded natural mummies with tattooed skin.→ into an individual with a story of its own. The film shows this through a few striking cases.²

A newborn, a mother and son, a woman in a man's coffin

Among the burials studied, that of a richly buried newborn raises questions. Why so much care for a child who died so young? In ancient Egypt, infant mortality was very high, and children were not always buried with abundant grave goods. This tomb bears witness to a family's attachment and perhaps to its social standing.²

Elsewhere, a mother and her son were reunited in the same coffin. The documentary shows how inscriptions and the analysis of bones make it possible to reconstruct this bond. Finally, one of the mummies is that of a woman resting in a burial prepared for a man.² This kind of situation is not exceptional in Egypt: coffins were costly objects, sometimes reused, resold or assigned to a different person from the one for whom they had been made. These reuses tellTellAn artificial mound formed by the accumulation of successive layers of settlement remains at the same spot, typical of the Near East. Each destruction-rebuilding event adds a stratum.→ us about the economics of death as much as about its beliefs.

Protecting bodies, keeping families together

As the discoveries unfold, the film paints a portrait of the intimate relationship the ancient Egyptians had with death: protecting bodies, keeping families together and preparing each person for the great journey to the afterlife.² For them, death was not an end but a passage. The body had to be preserved so that the soul could find it again, the name had to be written so that the deceased would go on existing, and offerings had to be renewed to nourish them for eternity.

The concentration of tombs around the pyramid of Teti also shows that this quest for eternity was collective. To rest near a deified king, alongside one's relatives and neighbours, was to belong to a community that continued beyond death. The shafts of Saqqara are, in this sense, so many family vaults.

Points to bear in mind

As is often the case with popular documentaries about Egypt, the story favours the suspense of discovery and the charismatic figure of Zahi Hawass. Some claims, made in the heat of the excavations, need to be confirmed by scientific publications, which often take years. The film nonetheless offers a fine immersion in fieldwork: clearing the shafts, handling the coffins, examining the mummies and deciphering the inscriptions.

Above all, it is a reminder that Saqqara is far from having revealed all its secrets. The Egyptian ministry considered that these discoveries would rewrite the history of the site, especially for the 18th and 19th Dynasties, when Teti was worshipped and local people were buried around his pyramid.¹ Beneath the sand, other shafts, other coffins and other stories are still waiting.