Ancient Royal Tomb Discovered in Luxor

On Saturday, Egyptian officials discovered a 3,500-year-old tomb in Luxor. It contains the bones of an 18th-dynasty pharaoh.

Mostafa Waziri, director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said that the tomb was discovered by Egyptian and British archaeologists on the west bank of the River Nile, near the well-known Valley of the Queens and Valley of the Kings.

He added that "the first elements discovered so far inside the tomb seem to indicate that it dates back to the 18th dynasty" of pharaohs Akhenaton and Tutankhamun, Waziri said in a statement.

The 18th dynasty, which was a component of the New Kingdom period of Egyptian history, came to an end in 1292 BC and is regarded as one of the most successful periods of prehistoric Egypt.

The tomb may belong to a princess or royal wife of Thutmosid ancestry, according to the chairman of the British research mission Piers Litherland of the University of Cambridge.

The interior of the tomb, according to Egyptian archaeologist Mohsen Kamel, was "in bad condition."

According to the antiquities board's statement, parts of it, including the inscriptions, were "destroyed in ancient floods that filled the burial chambers with sand and limestone debris."

On his part, Dr. Piers Litherland, the head of the mission from the English side, said that the discovered tomb may belong to one of the royal wives or princesses during the period of the Tamasih rule, of which a large number of them have not been revealed so far.

Egypt has unveiled several major archaeological discoveries in recent years, most notably in the Saqqara necropolis south of the capital Cairo.