Abstract
DISCOVERIES of great interest and importance are announced from Sakkara, where excavations are being carried on by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities under the direction of Mr. Walter Emery and Zaki Effendi Saad. These discoveries were made in a tomb of the first dynasty, which was partially excavated in 1931 and then appeared to have been completely rifled. Further excavation in the present season, however, in a series of forty-two store chambers in the superstructure of the tomb which previously had escaped notice, has brought to light the complete grave furniture of Hamaka, the Vizier of Pharaoh Den of the first dynasty (c. 3,000 B.C.). At present about half these chambers have been cleared. They have yielded a large number of objects. Among them are numerous jars for containing wine, which bear seals giving the names of Hamaka and his king, implements, such as wooden sickles with flint teeth, the wooden handles of large adzes, and a number of large flint knives of advanced technique, of which some are more than a foot in length. A quiver contains reed arrows with tips of bone or flint, and a spear has a head of ivory, while an inscribed ebony tablet bears the name of the Pharaoh Zer. Remarkable as are some of these objects, such as the flint knives, in coming from a tomb, the discovery is given a unique character by a large number of disks of stone, bronze or ivory, for which the excavators are as yet not prepared even to conjecture the purpose. Some of the disks are inlaid with different varieties of stone, and one showing hounds chasing a gazelle is in a style which is said to remind the observer of the products of Minoan art of some fifteen hundred years later.
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Discoveries at Sakkara. Nature 137, 650 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137650b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137650b0