And you think the wealth disparity is excessive today…. An ancient Egyptian mummy wrapped in gold leaf and sealed in a sarcophagus highlights one of the most complete and undisturbed burial sites found in recent times, the BBC reports.
The announcement of the discovery in Saqqara, Egypt was part of a larger complex of three burial sites. The gold-leaf mummy, believed to be the corpse of a wealthy man named Hekashepes, does not appear to have been a member of Egypt’s ruling family. In the same burial complex, dating from the 25th to the 22nd centuries BCE, archeologists found another tomb of a a priest, inspector and supervisor of nobles named Khnumdjedef. A third chamber appears to have at least two corpses: one of a judge and writer named Fetek and the last of Meri, a senior palace official known as “the secret keeper.”
In other Mummy’s Day news, a different mummy, that of a teenage boy buried between 330 BCE and 30 BCE contained 49 protective amulets and jewels, wrapped with the body in the belief they would protect the dead’s spirit and provide them with resources in the afterlife. According to CNN, the remains were first discovered in 1916, and they’ve been in storage in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which has hundreds of mummies stacking up, perhaps literally, that have never been examined. As part of a current project to catalog and identify the mummies, the museum scans each set of remains. The images for this corpse showed metal and gemstones on and around the corpse’s chest. The corpse also wears a golden funeral mask, a rare find given most ancient Egyptian tombs have been ransacked by grave robbers.