New Discoveries at North Saqqara

Dr. Nozomu Kawai; Professor of Egyptology, Director of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Civilizations and Cultural Resources at Kanazawa University in Japan, and Director of the Japanese–Egyptian Mission to North Saqqara

29 September 2024

01:00 PM

Auditorium, BA Main Entrance

The Antiquities Museum affiliated to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) Cultural Outreach Sector organizes a lecture entitled “New Discoveries at North Saqqara”. The Lecture is held on Sunday, 29 September 2024; 1:00 pm, at the Auditorium, BA Main Entrance. The Lecture is delivered by Dr. Nozomu Kawai; Professor of Egyptology, Director of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Civilizations and Cultural Resources at Kanazawa University in Japan, and Director of the Japanese–Egyptian Mission to North Saqqara.
Saqqara is a very important part of the Memphis Necropolis, it is about 40 km from Cairo. Saqqara probably took its name from the god “Sokar”, the god of the necropolis. It is truly an open museum that contains most of the artifacts of ancient Egyptian history; it contains the tombs of kings and senior officials of the First and Second Dynasties (c. 3040–2686 BCE), as well as the Step Pyramid, the oldest large stone building in history, for King Djoser (c. 2686–2667 BCE). It contains pyramids for the most important kings of the Fifth (c. 2494–2345 BCE) and Sixth (c. 2345–2181 BCE) Dynasties, where the pyramid of King Unas (c. 2375–2345 BCE) was the first to engrave his burial chamber with the Pyramid Texts. One of the most important features of Saqqara is the burial place of the sacred bull Apis, called the Serapeum, which continued to be used from the 18th Dynasty until the Ptolemaic era. As the bull Apis was considered a representation of the god Ptah himself, one of the most important gods of the Memphis region. In addition, Saqqara includes Coptic monuments, as we find the Monastery of Anba Jeremiah southeast of the pyramid complex of King Djoser, which remained in use until approximately the 8th century CE. We cannot ignore talking about the Imhotep Museum, which contains wonderful monuments from different eras that were discovered in Saqqara.

The Lecture sheds light on new discoveries; including the latest results that began revealing the development of the funerary landscape at North Saqqara through millennia, from the Early Dynastic Period to the Roman Period. The Japanese–Egyptian mission excavated both inside the Catacomb and outside the area to understand the development of the cemetery of this area through millennia. It found several tombs from different periods, such as the Early Dynastic Period, the New Kingdom, the Late Period, and the Greco–Roman Period.