ANCIENT TOMBS

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1010, 28 June 1930, Page 13

ANCIENT TOMBS

DISCOVERY ON LAND THAT WILL BE FLOODED Last November the Egyptian Government sent -a mission to the Nubian Desert to carry out archaeological work in anticipation of the raising of the Assouan Dam, which would flood an area of about 90 square miles, thus precluding excavation work. The mission now reports having found in the Valley of the Lion, near Assouan, 16 cemeteries containing 250 tombs. Among them is a prehistoric tomb in which all the material? associated with burial have been found intact. One cemetery dates back to the eighteenth dynasty, and another to ; the Greco-Roman. The majority of them contain many important objects in gold and precious stones. The eighteenth Egyptian dynasty j dated from about the middle of the ' sixteenth to the middle of the fourteenth century B.C. It reigned through the greatest period of the so-called

“New Empire,’’ and its kings Includ* i the great conqueror Thotkmes 111., the religious reform- Da) n Tutankhamen The Greco-Roman period in Egy; t runs from the conquest by Alexandc r the Great in 331 B.C. to that by Cho--roes. King of Persia, in A.D. Cl 6. During this time Egypt was ruled iro n Alexandria, first by the Ptolemi a (ending with Cleopatra) and then by Roman governors.