I love her name! Here's the story from the BBC:
16 January 2012 Last updated at 11:08 ET
Archaeologists working in Egypt have
discovered the tomb of a female singer in the Valley of the Kings.
The tomb was found by a team from the University of Basel in Switzerland who
came across it by chance.
The woman, Nehmes Bastet, was a temple singer during Egypt's 22nd Dynasty
(approximately 945 - 712BC), according to an inscription in the tomb.
The coffin found in the tomb contains an intact mummy from almost 3,000 years
ago.
Professor Susanne Bickel of the University of Basel told the BBC that the
coffin was opened on Monday and she was able to see the "nicely wrapped" mummy
of the woman who was buried in the tomb.
The opening of the coffin was carried out by Prof Bickel and her Basel
colleague, field director Elina Paulin-Grothe, together with the Chief Inspector
of Antiquities of Upper Egypt, Dr Mohammed el-Bialy and inspector Ali Reda.
Prof Bickel said that the upper edge of the tomb was found on the first day
of Egypt's revolution, on 25 January 2011. The opening was sealed with an iron
cover and the discovery was kept quiet.
Last week, after the start of this year's field season, the feature was
identified as a tomb - and one of the very few tombs in the Valley of the Kings
which have not been looted.
Elina Paulin-Grothe said that the tomb was not built for the female singer,
but was re-used for her 400 years after the original burial, according to
AP.
There are other non-royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, Prof Bickel said,
which mostly date from the 18th Dynasty (1500 - 1400BC).
The woman in the coffin was the daughter of the high priest of Amon, Egypt's
Antiquities Minister Mohammed Ibrahim told AFP.
The discovery was important because "it shows that the Valley of the Kings
was also used for the burial of ordinary individuals and priests of the 22nd
Dynasty", he added.
Egyptian news site
Ahram reports that the wooden sarcophagus was painted black and decorated
with hieroglyphic texts.
This tomb is only the second found in the Valley of the Kings since the
discovery of Tutankhamun in 1922, and is referred to as KV64 in the naming
system used to label tombs in the valley. It is one of a cluster of tombs
without any wall decoration found near the royal tomb of Thutmoses III.
A tomb found in 2006,
known as KV63, had
seven coffins in it but none of them contained any mummies - it seems to have
been used as a burial cache.
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