Archaeological crews working in the Saqqara necropolis discovered the tomb of Prince Waser-If-Re from 4,000 years ago.
The tomb featured a 14-foot-tall pink granite door that led to… nowhere.
Inside the tomb, the team also found 13 high-backed chairs with pink granite statues—many believed to be the prince’s wives—and two without heads.
In a one-of-a-kind discovery, archaeologists working within the Saqqara necropolis (south of Cairo, Egypt) found a pink granite door inside a tomb standing over 14 feet tall. The intrigue ratcheted up yet another notch when the archaeologists realized it was, in fact, a fake door. It led nowhere.
The oversized pink door wasn’t the only curious find inside the tomb of Prince Waser-If-Re—son of King Userkaf, the founder of Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty. In a joint operation between the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Zahi Hawass Foundation for Archaeological and Heritage, the 4,000-year-old discovery had plenty more intrigue baked in, according to a translated announcement from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
The tomb contained 13 high-backed chairs, each of which featured statues carved out of pink granite. The Egyptian experts, which included famed archaeologist Zahi Hawass, said (according to the State Information Service) that the statues were likely of the prince’s wives, although two of the 13 were headless.
The false door, which was over three feet wide, is the first of its kind in material and size ever to be found from ancient Egypt. It was directly connected to the prince’s tomb, and featured hieroglyphs carved on the door listing Prince Waser-If-Re’s litany of titles: “Hereditary Prince,” “Royal Scribe,” “Vizier,” “Judge,” “Governor of Buto and Nekheb,” and “Chanting Priest.”
A secondary entrance—this one also adorned with pink granite—featured a cartouche of King Neferirkare.
Granite and statues alike also proliferated the rest of the site. The team found a toppled-over black granite statue (over four feet in length) and a red granite table (roughly three feet in diameter), the latter of which featured carved text describing ritual sacrifices.
While the tomb was originally created as part of the Old Kingdom, it was reused along the way—likely during the 26th Dynasty, Hawass said. The team found a black granite statue of a male standing over four feet tall, with names and titles inscribed on the granite that link it directly to the 26th Dynasty.
Archaeologists also discovered statues of King Djoser, his wife, and 10 daughters. Hawass believes that the statues were once located inside a room next to the king’s pyramid and subsequently moved to the tomb of Prince Waser-If-Re. Archaeologists will remain on site to see if they can decipher why the statues were moved from their original positions, and find out what else they can learn from the granite-filled tomb of a prince.
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