A 4,400-year-old Saqqara tomb still has its paint, and it belonged to a royal judge

A joint Spanish-Egyptian archaeological mission has uncovered a mastaba tomb dating to the late Fifth Dynasty at Saqqara, complete with two funerary chapels whose painted reliefs still carry their original color nearly 4,400 years after they were carved. The tomb belonged to a senior court official named Yunmin and, in an adjoining chapel, his father Iti, offering a rare window into how Egypt’s bureaucracy ran during the reign of King Djedkare Isesi.

A Mastaba Rediscovered North of Saqqara

The tomb was found during the 2026 excavation season in an area known as the Mariette Cemetery, north of the main Saqqara necropolis, named for the 19th-century French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, who worked the site more than 150 years ago. According to the mission, the location of the mastaba had technically been known since Mariette’s era, but it had never been subjected to a systematic excavation using modern archaeological methods. The mission is a joint scientific project between the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, and it continues to work the surrounding ground north of Saqqara. Dr Hisham El-Leithy, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the discovery adds substantial new evidence about the Saqqara necropolis in the closing years of the Fifth Dynasty, both in terms of funerary architecture and the administrative roles senior officials held at the time.

Yunmin’s Career as Judge and Court Director

The mastaba is medium-sized by Old Kingdom standards, with two funerary chapels opening onto its eastern wall. The larger, on the northern side, belonged to Yunmin, who held several senior positions at once: judge, director of the court, and head of the scribes responsible for reviewing petitions and complaints brought before the state. Dr Josep Cervelló Autuori of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who leads the mission, said excavators uncovered a distinctive facade on Yunmin’s chapel bearing funerary inscriptions and an offering formula, along with a formal image of Yunmin himself. Reliefs on the chapel walls depict agricultural labor and processions of offering-bearers approaching the tomb, and many of those scenes still preserve traces of their original pigment, a level of survival that is unusual for painted Old Kingdom reliefs exposed to millennia of sand, salt and shifting groundwater.

Iti’s Scribal Duties Over Farmland and Offerings

The tomb’s second chapel, on the southern side, belonged to Yunmin’s father, a man named Iti, whose own titles tied him to scribal work connected with the administration of agricultural land and offerings. That chapel contains a false door, the architectural feature through which Egyptians believed a deceased person’s spirit could pass to receive offerings, along with painted scenes showing offerings being presented. Excavators note that a substantial portion of Iti’s chapel decoration has been lost over time, in contrast to the comparatively well-preserved paintwork in his son’s chapel next door. Together the two chapels give researchers a rare father-and-son pairing of state careers spanning two generations of Fifth Dynasty administration, one in judicial and scribal oversight and the other in the management of farmland tied to temple or funerary offerings.

Reliefs That Kept Their Original Color

Egyptologists have long relied on painted tomb reliefs to reconstruct the artistic conventions of a given period, but pigment this old rarely survives intact. In Yunmin’s chapel, the retained coloring on the farming and offering-procession scenes lets researchers study the palette and technique craftsmen used in the twilight years of the Fifth Dynasty with unusual precision, rather than inferring color choices from faint traces or comparison with better-preserved tombs elsewhere at Saqqara. The mission has also carried out conservation work on the newly exposed architectural and decorative elements, aimed at stabilizing the paint and stonework for continued study rather than leaving it exposed to the same conditions that erased much of Iti’s chapel.

The Reign of Djedkare Isesi and a Changing Bureaucracy

The tomb dates to the reign of Djedkare Isesi, one of the last kings of the Fifth Dynasty, a period in which the Egyptian state’s administrative apparatus was becoming increasingly specialized. Titles like the ones Yunmin held, spanning judicial authority, court leadership and oversight of a scribal staff dedicated to petitions and complaints, point to a bureaucracy with distinct channels for adjudicating disputes rather than a single generalized office handling every function of government. Iti’s more narrowly agricultural scribal role, by contrast, reflects the parallel machinery Egypt relied on to track land, labor and offerings feeding both the state and its funerary cults. Studying both men’s careers side by side gives archaeologists a clearer picture of how these overlapping bureaucratic tracks functioned at the close of the Fifth Dynasty, shortly before the Sixth Dynasty reshaped Egypt’s administrative and political landscape.

A Joint Mission With More Ground Left to Excavate

Because the mastaba sits in ground that Mariette surveyed but never fully excavated, researchers say the surrounding area north of Saqqara likely holds further tombs from the same period and social stratum. The Spanish-Egyptian mission plans to continue excavation and research in the area, building on more than a century of prior survey work that identified the general cemetery but stopped short of documenting individual monuments in detail. Separate reporting on the find noted that the team has already completed conservation work on the newly found architectural and decorative features, a step meant to protect the surviving paint before further excavation resumes nearby. For now, Yunmin and Iti’s mastaba stands as one of the better-documented examples of how Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty elite arranged both their careers and their eternal resting places.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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