Egyptian archaeologists have announced two discoveries at once: a cluster of nearly 2,000-year-old tombs on the Mediterranean coast, some still sealed exactly as they were closed in antiquity, and the remains of a planned Byzantine-era city in the western desert. According to an AFP report carried by Malay Mail, the country’s tourism and antiquities ministry said the coastal dig at Marina El-Alamein, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Alexandria, uncovered 18 Greco-Roman tombs, while a separate excavation in the Dakhla Oasis revealed a 4th-century mudbrick settlement.
Why sealed tombs are an unusual find
Most ancient tombs are found already disturbed — robbed, reused, or opened by earlier excavators. What makes the Marina El-Alamein discovery notable is that several burial chambers were found with their original stone blocking slabs still in place, and a granite sarcophagus measuring about 2.5 meters (8 feet) was found with its lid intact. The ministry said those features suggest the graves had remained sealed for nearly two millennia, which raises the odds that their contents survived undisturbed and can be studied as a closed context rather than a scattered one.
Inside the tombs, archaeologists found human remains alongside pottery, amphorae and other funerary objects. Among the most striking finds were 24 gold objects placed inside the mouths of several individuals — a funerary practice tied to ancient beliefs about the afterlife, and a detail that links these burials to broader traditions seen elsewhere in Greco-Roman Egypt. The site is believed to correspond to the ancient city of Leukaspis, a Mediterranean port that flourished between the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods, and the new tombs bring the total known at Marina El-Alamein to 44 since the site was first identified in 1986 during construction work.
The lost city in the desert
The second discovery is a different kind of find: not a burial but a settlement. In the Dakhla Oasis, in Egypt’s western desert, archaeologists uncovered the remains of a Byzantine-era community at Ain al-Sabil, dated to around the 4th century AD. The ministry described a mudbrick city with a planned street grid, public squares, residential buildings, a basilica-style church and defensive structures — the hallmarks of an organized urban community rather than a scattered rural outpost, and evidence that people built and maintained deliberate towns deep in the desert interior.
The material recovered there helps date and describe the place. The site yielded around 200 ostraca — inscribed pottery fragments used for everyday writing — in both Coptic and Greek, along with bronze and gold coins, including examples linked to the reign of the Roman emperor Constantius II, who ruled from 337 to 361 AD. Those coins and texts anchor the settlement firmly in the 4th century and hint at a literate, connected community using two languages, though the ministry’s announcement does not detail how large the population was or how long the city remained occupied.
As with any freshly announced excavation, much remains to be published. The reporting reflects the ministry’s statements rather than a peer-reviewed study, and specifics such as the identities of those buried at Marina El-Alamein, the full inventory of the desert city, and the results of any laboratory analysis have not yet been released. Those are the details that turn an announcement into a fully documented find, and they typically follow over months or years.
What the discoveries mean and why now
Taken together, the two sites broaden the picture of Egypt beyond its pharaonic image, filling in the Greco-Roman and Byzantine centuries when the country was a Mediterranean crossroads and, later, a Christianized province. A sealed port-city necropolis and a planned desert town from the same broad era offer complementary windows: one into how people were buried and what they valued in death, the other into how they organized daily life, worship and defense in a harsh environment.
There is also a practical motive behind the fanfare. Egypt has been working to rebuild its tourism revenues, and high-profile archaeological finds are routinely used to showcase the country’s heritage and draw international visitors. Tourism is a key source of foreign currency for the country, alongside Suez Canal revenues and remittances, which is part of why the ministry publicizes discoveries like these promptly and prominently.
For anyone following the archaeology rather than the tourism campaign, the sealed tombs are the element most worth watching. If the intact granite sarcophagus and the still-blocked chambers are excavated carefully, they could yield undisturbed skeletal remains and grave goods that let researchers reconstruct diet, health, origins and burial customs at Leukaspis with unusual precision. The open question is what those sealed contexts ultimately contain — the answer to which will come only as the slow, deliberate work of excavation and analysis proceeds.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
