Archaeologists find a Roman-era pyramid tomb with a rare Greek funerary poem in Egypt

An Egyptian archaeological mission has uncovered a roughly 1,700-year-old pyramid-shaped tomb at Bir al-Shughala in the Dakhla Oasis, about 750 kilometers southwest of Cairo, built to hold the remains of a man and his wife and inscribed with a 19-line funerary poem written entirely in Greek. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities announced the find on September 25, 2026, describing a burial that layers two distinct religious traditions inside a single limestone-and-mudbrick structure.

Roman-period Egypt is well documented as a place where Egyptian religious practice persisted long after Greek and then Roman rulers took control, but tombs that display the blend as directly as this one, pairing a purely Egyptian architectural form with a purely Greek literary text on the same walls, remain rare finds even in a well-excavated oasis.

A Pyramid Shape Borrowed From an Older Egypt

Visitors reaching the tomb would have climbed fourteen steps to a sandstone entrance built in a style borrowed from monuments more than a thousand years older: a winged sun disc, cobra motifs, and a stone panel that Mohamed Abdel Badi, head of Egypt’s Antiquities Sector, describes as carrying “deeply carved hieroglyphic inscriptions, protective spells and religious recitations”. Beyond the entrance, a plastered mudbrick hall with a vaulted, partly collapsed roof leads to two separate burial chambers, one on either side of the passage.

Excavators also identified two further plaster-covered burial structures set beside the main hall, suggesting the tomb grew to hold more occupants than just the couple named in its Greek inscription, though officials have not yet said who was placed in those additional chambers or when they were added.

By itself, the architecture is typical for the period. What is unusual is what was carved for the couple buried inside it.

Nineteen Lines of Greek for a Man Named Pisechtes

A sandstone stela inside the tomb carries a 19-line funerary poem written entirely in ancient Greek, commemorating a man whose name is rendered in different transliterations as Pisechtes, Pisechthis, or Bisichthes, and who preliminary research suggests may have worked as a judge. The inscription is dated to the late third or early fourth century AD, meaning it was carved roughly two centuries after Rome had absorbed Egypt into its administrative structure and long after Greek had become the language of the oasis’s educated class.

Hisham Al-Lithi, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the architecture, inscriptions and funerary monuments discovered at Bir al-Shughala “could provide important information about burial practices as well as the cultural and religious life of the oasis during the Roman period.” Setting an Egyptian pyramid form beside a Greek literary text in the same burial is exactly the kind of evidence that lets researchers trace how thoroughly the two cultures blended rather than simply existed side by side.

A Bronze Coin of Constantine and a Second Life for the Tomb

Excavators also recovered a bronze coin bearing the portrait of Emperor Constantine, a sandstone offering table paired with a purification basin, and several pottery vessels left inside the burial chambers, all consistent with the fourth-century date the Greek inscription already suggested. Above the entrance lintel, a funerary scene depicts the seventh hour of the Imy-Duat, the ancient Egyptian text describing the sun god’s nightly passage through the underworld, positioned only steps away from the Greek stela.

A later addition complicates the picture further: a small mudbrick chapel was built directly above the tomb’s entrance sometime after the original burial, evidence that the site kept being visited, and possibly reused, long after the couple inside it had died.

A Discovery With No Exact Match in Its Own Cemetery

Excavations at Bir al-Shughala, part of the necropolis that served the ancient oasis capital of Mothis, have continued since 2002, according to Ahram Online’s account of the excavation history, with successive seasons steadily adding to a catalogue of tombs that already documents Egyptian, Greek, and Roman funerary customs sitting side by side. Even against that backdrop, officials describe this particular pyramid as having no exact parallel elsewhere in the cemetery, a distinction that rests less on its size than on the specific pairing of a Greek elegy inside an entirely Egyptian religious structure.

The Dakhla Oasis sits deep in Egypt’s Western Desert, hundreds of kilometers from the Nile Valley proper, which makes the presence of fluent literary Greek there almost as notable as the tomb’s architecture. Researchers have not yet settled how Pisechtes came to be memorialized in Greek verse so far from Alexandria, or whether the mudbrick chapel added later belonged to his own family or to someone unconnected who simply valued the site. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has not indicated when, or whether, further excavation at Bir al-Shughala is planned to help answer either question.

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

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