A remarkable cache of 225 funerary figurines has been uncovered inside a tomb at Tanis, the ancient Egyptian capital in the Nile Delta. This discovery is not only exceptional in scale but also helps resolve a long-standing question about royal burials in the region.
French Egyptologist Frederic Payraudeau, who leads the Tanis excavation, noted that finding figurines in place within a royal tomb at Tanis hasn’t happened since 1946. He added that such a scene is unprecedented south of Tanis as well, outside the famous Valley of the Kings near Luxor, except for Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. He emphasized that most major tombs in Egypt’s storied necropolises have been looted over the centuries.
The discovery was made on the morning of October 9, after the team had finished examining the other three corners of a narrow tomb containing a large, unnamed sarcophagus. Payraudeau recalled that seeing three or four figurines together immediately signaled something extraordinary to come. He described sprinting to inform colleagues and officials, only to find the workday ending near the weekend. Typically, the crew would wrap up by 2 pm, but this moment felt too significant to stop.
Lighting was arranged, and work continued through the night. It took ten days to meticulously extract all 225 diminutive green ushabti figurines.
The figurines were arranged with purpose: a star-shaped pattern around a trapezoidal pit’s sides, with additional rows resting along the bottom. Ushabti served as ceremonial servants for the deceased in the afterlife.
A striking feature of the find is the high proportion of female figures, which Payraudeau called quite exceptional.
Tanis was established around 1050 BCE as the capital of the kingdom during Egypt’s Twenty-First Dynasty. At that time, the nearby Valley of the Kings had already fallen into disuse and had been looted in various pharaohs’ reigns, prompting the shift of royal burial sites to Tanis.
Newly revealed royal symbols on the figurines also shed light on a long-debated question: who lay within the sarcophagus. The inscriptions indicate Pharaoh Shoshenq III, who ruled from 830 to 791 BCE.
Payraudeau described this as astonishing, noting that another tomb at the site—the largest one—bears Shoshenq III’s name as well. The question remains: why was he not buried in the sarcophagus now found in this tomb? He suggested that tomb-building was a political gamble; a pharaoh cannot be certain a successor will inter him there.
Thus, the new evidence demonstrates that such bets about final resting places did not always pay off. Shoshenq III’s four-decade reign was marked by turmoil, including a violent civil conflict between Upper and Lower Egypt, with competing pharaohs vying for control.
Two scenarios emerge: either the intended tomb for Shoshenq III was superseded by events, or his remains were relocated later due to looting. Nevertheless, reassembling a 3.5 by 1.5 meter granite sarcophagus into a cramped space would be difficult to believe as a post hoc adjustment.
After thorough study, the figurines are slated for display in an Egyptian museum, where they will illuminate this pivotal period of Tanis’s royal history.
