Newest pharaonic tomb reveals flowers, not mummies

The first tomb discovered in Egypt's Valley of the Kings in 80 years doesn't have any mummies, but archaeologists opened the last of eight sarcophagi inside Wednesday and found something they say is even more valuable: embalming materials and a rare collar of ancient, woven flowers.

Photo: Newest pharaonic tomb reveals flowers, not mummies

Newest pharaonic tomb reveals flowers, not mummies

Hushed researchers craned their necks and media scuffled inside a stiflingly hot stone chamber 6 meters (yards) underground to watch Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass slowly crack open the last coffin's lid with his bare hands for the first time in what scientists believe is more than 3,000 years.

But instead of a mummy as archaeologists had hoped, the coffin revealed a tangle of fabric and rusty-colored dehydrated flowers woven together in laurels that looked likely to crumble to dust if touched.

"I prayed to find a mummy, but when I saw this I said it's better it's really beautiful," said Nadia Lokma, chief curator of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The flowers were likely the remains of garlands, often entwined with gold strips, which ancient Egyptian royals wore around their shoulders in both life and death, she said.

"It's very rare there's nothing like it in any museum. We've seen things like it in drawings, but we've never seen this before in real life it's magnificent," Lokma said.

Dug deep into white rock, the tomb is known only by the acronym KV63 the 63rd tomb found in the Valley, a desert region near the southern city of Luxor used as a burial ground for pharaohs, queens and nobles between 1500 and 1000 B.C.

The burial chamber was discovered accidentally last year by U.S. archaeologists working on the neighboring tomb of Amenmeses, a late 19th Dynasty pharaoh. It was the first uncovered since the famed tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922.

"For decades, archaeologists have been cleaning up tombs that were found earlier, so it's very exciting to discover something new," said Otto Schaden, an Egyptologist from the University of Memphis who found the new grave and heads excavations there.

Scientists cut a hole in the tomb's door and got their first glimpse into the 2.5 meter by 4.5 meter (12-foot-by-15-foot) tomb in February. At the time, they believed there were only seven coffins, but Lokma said a total of eight were inside.

Since then, the lids of seven sarcophagi, including a tiny one built for an infant and filled with feather-stuffed pillows, were peeled back one by one, revealing pottery shards, fabrics but no mummies, reports AP.