Archaeologists prepare to open huge granite sarcophagus in Egypt

Thank you for posting this.

I love this shit.

This is so exciting!

But opening it for the first time will require extensive work to be done in advance. “It’s risky to open it directly – we need to prepare,” said Ashmawy.

Well that was a big tease, they won't be opening it for a while.

This stuff is exciting to me, too. Doubtful that we'll ever find another untouched tomb of riches like King Tut in the 1920s.

I just read a horrible "humor" piece on Vulture about it. One of those "We're so witty in Slack Chat so let's just make this conversation into an article! Tee hee!" pieces that make me hate Millennials. It was just their writer chatroom chat about "what could be in the sarcophagus? I hope it's a year's supply of avocado toast titter titter ehehehrhrhrhr ahahahahaHarHar!!!"

I won't paste it here because I hate them, but it ruined the mystery for me forever.

r5 I had always wondered where those painfully unfunny takes came from but Slack Chat totally explains it.

There is non-viable smallpox in those desert mummies. But the real danger are the mummies of the Alps and animals in siberia now that the ice is melting.

On the plus side, it will devastate Russia first, so the rest of us have time to devise cures.

Careful with that thing.

45 tonnes?

I'm certain they will find Al Capone's treasure!

I do hope they all have curse insurance.

This has been a great week for archeologists.

An ancient clay tablet with Homer's The Odyssey was just discovered.

My God! It's..... it's all caftans! And earrings!

Jesus, can you imagine how long it must have taken to write a book back then? On clay fucking tablets?!!

R13 the articles for that are all terrible. They dont give the dates for what the actual earliest discovered version is and then they say this is from the third century AD and they barely touch on what makes it special. They need a classics professor to provide better context!

Sharcophagush.

At last - they've found the resting place of Jimmy Hoffa.

i'm more shocked by the fact that the Guardian started to use the metric system to describe lenghts of stuff, like in OP's link. Welcome to the civilized world, anglosaxons!

And whaddaya get, R10 ?

I would never be able to be a part of something like this. I'm such a chicken.

Here go hell come.

Very exciting!

BEWARE! DON'T LIFT THE LID. DON'T LI---

They will discover it's an ancient latrine

It will just be a bunch cheap Made-in-Zhou-Dynasty-China crap.

Imagine the dude who discovered that giant alabaster head staring back at him in the ground.

What if they find Jesus?

Get back to me when they find some lost literature, like a play of Euripides that we only have fragments of now, or Callimachus' *Aetia*. They're recovering some of this kind of stuff on scrolls from Herculaneum. If the mummy in this sarcophagus isn't clutching, e.g., a few books of Epicurus to his bony sternum just put the lid back on and try again.

Arent they gonna xray it or something first? what if its an animal head put on a decapitated body, big featureless black sarcophagi likely dont contain royalty

What if it's filled with those evil scarabs from the Mummy?!

demons

Why do they have to look?

Don't look, Marian!

Relax everyone. It's only Phil. "SURPRISE!"

Poirot already covered this.

There are murderous Yalies at the center of the plot.

It will be condemned and denounced as "unislamic blasphemy" and suicide-bombed into rubble with wild-eyed, righteous zeal.

Sixteen goes into 45 how many times, R20?

If it's like the rest of Egypt, it is probably full of garbage and shit.

Filled with chocolate?

I was right! It was an ancient latrine!

[quote] Thank you for posting this. I love this shit.

Prophetic

^ lol

No avocado toast 😢

A kinky threeway gone awry?

Should’ve used Tupperware.

[quote]“The sarcophagus has been opened, but we have not been hit by a curse,” said Mostafa Waziry, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities, in response to news reports warning of maledictions hidden inside the tomb in the port city of Alexandria.

Archaeology humor - hee hee hee!!

Poop & bones in Egypt. Who knew?

Did that shit leak in AFTER the sarcophagus was discovered???!!!

Love it. Love underwater excavations containing treasure the best. After a big hurricane I anxiously await a new discovery found on the beach. Some kid in NJ found an old arrowhead or shark's tooth. Sometimes the skeleton of an ancient sea wreck will be exposed. I only ever discover cobalt sea glass. Once while on Fire Island after a big storm I found the bottom of a seafoam green bottle. Researched the marking and it was remnants of an English gin bottle from 150 years ago. What a find.

I can get lost in youtube channels where metal detectors unearth treasures on land but especially rivers that were once used for travel in earlier centuries.

Those mummies creep me out. I have read too much about ancient "curses" and dead deceases that the mummies might bring back.

R20, W&W. Haven't heard that song in years.

R50, I've been watching that British antiques show Flog It on Youtube, and in one episode a lady was sellilng a large amber necklace, and she explained to the expert that she had been on a church outing to the local beach and she found 60 amber necklaces buried in the sand. She turned them in to the local police but no one claimed them and she donated them to the church for a charity sale and bought the one necklace back.

R53 my dad always used to sing that. He had an incredibly deep voice (smoked 2 packs a day for decades)

Ew.

Lolz... bone juice