Researchers have unearthed what seems to be a cemetery filled with millions of mummified corpses. The cemetery with millions of mummies was discovered in Egypt, and the team of archaeologists from Utah’s Brigham Young University who discovered it named the cemetery Fag el-Gamous, meaning “Way of the Water Buffalo”. The archaeologists got their name from a nearby road.
Many archaeologists have been excavating the site around the cemetery, which has a pyramid nearby, for almost 30 years. Some of the mummies buried in there date back when Egypt was ruled by the Byzantine or the Roman Empire, between the 1st and the 7th century A.D.
Kerry Muhlestein, one of the archaeologists who discovered the cemetery said that they believe there are more the a million people buried in the cemetery. Apparently, the cemetery was not a burial place for kings and royalty. The researchers said that most of the people were buried without any grave goods. Also, the ones buried in the Fag el-Gamous cemetery were not put into coffins when they died.
The experts said that the internal organs of the deceased were rarely taken out. But because of the arid environment in which the cemetery is found, the deceased were naturally mummified.
Despite the fact that the ones buried in the cemetery had not been rich people, the researchers found very beautiful items on them, like glass, linen and colorful booties that belonged to children.
Muhlestein said that as little as the dead had, they were buried with it in this cemetery. The archaeologists discovered the mummy of a small child wrapped in a tunic and wearing a necklace and two bracelets. The brain, tongue, toes and toenails were preserved very well and the researchers believe the child was a girl.
The cemetery with a million mummies buried inside remains a mystery. The archaeologists do not know where all the deceased come from. They believe that a village would have been too small for so many people. The town near the cemetery was known as Philadelphia, but archaeologists said it had a cemetery of its own, so it could not have been related to this cemetery.