Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has announced the discovery of a new funerary unit at the Tell Quesna archaeological cemetery in Menoufia Governorate, in the heart of the Nile Delta, a find the ministry says sheds fresh light on burial practices and on the cultural and commercial contacts of the region during the Late and Greco-Roman periods.
Tomb With 560 Funerary Figurines Found in Egypt’s Nile Delta. Image credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities وزارة السياحة والآثار
The announcement came on July 22, 2026, following excavations by an Egyptian archaeological mission working under the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Sherif Fathy said the discovery offers new insight into the religious and economic life of the period, underlining the Delta’s role as a crossroads of exchange in the centuries when Egyptian tradition mingled with Greek and Roman influence.
A vaulted tomb and bodies laid like Osiris
The funerary unit itself consists of a main hall opening onto several chambers with vaulted entrances, a layout characteristic of the Delta’s later cemeteries, where mudbrick vaulting substituted for the rock-cut architecture of Egypt’s southern necropolises. Within the chambers, the mission documented human remains placed in Osirian positions, the distinctive arrangement with arms crossed over the chest that deliberately mirrors the pose of Osiris, god of the dead, expressing the deceased’s hoped-for identification with the deity in the afterlife.
Alongside the burials, excavators recovered a range of funerary objects, headlined by a genuinely substantial find, two separate groups of small funerary figurines known as ushabti, numbering 560 pieces in total.
Tomb With 560 Funerary Figurines Found in Egypt’s Nile Delta. Image credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities وزارة السياحة والآثار
An army of servants for the beyond
Ushabti figurines rank among the most characteristic objects of Egyptian burial practice. Placed in tombs among the grave goods, they were intended to act as servants for the deceased, answering on their owner’s behalf should the dead be called upon to perform manual labor in the world beyond, plowing fields, filling channels, carrying sand. Many carry a hoe over the shoulder and a basket on the back, and their inscriptions frequently include the spell from the sixth chapter of the Book of the Dead that commands them to rise and work when their master’s name is called. A well-furnished burial could include hundreds, in the ideal case one for every day of the year along with overseer figures to manage them, which makes a cache of 560 figurines across two groups a burial assemblage of real ambition.
Eye of Horus amulets recovered from the newly discovered funerary unit at Tell Quesna in the Nile Delta. Photo Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
A necropolis that keeps giving
The new funerary unit adds to a site with a well-established record. The Quesna cemetery, located in the Kfour el-Raml area of Menoufia Governorate, ranks among the most important archaeological grounds in the Delta, serving as a burial ground across many centuries for the region connected to the ancient city of Athribis, modern Benha, capital of the tenth province of Lower Egypt. Earlier excavation seasons at Quesna produced some of the Delta’s most striking finds, including mummies buried with tongues of gold foil placed in their mouths, gold chips shaped as scarabs and lotus flowers, funerary amulets, human-form stone coffins, and a massive black granite coffin belonging to one of Athribis’s most important priests.
Those golden tongues connect Quesna to a wider funerary tradition documented across Late and Greco-Roman Egypt, from Taposiris Magna near Alexandria to Oxyrhynchus and, most recently, the coastal cemetery of Marina el-Alamein, a practice meant to allow the dead to speak before Osiris in the judgment of the afterlife. The newly announced funerary unit, with its Osirian burials and its small army of ushabti servants, fits squarely within that same devotional world, another chapter in the long afterlife of a necropolis that has been serving the Delta’s dead, and now its archaeologists, for well over two thousand years.
Source: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities وزارة السياحة والآثار