The mission is due to leave Poland on Saturday to begin the next stage of research in the burial chamber of the Fourth Dynasty ruler.
The project, known as the "Mastaba of the Pharaoh" mission, is a joint effort by the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
A mastaba is a type of flat-roofed, rectangular tomb used in ancient Egypt, while a necropolis is a large burial ground.
The stone structure at Saqqara, known in Arabic as Mastabat al-Fir’aun, is the grave monument of Shepseskaf, the sixth and probably last ruler of the fourth dynasty during the Old Kingdom period, c. 2700 to 2200 BC, also known as the "Age of the Pyramid Builders."
At a briefing on Thursday at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, mission leader Prof. Teodozja Rzeuska said that although the team has spent only about three months in the field so far, the work is already changing what scholars know about the tomb.
She said the researchers have gathered "a lot of data and several discoveries" that shed new light on how the complex functioned both during the centuries when the official cult of the pharaoh was active and in later periods.
In the first season, at the beginning of 2024, the Polish-Egyptian team carried out precise measurements of the structure and created a detailed three-dimensional digital model of the site.
In the following campaign, researchers focused on the burial chamber, collected many fragments of the destroyed royal sarcophagus and began the painstaking process of reconstructing it.
According to Rzeuska, the team has already confirmed that the burial complex had been built in several phases, although it is still unclear who commissioned the later stages and when exactly they were added.
One surprise came with the discovery of pottery fragments from the time of Ramesses II on the roof of the mastaba, more than 12 centuries after Shepseskaf's reign. The team plans to investigate how these later objects ended up there as the work continues.
The most striking find so far has been evidence that the tomb once housed a Byzantine Christian hermit.
In the burial chamber the archaeologists uncovered fragments of Byzantine amphorae, the remains of an oven used for baking and cooking, and a niche that had been reshaped into a small sleeping alcove.
Early Christian monks were known to live in abandoned temples and tombs in Egypt, but Rzeuska noted that for nearly 170 years, since the mastaba was re-opened in the 19th century, no one had recognized these traces of a monastic dwelling inside Shepseskaf's tomb.
The mission is funded in part through a crowdfunding campaign on the Patronite platform, supported by more than 3,000 individual donors, as well as backing from the Polish Business Roundtable, the Umbra Orientis Foundation, the OmenaArt Foundation and Poland's Ministry of Science and Higher Education.
The team expects to return to Poland before Christmas and hopes to resume work in Saqqara in the spring.
Poland’s latest work at Saqqara builds on a long tradition of Polish archaeology in Egypt and the wider Mediterranean region.
Since the mid-20th century, Polish expeditions have taken part in major projects, from the temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari to the rescue excavations at Faras in Nubia, and long-running work at Old Dongola in Sudan and Nea Paphos in Cyprus.
These missions, carried out by the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology of the University of Warsaw and associated institutes, helped establish what is referred to as the "Polish school of Mediterranean archaeology," known internationally for combining field excavation with conservation and museum work.
Thursday’s presentation in Warsaw coincided with the opening of a new library at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
The library was named after Prof. Kazimierz Michałowski, a pioneering Egyptologist and the founder of the Polish school of Mediterranean archaeology, in a ceremony attended by Deputy Science Minister Karolina Zioło-Pużuk.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP