Pharoah's Wife's Jewels.

Waikato Argus, Volume XXIV, Issue 3750, 6 April 1908, Page 2

Pharoah's Wife's Jewels.

Archaeologists are excited over a recent find of great importance in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, where the jewels of the wife of Seti 11. have been brought to light. She was a royal lady of the nineteenth dynasty, who lived about 1300 years 8.C., and was probably no less a person than the wife of the Pharaoh of Exodus. It is said there are bracelets of heavy gold, earrings several inches in length, bearing the cartouche of the royal wearer, rings of elaborate workmanship, and fillets of gold, which the Queen wore round her head; but no one but the fortunate finders and experts have yet viewed the treasure —with the exception of Sir Eldon and Lady Curst. The tomb itself proved empty, the jewels being found a few days later embedded in mud, where they had probably been thrown by robbers of some bygone age, who plundered the tomb of the royal dead.

Engineers working at Shellal, in connection with the heightening of the great Nile dam below Philac, announce the discovrcy of a prehistoric cemetery. As in the case of the jewels found at Thebes, the public are excluded till it has been viewed by experts; but it is an open secret that the bodies found are those of a pre-dynastic people, who, embalmed in a most primitive way, were small in stature, and so poor in worldly goods that they carried with them to their graves only a few pebble ornaments. Near to this cemetery a trench was discovered, in which were found the bodies of 40 Roman soldiers lying side by side with their heads cut off.

Another pre-historic mummy, of the period of the one in the British Museum, was found at Thebes recently, and will be sent to England before long.