Fox TV cameras followed Zahi Hawass, a top Egyptian archaeologist, as he descended into a narrow shaft to reach the main room in the tomb of Kai, a high priest in a pharaoh's court. With an audience of millions watching in America on Tuesday night, Hawass slid the lid off a dark brown wooden sarcophagus to reveal a dusty mummy in off-white bandage -- that of Kai. Hawass had earlier entered an adjacent tomb and found two skeletons, believed to be that of Kai's wife and daughter. The tombs are about a half-mile from the three Great Pyramids on the Giza Plateau in Cairo. Kai's mummy has little significance even though it is older than the famed 3,300-year-old King Tut's tomb, discovered in 1922.
But Hawass noted that the importance of Wednesday's broadcast, called "Opening the Lost Tombs: Live From Egypt," was in bringing archaeology into people's living rooms as it happened. "This is the first time we have done something live," Hawass told The Associated Press. Fox's executive producer Peter Isacksen said he was relieved and pleased: "I think it is very good for television to do something different and make archaeology more fun and cool."
Though the tombs had been discovered earlier, the main rooms and the sarcophagus were not opened until early Wednesday so the discoveries could be made during the live show. Hawass said an artist's signature was found in Kai's tomb; in the past, no signatures had been noted on tomb paintings. Other paintings on the walls inside the wife's tomb were the most impressive find, he said. They showed "butchers bringing thighs of cows and it shows people bringing offerings, women standing. ... It's beautiful life scenes." They illustrate "a lot about the family relationship," he said.
Hawass and the TV crew later entered one of the three small pyramids of the pharaoh's queens that stand in the shadow of the Great Pyramids. Hawass had hoped to find the remains of Queen Khamerernebty II. But when he ventured 60 feet down through a narrow passageway, crawling and ducking all the way, he found an incomplete burial chamber. Inside, there was a skeleton he believed could have been a grave robber. "No pyramid is similar to this at all," he told The Associated Press afterward. "The entrance and the chambers were unfinished and the queen was never buried here. She is buried somewhere else in a tomb and therefore, this pyramid was never used."
The program cost Fox $3 million, including a contribution to Egypt's antiquities department made in return for government permission for the broadcast, network officials said.
Egyptian Tomb Discoveries on Live TV
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- An archaeologist crept through two Pharaonic-era tombs on live television early Wednesday and found a mummy, skeletons and pottery believed to be 4,200 years old.
