In a thrilling discovery, archaeologists have unearthed a ransacked 3,300-years-old tomb at an ancient cemetery in Egypt that had a 23-feet-high pyramid at its entrance.
The tomb, found at the site of Abydos, has a finely-crafted sandstone sarcophagus, a box-like funeral receptacle for a corpse.
There is no mummy in the sarcophagus but archaeologists found skeletal remains from three to four men, 10 to 12 women and at least two children in the tomb, media reports said.
The sarcophagus has images of several Egyptian Gods on it.
"Originally, all you probably would have seen was the pyramid and maybe a little wall around the structure just to enclose everything," said lead excavator Kevin Cahail, a doctoral student at University of Pennsylvania.
According to Cahail, it was not uncommon at that time for tombs of elite individuals to contain small pyramids.
The bones discovered in the tomb indicate that considerably more women than men were buried in the tomb.
The pyramid itself probably would have had a small mortuary chapel inside of it, the archaeologists noted.
That elite family had military ties that allowed them to afford such an elaborate tomb and nursed dream to become pharaohs one day.
The archaeologists also found a heart amulet, made of red and green jasper.
"It was probably on the chest of one of the deceased individuals and there probably would have been some sort of necklaces and gold and things like that," Cahail was quoted as saying.
