Amazing 4,500-Year-Old Egyptian Bead-Net Dress Found In Giza Tomb Restored

AncientPages.com | June 27, 2023

Amazing 4,500-Year-Old Egyptian Bead-Net Dress Found In Giza Tomb Restored
AncientPages.com | June 27, 2023 |

Ellen Lloyd - AncientPages.com - In 1927, a team of archaeologists led by George A. Reisner excavated at Giza, Egypt, where they unearthed a remarkable ancient treasure. The scientists discovered the only complete ancient Egyptian bead-net dress found to date in one of the tombs! Most ancient Egyptian tombs have been looted, but the owner's burial had remained undisturbed, giving archaeologists a unique opportunity to examine the incredible clothing.

Inside the Giza Mastaba tomb G7440 were the skeletal remains of an unidentified female. Riesner was a thorough archaeologist who photographed and documented everything inside the tomb. He also wrote a daily diary describing everything of importance concerning tomb G7440. Thanks to this diary and Riesner's archaeological methodology and highly controlled recording techniques, scientists could reconstruct the incredible dress found in tomb G7440 60 years later.

As a research associate for a prospective MFA exhibit on the burial practices and funerary beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, I was assigned the task of solving the mystery tiny round boxes and their bead-contents. Some 7,000 of the latter, of varied color, size, and shape, suggested that I was dealing with an object of major proportion; but what form would these beads assume when restored to their original configuration? Millicent Jick recalls.

Sitting in the basement storage room of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Jick read the archaeological diaries and counted and sorted the thousands of beads in the small boxes. He was trying to determine what it all meant. The fact he was familiar with large ancient bead-net burial shrouds was, of course, an advantage when trying to solve this ancient mystery.

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Beadnet dress - Egyptian Old Kingdom, Dynasty 4, reign of Khufu2551–2528 B.C.Findspot: Egypt, Giza, Tomb G 7440 Z. Credit: MFA Boston

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