The sand of the desert sins of gluttony in Egypt. Gluttonous, it has been feeding on monuments and objects that from time to time resurface from its entrails. This has been the case of the discovery announced this week. The immense Saqqara cemetery has once again amazed with the discovery of 250 sarcophagi and other elements, such as some 150 bronze statuettes. The photographs spread by an Egypt anxious to recover tourism are impressive. Lined up in rows, the anthropomorphic boxes look like a platoon of souls ready to be resurrected, waiting for Egyptologists to relive their stories.
The startling discovery corresponds to the late period, when the lavish empire of the pharaohs was already a shadow of its luminous past. Important discovery, without a doubt. But nothing compared to the great objective of the team of Egyptian archaeologists who ran into such a surprise: find the whereabouts of the most desired tomb by any Egyptologist and amateur who lends himself. And it is not that of any pharaoh, not even that of Cleopatra, who also has her morbidity, but that of a man who lived during the III dynasty, that is, about 4,600 years ago. His name is not strange to us, at least for those who have seen Boris Karloff's The Mummy or his return by Arnold Vosloo.
Indeed, we are talking about Imhotep, also called Imutes, a transcendental character in the history of mankind. He was the first known architect and the first to shape a pyramid, the stepped one, destined to procure eternity for Pharaoh Djoser. And in doing so he became the first to use stone as a building material. It has always been suspected that his tomb must be somewhere in Saqqara, not far from the king who elevated him to the top and who even wrote his name on the base of one of his statues along with some of the honors with which he was awarded: " chancellor to the king of Lower Egypt, administrator of the palace, hereditary nobleman, high priest of Heliopolis. Imhotep the builder, the sculptor, the maker of stone vessels."
If he had lived in Quattrocento Florence, no one would doubt his Renaissance character. He was also a writer, for example. He is known a lost work. But above all he was a doctor, and of great reputation. Manetho speaks of him: “among the Egyptians he is considered as Asclepius by his medical science”. In fact, it was his healing virtues that elevated him to the god of medicine in the Low Age, the one to which the 250 sarcophagi belong. And, what things are, in the absence of his burial, among the findings is a statue that represents him deified. How did you conceive of his own tomb? What would you reveal about this great character full of questions? Discovering his eternal abode is a dream, a chimera. Any member of the mission would change without blinking the 250 sarcophagi they have found for just one: that of the great Imhotep.
