Alexandria’s big black sarcophagus saga : What was inside the big black box

I am trying to keep things light in the blog as much as I can.

Egypt’s Ministry of antiquities declared last week that the initial analysis of skeletons found in that big black sarcophagus unearthed in Alexandria in July was for two men and a woman from the Ptolemaic era.
Gold panels were also found inside the sarcophagus.

There are no further clues revealed publicly on who those people were and where they were buried like that.

What is known from the initial examination of the sarcophagus that the skull of the woman indicated that she was between 20 to 25 years old and a height of around 160 to 164 cm when she died.

The woman's skeleton or remainings of the skeleton to be accurate "Ahram Online" 

One of the other two skeletons goes back to a man who was 35 to 39 years old and a height of 160 to 165.5 cm while the other skeleton goes back to a man who was 40 to 44 years old and a height of 179 to 184.5 cm when he died.

The skeleton of the 35-39 years old man "Ahram Online" 

Interestingly, the team of researchers headed by Zeinab Hashish, director of the Department of Skeleton Remains Studies at the Antiquities Ministry found that there was 17cm-wide round cavity in the skull of the third skeleton, the older man.

Dr. Zeinab Hashish told Ahram Online that that cavity could be the result of “a trepanation” which she explained as “the scraping or drilling of a hole in the skull, and is the oldest surgical intervention in history, found in prehistoric human remains.”
What is even more interesting “at least for me” that form of surgery was rare in Ancient Egypt despite some skulls were found before in the country with that sort of surgery and currently are exhibited in the Kasr Al-Aini hospital museum “another local and less known museum to be on my list”.
She added that some skulls found at the 18th dynasty tomb of Maya and Merit so we are speaking about the Modern kingdom.
 I am not an expert but I believe not all people in the old age had the privilege of having a surgery so the third man could not be a poor man !?

More tests are done to know who those people there and their story.
Moving to those gold panels

The Gold plates "Ahram Online"

The 5cmx3cm gold panels were found in the bottom of the sarcophagus.
The secretary general of High Council of Antiquities Mostafa Waziri believes those panels may refer to military ranks !! The man is insisting that the sarcophagus got a military relation in any way.

I am not an expert like him but those panels reminded me of the gold Ptolemaic jewelry exhibited in Egypt Museum's second floor right before King Tut's section.

I feel that the gold panels above have the same spirit

One thing for sure, that Ptomalic Jewelry was not as sophisticated as the more ancient Egyptian Jewelry

By the way, I will seize this post and share with a very short video I filmed in 2015 for that small Greco-Roman section on the first floor of the Egyptian museum.

The Egyptian Museum does not have only interesting and beautiful ancient Egyptian artifacts and antiquities