And then there were more

The burial ground which spans 2,70,000 feet and sheltered tombs ascending up to 10 terraces. PIC/NY POST

Egypt's City of the Dead, Aswan, is a gift that keeps giving - if you are an archaeologist. A team recently uncovered more than 36 tombs from an ancient cemetery that had 300 documented tombs so far. And each tomb is said to hold 30 to 40 mummified bodies each. Five years of digging at the site that was once located on the hill near the modern Mausoleum of Aga Khan III, brought up burial grounds spanning 2,70,000 sqft and with tombs ascending up to 10 terraces. The team of international researchers estimated the site had been in use for around 900 years, between 6 BCE and 9 CE.

According to Ayman Ashmawy, who heads Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, 30 to 40 per cent of the remains belong to infants and adolescents, many of whom died of infectious diseases and life-threatening illnesses including anaemia, tuberculosis, and diseased organs.

"Aswan has been a historical meeting point - goods from southern regions of the continent would arrive here, and be dispersed everywhere else," says Patrizia Piacentini, an archaeologist at the University of Milan, who led the team. Describing one of the mummified remains, she says, "At first, we thought they were mother and child, but new CT scans showed they are two children. We recently found a woman near them, who was likely their mother and the remains of a man, likely to be their father."

Aswan was nicknamed the City of the Dead after a similar discovery in 2019. A tomb containing the mummies of two children was discovered, and then later, two more remains, presumed to be their parents, were uncovered. Each dig thereafter has uncovered dozens more tombs and provided more clues about the civilisation that thrived there more than 2,000 years ago. Further excavation also revealed that bodies were buried according to their socio-economic classes, with the remains of the elite, entombed at the top of the hill.

900 yrs
Estimated use of the site

Ungratefulness comes with a cost

Woman poisons husband for not appreciating surprise birthday party

A spousal squabble took a life-threatening turn when a disgruntled Missouri woman spiked her husband's Mountain Dew with a weed killer. His crime? Not being appreciative of her efforts to plan and throw him a surprise birthday party for his 50th. According to officials, the man had become suspicious when he noticed that one of the bottles of the fizzy drink in their refrigerator tasted unfamiliar. When it started revolting inside him and ejecting from both ends, he decided to check CCTV camera footage. It caught his wife pouring the herbicide, Round Up, into his soda. "Michelle admitted to putting the household poison from the basement into the two-litre Mountain Dew bottle," the police said in an affidavit, "and placing it in the garage refrigerator on the evening of June 23, 2024. Michelle said she was mad and just wanted to be mean."

Now, that's a tip

Pic/The Daily Mail

A stranger played fairy godmother to her food delivery partner, by making his wedding dreams come true. Paul Slobodzian attached an endearing note with Erica Hernandez's chipotle order, expressing his desire to give his fiancée a wedding she deserves. She later shared it on TikTok, where it became viral and and soon the wedding kitty was full. Grateful, they also invited her.

A toast to her toes

PIC/ODDITY CENTRAL

A British foot model, Emilie Rae, is selling wine, worth £100 (Rs 10,000), made by crushing grapes with her feet, to the ecstacy of podophiles everywhere. Named as the Simp Wine, Rae also expresses, "I nearly lost my life in the trampling process. When the skin of the grapes break, they become really slippery, I was stomping away, trying to look sexy in this ball gown, and the next minute, I'm flying off to the side."

That gavel didn't go off!

A 90-year-old Chinese woman, identified only by her last name Qin, has been using a hand grenade to crack nuts for 20 years. She only realised she had been gambling with her life when some handymen pointed out it was a hand grenade.

For the die-hard fans

A member of the University of Nebraska, Barbara Weitz, recently proposed rooms to be made for urns containing the mortal remains of Cornhuskers, as the team's fans are called, under the Nebraska Memorial Stadium. What was made as a light-hearted suggestion, was eventually considered to make up the budget shortfall.

Typo frees murderer

A small mistype in prisoner number set an American man free. Amarion Sanders, charged with murder, was accidentally dismissed from Cuyahoga County Jail in Ohio instead of another prisoner with a similar number. Sanders, who was held in connection with a gun-shooting in September last year, is now on the run with the police hot on his heels.