News: Tomb of the Birds

Dr Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, is now exploring the Tomb of the Birds, the point of access to Giza's cave underworld discovered last year by Nigel Skinner Simpson, Sue Collins and myself. Coincidence? Note likely. He and his team have been in there ever since news of the discovery hit the internet in August. Obviously, I applaud his interest in our cave discoveries, but I remain cautious of his intentions. His official view will be that he has found Giza's lost bird and animal cemetery, long known to exist on the plateau but never traced until now. I suspect that this will be the official announcement next year. I might be wrong. Let's wait and see.

Yet strangely there is still no mention of the caves themselves. In an email to me last Friday he admits that the "system" is now being cleared, and that in his opinion it is merely a "catacomb", like so many others in Egypt.

This is wrong. Other catacombs in Egypt are rock cut by human hands. What we have found is a unique natural cave system that stretches beneath the plateau for hundreds of meters, and would seem to have been adapted in Egypt's Late Dynastic period to become a bird cemetery.