5000 year old antiques unearthed in Abydos
Egypt, Local, 3/15/2004

Egypt's Culture Minister Farouk Hosni said the funerary fence of King Hor A-ha (Fighter Horus), the first of the early dynasties' kings (3000 BC), and the remains of 10 donkeys believed to have been used to carry sacred items to the underworld were unearthed.

Hosni, in statements Sunday, said the discovery came at the end of the US mission's work in Abydos, Sohag governorate, supervised by archaeologist David O'Connor, a professor at the New York University.

Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), Zahi Hawas, said the find is the first funerary monument for King Hor A-ha since a British archaeologist first managed to unearth the king's tomb in 1900.

He said a gallery of the king was also found in good condition, surrounded by six buried objects, most likely the king's servants and court men, who supposedly would serve the king in the underworld.

Mathew Adams, a member of the mission, said that another fence of an unknown king of the 1st Dynasty was also found.

Meanwhile, Hosni said he will open a project to restore and rejuvenate the incomplete Obelisk area in Aswan in mid-2004, to be the first outdoor museum to show monuments that were not completed by the ancient Egyptians.

Touring the area Sunday with Governor Samir Youssef, SCA chief Hawas and Upper Egypt Antiquities Department Director Helil Ghali, the minister said the project took 18 months of work and cost L.E. 15 million.

He said Egypt will also retrieve two archaeological plaques of the ancient Egyptian ones stolen in Switzerland.

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