Archaeologists Opened a Tomb Full of Golden Mummies — What They Found Was Unbelievable

In 1996, a guard's donkey stumbled into a hidden hole near the Bahariya Oasis, in Egypt's Western Desert. Looking down, the guard saw golden faces staring back from the dark. It was the Valley of the Golden Mummies, a Greco-Roman cemetery that may hold as many as ten thousand bodies. We follow the whole story: the oasis and its temple of Alexander the Great; Zahi Hawass's excavations from 1999; the four styles of burial, from gilded masks to plain linen; the families buried side by side; Roman Egypt, Cleopatra and the Fayum portraits; the tomb of governor Djed Khonsu Iuf Ankh under the houses of Bawiti; the epidemic theory and why the tombs tell a longer story; and the ka, the heart and the weighing of the soul.