What happened after the tomb was full? Unravelling 2,700 years of burial, reuse and ritual in ancient Egypt

Deep inside a burial chamber cut into the slope of Wadi Hatasun, a dry river valley on the Nile's west bank in Luxor, two mummified adults lie side by side, arms crossed over their chests in the sacred pose of Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld. A mummified dog rests across their shins.

The scene is among the most striking to emerge from Theban Tomb 209 (TT 209) and the centrepiece of a new study published on 18 August 2026 by a joint Spanish-Egyptian team in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

The study examines how this single burial space was reused and reworked across roughly three centuries — from the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty (744 BC-656 BC), when Kushite kings from Nubia ruled Egypt, through the Persian and Ptolemaic periods — revealing that burial practices shifted from individually coffined bodies to the deceased being stacked directly on top of one another.

The excavation took four years, from 2018 to 2022, but the analysis has only now been made public.

The roughly 2,700-year-old tomb sits within the Theban Necropolis, part of a site UNESCO declared a World Heritage property in 1979.

Ancient Thebes and its Necropolis — one of the most concentrated archaeological landscapes on Earth — is a pillar of Egypt's tourism industry, with freshly unearthed tombs continuing to make headlines.

"There are always new things happening in Luxor," Tourism and Antiquities Minister Sherif Fathy said at the unveiling of the restored Colossi of Memnon last December.

The new TT 209 study is just the latest.

Of the many chambers inside TT 209, one in particular, known as Side Chamber 3 (SC3), holds the fullest, most intact sequence of bodies.

"This is the only one we have preserved like a good sequence of bodies," Dr Jared Carballo-Pérez, of Leiden University, told The New Arab.

Elsewhere in the tomb, remains have been looted or disturbed by later intrusions, leaving scattered bones rather than an intact sequence. Because of that, SC3 was the team's focus

The findings come from a joint Spanish-Egyptian project known as dos cero nueve, Spanish for "two zero nine," a nod to the tomb's number.

It was co-led by Carballo-Pérez and Dr Miguel Ángel Molinero Polo of the Universidad de La Laguna, under permits from Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The challenge is to piece together a picture of the deep past from the smallest of traces, said Molinero Polo, the study's senior author and director of the mission.

"We have few details regarding how the people who entered tombs behaved, what their motivations were in each historical period, and how they conceptually reconfigured the pre-existing space," he told The New Arab.

TT 209 was built for Nisemro, a high official of Nubian origin active in Thebes in the early years of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty.

The tomb sits on the slope of an active wadi. That makes it prone to flooding.

"The mummies were heavily affected by the fact that it was flooded," Carballo-Pérez said. It was also an opportunity for the team to compare ancient flood layers with recent ones, some from the 1990s and identifiable through datable plastic debris, helping them piece together a history of flooding in Luxor.

Inside SC3, researchers documented 16 human individuals in primary or partly primary positions, meaning their remains were found in the same location and arrangement as at burial.

They also found a mummified dog. A separate secondary deposit affected by burning and later disturbances contained 1,775 bone fragments from at least four more people.

Some fragments were later incorporated into a thick, reworked layer of sediment above it, and their original source is still unclear.

The study employed archaeothanatological techniques, which analyse the positioning of bodies and their decay in relation to surrounding earth layers, to understand how past groups treated the dead.

Similar studies have been done on predynastic sites in Egypt's western oases, but this is the first of its kind on the Theban burial sites of this period.

"I would say it is at least the first study we have with this approach," said Carballo-Pérez.

Previous studies looked at tomb reuse in Thebes, but from a different angle. Earlier work by Egyptologist Gianluca Miniaci "focused mainly on architectural restructuring or material culture," said Carballo-Pérez.

From individual burials to a shared, stacked space

The earliest burials in the chamber, likely from the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, present the classic image of an ancient Egyptian burial: individual bodies in wooden coffins, each in its own space, surrounded by jars, amulets and beads.

"The earliest individuals buried here appear to have been of high social standing," Molinero Polo said, "as they were interred in coffins, with funerary nets and amulets, and with an assemblage containing costly items, such as the contents held in Phoenician amphorae."

Then, from the late Twenty-Fifth Dynasty onwards, burial practices began to change: the deceased were placed directly into spaces where others had already been buried.

By the Persian and Ptolemaic periods, bodies were routinely stacked on top of each other. Coffins, once a cornerstone of every burial, became rarer and then largely disappeared.

In the past, scholars have pointed to recycled tombs as a sign of economic decline, but Carballo-Pérez and his colleague push back on this narrative.

Both the earliest and latest burials included funerary items and offerings, he said. "I wouldn't say it's that they were poorer. I would say it's just a change in the funerary behaviours and the customs that this population had."

Tarek Sayed Tawfik, professor of Egyptology at Cairo University's Faculty of Archaeology and president of the International Association of Egyptologists, put it like this: "It could be called relative poverty," he told The New Arab. 

"Owning a luxurious, decorated coffin points to a certain level of wealth, but relying on embalming wrappings alone doesn't mean a total absence of wealth – mummification itself was costly and shows that the person held a certain social standing."

An open question over arm position

The crossed-arm posture of some of the mummies in SC3 is known as the Osirian pose, named after Osiris – the god of the afterlife and resurrection, who was famously killed by his jealous brother Set and brought back to life by his wife, Isis.

A mummy with arms folded over the chest is one of ancient Egypt's most recognisable burial images. Though, as the researchers found, it was not a pose used at every point in time, or on every body.

Carballo-Pérez said the team found both the Osirian pose and straight, extended arms at every level of the chamber, with no statistically clear pattern by period, though the pose was somewhat more common in the Ptolemaic layers.

He said the sample was small, raising another possibility: that the pattern reflects a change in custom within the same population, rather than a change in who was buried there. "We can just say that there are some changes in the burial customs," he said.

The straight-arm position is understood as the older of the two, said Tawfik, "though it remains an observation needing more comparative study."

Both researchers agree that the evidence isn't yet strong enough to support a firm rule.

It is in one of the tomb’s later, denser phases – dated to the Persian period – that the mummified dog appears, placed across the lower legs of the man and woman in the Osirian pose.

Carballo-Pérez said this is, as far as the team could tell from a preliminary review of previously published finds, the first documented case of a mummified dog buried directly on top of a human body.

“There's maybe a closer relationship rather than an offering,” he said.

He also raised, then set aside, a tempting connection. Nisemro, the tomb's original owner, is shown in inscriptions with a dog named Hekenu, a detail Molinero Polo documented in earlier fieldwork on the tomb.

But Carballo-Pérez said the couple dated centuries later, too wide a gap to draw any direct link.

Molinero Polo offered another possibility: that the animal may have taken on the role of a psychopomp, a symbolic helper guiding the dead into the afterlife.

The most famous example from ancient Egypt is Anubis, the jackal-headed canine who leads the deceased to the underworld and oversees the weighing of the heart, or final judgment ceremony.

The paper's authors describe SC3 as a "mortuary environment," a term meant to capture how the chamber's organisation carried forward from one burial to the next, with the one-to-one relationship between an individual, their coffin and their funerary equipment gradually dissolving into a shared system.

As Carballo-Pérez put it, the wider Theban necropolis functions similarly: "the whole Theban necropolis is a funerary landscape – modified across time through the reuse of tombs."

[Cover image: Mummified individuals from Side Chamber 3 of Theban Tomb 209, showing variation in body orientation and arm position. Credit: Proyecto dos cero nueve, Universidad de La Laguna/Jared Carballo-Pérez]

Ashraf Amin is a senior editor and science and environmental journalist with 26 years of experience. He also works as a media trainer and podcast host covering the healthcare sector across Egypt, MENA, and Africa. He holds a Master's degree in science and technology policy from the University of Sussex

This article is published in collaboration with Egab