Excavators studying ancient Egyptian tombs discovered that even the ultra-wealthy suffered from disease and malnutrition

Thousands of years ago, locals cut the tombs into the hill's rock. They used the area as a cemetery for nearly a millennium, starting in the 6th century BCE, centuries before the construction of Egypt's pyramids.

The necropolis is enormous, covering over 1 million square feet, the size of about 17 American football fields, and scientists have only searched about 33 of the estimated 300 to 400 tombs.

The hill contains between eight and 10 terraces, or levels, with the wealthiest members of society interred at the top.

"We have, for example, a general of the army of Aswan and the administrator of temples," Piacentini said. "So very, very high positions." The funerary equipment in these tombs tends to be more valuable too, she said.

The tombs don't have evidence of the poorer classes, Piacentini said. They would have likely been buried in simpler tombs in the desert.

The joint team of excavators aren't the first to discover this ancient site. These upper-class tombs were likely once filled with objects made of precious metals and other valuable items, but the researchers rarely find anything of the sort. Centuries ago, grave robbers probably removed them, Piacentini said.

However, there are still plenty of items for Piacentini and her team to explore, including wooden statues, clay figurines, oil lamps, and other objects.

One common item in many of the tombs is cartonnage, a kind of plaster made of papyrus. Ancient Egyptians often covered bodies in casts made from the plaster and decorated them. This image shows a cartonnage chest covering found in the tomb.

These days, there's a market for stolen cartonnages, and illegal excavators were targeting the tombs before the Egyptian government took over the site, Ahram Online reported in 2015.

In addition to cartonnage masks like the one pictured here, the citizens of Aswan would stock their relatives' tombs with sycamore figs or dates left in vases.

"These were the offerings brought to the dead," Piacentini said.

Chemists, paleobotanists, and bioarchaeologists are looking at every aspect of the tombs, from mummy wrappings to plant remains to animal bones.

"Our mission is an interdisciplinary mission," Piacentini said, adding that there's still much more to be learned.

The process is so slow and careful that the team can only study a handful of tombs a year, Piacentini said.

Early excavators used to remove wrappings from bodies to examine them. Now, experts use CT scans and X-ray machines to "virtually unwrap" mummified remains.

This can help researchers learn new information about mummification techniques. For example, two children had rods between their vertebrae to help keep their bodies perfectly straight after death, Piacentini said.

Early results from some of the experts' research revealed that between 30% and 40% of the people in the tombs were children, from newborns to teenagers.

Many of the people, including the wealthy, showed signs of anemia, malnutrition, and other diseases. Entire families may have died from tuberculosis, according to the researchers.

In addition to disease, childbirth was another common cause of death, for both the mother and baby, across all social classes.

While some refer to the Aswan necropolis as a "city of death," Piacentini prefers to think of it as a city for eternity. "They wanted to live forever," she said. "And they did because we discovered them. We studied them."

And there's enough of the necropolis left unexplored that the excavations will continue, too. "It'll last forever," she said.