Josh Gates Uncovers a Mystery Inside an Egyptian Noble’s Tomb

As an archaeologist, I’ve spent years reading about the collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom – but standing inside these tombs, you don’t just read history, you feel it closing in around you.

Near Luxor, in the tomb of the official Ani, the walls read like a carved report from a civilisation in freefall. Ani proudly lists his titles – dignitary, governor, royal seal bearer, regional ruler – then boasts that he is “the beginning of men and the end of men,” a level of self-importance that only appears when central power is slipping. In the same inscription, the tone shifts from arrogance to desperation: he describes all of Upper Egypt “dying of hunger,” and “every man eating his child.” Exaggeration, perhaps – but exaggeration born from real famine. Geological studies now confirm that around 2200 BCE, at the very moment the Old Kingdom collapsed, parts of the Nile valley were left bone dry. Against that backdrop, powerful local governors controlling food and water were no longer loyal servants of the pharaoh – they were rivals.

Back in Saqqara, inside the tomb of Huu, a mayor under the pharaoh Merenre, we see how that political breakdown played out at the most personal level. When we descended into his beautifully painted burial chamber, we found something jarringly out of place: a crude mudbrick wall blocking half the tomb and, beneath the sand, an “intrusive burial” – a later body laid directly over Huu’s disturbed grave. The wooden coffin of the original owner has been smashed, his burial dismantled. The later mummy, poorly preserved but clearly Old Kingdom in style, had been placed here by someone desperate enough to destroy another man’s eternity to secure his own shot at the afterlife.

We often imagine ancient Egypt as timeless, orderly, obsessed with cosmic balance. But in these final layers of the Old Kingdom, carved boasts, famine texts, broken coffins, and stolen tombs tell a different story: of drought, fear, and people willing to tear up tradition just to survive. In the end, even a “sole friend of the king” like Huu could not escape the chaos he lived through.