A deep burial well was found on the path leading to King Tuthmosis III’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The well leads to a burial chamber filled with a treasured collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts. Further inside the chamber, excavators stumbled upon a wooden sarcophagus painted black and decorated with hieroglyphic texts, and a wooden stelae engraved with the names and different titles of the deceased. The tomb dates to the 22nd Dynasty (945-712 BC) and it belongs to the daughter of Amun Re, lecture priest in Karnak temples and also the singer of the God Amun Re.

The Antiquities and Tourism police stepped in to stop residents of Beheira digging at Al-Qalayan archaeological site.

Minister of State for Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim announced that construction would take 40 months and the museum would be officially opened on 15 August 2015. It will relate the history of the ancient Egyptian civilisation from prehistory right through to the early Graeco-Roman period.

The third phase will include construction of the GEM's main building, in which the museum’s roughly 150,000 artefacts will be exhibited. The building is designed to look like a chamfered triangle in plan, with the building's north and south walls lining up directly with the Great Pyramids of Khufu and Menkaure. A large plaza, teeming with date palms, will be located in the front of the building.

The Minister of State for Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim led a tour around the Giza plateau to monitor work being done on the Sphinx’s Valley Temple and Mit-Rahina archaeological site, as part of the lead up to the second phase of the Giza Plateau Development Project due to be launched in March.

The Ministry of State for Antiquities has selected Beit Al-Sennari (Sennari House) as the temporary location for the Egyptian Scientific Institute until its restoration is complete. All rescued books from the institute, burned during clashes between protesters and the army last month, have now been transferred for storage at the Sennari House in Cairo’s Sayeda Zeinab district. Sennari House was the original location of the scientific institute established by Napoleon Bonaparte’s French expedition to Egypt in 1798 as a counterpart to the French Scientific Institute in Paris.

During an inspection tour of Luxor’s archaeological sites, the Minister of State for Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim announced that the Avenue of Sphinxes will be partly opened to public by mid March. He explained that a 150 metre long section out of the 2,700 meters of the avenue will be ready for the public after restoration, promising to solve all technical and financial problems in order to resume restoration work in the rest of the avenue.

The Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA) has decided to exempt bazaar, cafeteria and gift shop owners in museums and archaeological sites from paying rent for June and August. As part of the ministry’s move, any legal action that has been initiated against the owners of affected businesses will be stopped. The step was approved by the MSA’s Administration Council and comes as an attempt to reduce the burden on businesses affected by the slump in the tourism industry.

A fire that erupted in Egypt’s Institute for the Advancement of Scientific Research has resulted in the loss of several precious manuscripts. Nearly 30,000 books were rescued out of a total of around 196,000 in the institute’s collection