A 4,000-year-old burial chamber which belongs to an ancient Egyptian queen has been found outside Cairo.

The necropolis of Saqqara outside Cairo has yielded a string of new discoveries as 10 different teams excavate a previously untouched area of these burial grounds were used continuously for more than 2,000 years until Roman times.

French mission head Philippe Collombert said the mummy of Queen Behenu was destroyed, but the chamber contained green hieroglyphics picked out on white stone known as the “Pyramid Texts.”

“We are excited because the texts are well conserved,” he told The Associated Press, adding the queen’s titles were written on the walls of the 33 by 16 foot (10 metre by 5 metre) burial chamber inside her small pyramid.

The text is primarily concerned with protecting the queen’s remains and her transition to afterlife.

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An intact Roman burial urn has been found in England, complete with human ashes inside.

The 2,000-year-old vessel, which is whole and unbroken, was dug up during construction work on the Millwood Homes site in the centre of the town.

It was x-rayed at Exeter Airport because it was too large for the machines at the city’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum.

Pictures showed it contains soil, dense material thought to be ash from the cremation and several mysterious curved object, which may be bone fragments or possibly metal items.

The urn is one of many finds at the Cullompton site that prove the Roman occupation lasted from the 1st Century until the 4th Century – a fort on St Andrews Hill discovered in 1984 suggested they left in the mid-70s AD.

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The remains of an East Asian man, the first ever discovered, has been found in a Roman cemetery in Vagnari, Italy.

The surprise is that the DNA tests show that one of the skeletons, a man, has an East Asian ancestry – on his mother’s side. This appears to be the first time that a skeleton with an East Asian ancestry has been discovered in the Roman Empire.

However, it seems like this contact between east and west did not go well.

Vagnari was an imperial estate during this time. The emperor controlled it and at least some of the workers were slaves. One of the tiles found at Vagnari is marked “Gratus” which means “slave” of the emperor. The workers produced iron implements and textiles. The landscape around them was nearly treeless, making the Italian summer weather all the worse.

The man with East Asian ancestry may well have been a slave himself. He lived sometime in the first to second century AD, in the early days of the Roman Empire. Much of his skeleton (pictured here) has not survived. The man’s surviving grave goods consist of a single pot (which archaeologists used to date the burial). To top things off someone was buried on top of him – with a superior collection of grave goods.

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The discovery of Iron Age remains in Laos is shedding new light on the regions prehistoric burial practices.

The discovery was made during a dig known as the Middle Mekong Archaeological Project, which is a joint effort between Laos’ Department of Heritage and the University of Pennsylvania Museum in the United States.

“Last week, we unexpectedly found two skulls and a fragment of a third, a baby, along with some body bones,” said Joyce White, associate curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. “It is quite a significant discovery of Lao archaeology.”

Also among the items found was a burial pot containing human bones, which was the first such example of a secondary burial, or the custom of dismembering a corpse and removing all flesh so the bones could be placed in a container.

Although the practice was common in neighbouring Thailand and Vietnam, this was the first evidence of a secondary burial in what is now Laos.

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A first-century tomb found near the Old City in Jerusalem contains the first known case of leprosy. The man was buried in a shroud made up of a simple two-way weave, which is nothing like the complex weave of the Turin shroud, making it further evidence that it is a medieval fake.

The tomb is very unusual because it is clear that this man, whose remains are dated by radiocarbon methods to 1 CE to 50 CE, did not receive a subsequent burial. Secondary burials were common practice at the time, when the bones were removed after a year and placed in an ossuary (a bone box made of stone). In this case, however, the entrance to this part of the tomb was completely sealed with plaster. Spigelman believes this is because the man had suffered from leprosy and died of tuberculosis, as DNA of both diseases was found in his bones.

Historically, disfiguring diseases such as leprosy led to the sufferer being ostracized from their community. However, a number of indications – the location and size of the tomb, the type of textiles used as shroud wrappings, and the clean state of the hair – suggest that the shrouded individual was a fairly affluent member of Jerusalem society, and that tuberculosis and leprosy may have crossed social boundaries at that time.

This is also the first time fragments of a burial shroud have been found from the time of Jesus in Jerusalem. The shroud is very different to that of the Turin Shroud, until now assumed to be the one that was used to wrap the body of Jesus after his crucifixion. Unlike the complex weave of the Turin Shroud, this is made up of a simple two-way weave, as textile historian Dr. Orit Shamir was able to demonstrate.

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