Digging through the desert south of Cairo in Abydos, Pennsylvania University archaeologist Josef Wegner and his team did not expect to find the remains of what could have been one of Ancient Egypt’s last traditional funerary boats and clues to the burial place of 12th dynasty Pharaoh Senwosret III, which has eluded archaeologists for years. Underground, Wegner and his crew found a 21-meter long and 4-meter wide vault that had been robbed of most of its valuables during ancient times. Inside were some jars and a few wooden planks from a ship they now believe belonged to Senwosret III’s funerary procession. The ruler built several tombs during his lifetime — one in his capital Itjtawy about 450 kilometers north of Abydos, a pyramid in Dahshur not for from the Giza Plateau, and a temple in the far south of Abydos, but none had ever been confirmed as his final resting place, National Geographic says.

Etched on its outside walls of this chamber were more than 100 drawings of boats, each slightly different from the other and likely the marks left by mourners after the king’s funeral. The quality of the planks found in the chamber and the fact that the boat had been stripped down suggest “a royal connection,” Wegner says, as the “lumber probably included expensive cedar plans imported from Lebanon.” In a nearby site, close to the mythical temple of afterlife god Osiris, with whom Senwosret III was connected, Wegner and his crew also stumbled on a “magnificent stone sarcophagus [that was both] empty and not in its original location,” supporting even more the claim that the pharaoh was buried in Abydos. The funerary boat custom disappeared not long after Senwosret III’s reign ended, as kings then began building secret tombs, probably to protect their mortal remains and worldly possessions from suffering the same fate as many of their predecessors’, meaning that Senwosret III’s are probably the last remaining relics of that ancient tradition. In 2017, Wegner and a team of students and specialists intend to return to the site and hopefully uncover more of its mysteries.