Three years ago, on a windswept archaeological site in a remote Egyptian oasis, a guard patrolling on his donkey slipped down a hole. Not an earth-shattering event - until it was discovered that the hole was in fact a tomb piled high with mummified bodies that had lain undisturbed for almost two thousand years.
As archaeologists rushed to the area it became clear that with his fall, the guard had unwittingly stumbled upon one of the most spectacular caches of mummies ever found in this antiquities-rich country.
In the three years since the discovery, a team of archaeologists led by Dr Zahi Hawass, director of the Giza plateau, have found that the tomb was only one of many lying beneath the sands just outside Bawiti, the capital Bahariyya Oasis, some 350 km south-west of the Giza pyramids.
So far they have only excavated four, yet in that small number alone they have unearthed one hundred and five mummified bodies, which they estimate date back to the first and second century AD, when successive Greek and Roman dynasties ruled Egypt.
"I call this `The Valley of the Mummies'," Dr Hawass said of the necropolis when details of its contents were made public recently. "This is the largest ever intact-mummy find that has been made."
According to Dr Hawass, four kinds of mummy have been unearthed in Bahariyya. Some are simply wrapped in linen, others are inside terracotta coffins and decorated with human faces. Many are covered with cartonnage (a kind of pasteboard made of linen or papyrus) and decorated with pharaonic religious motifs, while the most spectacular have guilded masks.
Buried with the mummies were a wide range of artefacts, including terracotta figures of Egyptian gods, jewellery and coins (which allowed the archaeological team to date the find to the GraecoRoman period).
Mummies are not usually big news in Egypt. A bit of snooping in the sand around the thousands of tomb entrances that honeycomb the country often unearths bits of brittle linen that were once wrapped around a corpse. In the last century the ancient wrapped bodies were so commonplace that European travellers in Egypt used them for fuel, and bazaar touts ground them up and sold them as aphrodisiacs.
But the Bahariyya discovery is different. Its sheer size makes it unique: a six square kilometre area that Dr Hawass estimates could contain as many as 10,000 corpses stacked in what may have been family vaults, some carved from the sandstone, others with deep shafts leading to burial chambers. Also exciting is that the tombs have not been touched since their occupants were buried almost 2,000 years ago.
By contrast, in the Nile Valley, where ancient tomb robbers were the biggest headache of those hoping for a smooth ride into the afterlife, the tomb of Tutankhamun is the one of the very few found intact in modern times.
THE mummies could also shed new light on life in this part of Egypt during the Graeco-Roman period, a six-hundred year interlude marking the transition between the Pharaonic and Christian eras. Bahariyya was then a thriving oasis, home to as many as 500,000 people, according to Dr Hawass.
Its rich, fertile land, watered by natural springs, was ideal for agriculture. It became a major wheat producer for the empire to the north and was famous for its fine wine. For Greek and Roman colonists, a piece of land here was a coveted reward for a distinguished military career or a sought-after favour for adventurous nobles. Greek and, later, Roman families set up home and became a kind of expatriate elite.
The mummies discovered here over the past three years are thought to have been from this class of wealthy landowners, dignitaries and governors. Experts are hoping that an examination of their mummified remains will reveal information about their health and diet that could help us understand more about daily life some two thousand years ago.
Five of the mummies have been removed from the site to Bahariyya's antiquities inspectorate for the benefit of journalists and experts. Even with their stylised masks they seem to reach poignantly across the centuries. Two of them have huge kohl-rimmed eyes and adult faces but their tiny size means they couldn't have lived more than a year or two. The body of a woman, perhaps their mother, is beside them, as if accompanying them in death.
ONE is also struck at how the Hellenistic and Pharaonic have come to gether in these ancient coffins. Classical Greek faces sit atop sarcophagi decorated with scenes of Egyptian gods helping the deceased find his or her way to the afterlife; a curly Greek hairstyle contrasts with a Pharaonic-style sacred cobra - all fascinating glimpses into how the Graeco-Romans preserved their own culture but gradually incorporated practices from the infinitely more ancient Egyptian way of life.
According to Dr Hawass, they even put their own twist on the art of mummification, replacing the intestines of the dead person with palm leaves, rather than following the Pharaonic practice of filling the eviscerated body with spices or resin-impregnated linen.
Standing today in the desolate landscape surrounding Bawiti, it's hard to imagine the lives of these ancient notables. Although the oasis remains one of the few patches of green in the vast and austerely beautiful Western De sert, gradual desertification and the drying up of ancient wells mean that the amount of cultivatable land is shrinking.
These days the town is a remote outpost with several thousand inhabitants at most. Society here is traditional and most of the townsfolk live modestly off their production of dates, with the exception of a few that have branched out into the more lucrative desert trekking business. The wealth that allowed their Graeco-Roman forbears to afford golden masks has long since disappeared.
Antiquities and tourism officials hope that the spectacular mummy discovery will help put the oasis on the tourist map. As with other areas of Egypt, there is a wealth of history here. Tantalising ruins, almost none of which have had any more than the most cursory examination by archaeologists, dot the oasis and testify to the past importance of the area. At one site a wine-press can be seen partially buried in the dunes.
Roman irrigation channels are still in use in some date plantations, and mudbrick fortresses and settlements - including one built by Alexander the Great - melted by the rain of millenniums and partially buried under ever-advancing desert sands, give some clue to the scale of past settlement here.
For now the Valley of the Mummies remains closed for excavation but officials say they intend to leave most of the mummies in situ and turn the site into an open-air museum.
"Bahariyya will become a renowned archaeological site, like the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens in Luxor," Gaballa Ali Gaballa, head of Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities told a local paper when announcing the find.
But don't rush to buy your tickets: there are still several more years of digging - and who knows how many more mummies to discover - before the site will be ready for visitors.