Seven sarcophagi, some dating back more than 6,000 years, have been discovered at a site on the edge of the pyramid complex in Saqqara, south of the Egyptian capital, archaeology officials announced Saturday. Antiquities Minister Khaled el-Enany said the discovery was made by an Egyptian archaeological mission during excavation work started in April. Three of the tombs had been used for cats, he said, while one of four other sarcophagi discovered at the site belonged to Khufu-Imhat, overseer of the buildings in the royal palace. Mostafa Waziri, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the mission had also unearthed the first mummies of scarabs to be found in the area. Two such mummies were found inside a rectangular limestone sarcophagus with a vaulted lid decorated with three scarabs painted in black, he said. Dozens of cat mummies were also unearthed along with 100 wooden, gilded statues of cats and one in bronze dedicated to the

The Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain exhibition reconstructs one of the most important hubs in the complex surrealist network. Through the privileged lens of the American photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977) – ambassador for the movement in London jointly with her partner, the artist Roland Penrose – the show reveals the creative connections and productive collisions that emerged between British artists in the 1930s and 40s and the international surrealist network as a whole. The project is produced by The Hepworth Wakefield in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró, and curated by Eleanor Clayton, from the British institution. The version presented in Barcelona has been expanded with contributions from Martina Millà, Teresa Montaner and Sònia Villegas, the Fundació’s Programming Director, Collections Director and Conservator, respectively. Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain explores the introduction of the m

The “treasure chamber” at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum takes on a new meaning thanks to an exhibition curated by American filmmaker Wes Anderson and his partner, illustrator and author Juman Malouf. The pair were given free rein to assemble pieces from the vast collections and archives of the museum, as well as some of its partner institutions, in order to put together the six-month show, entitled “Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures”. The opening of the exhibition on Monday evening was attended by some of Anderson’s perennial collaborators such as actors Jason Schwartzman and Tilda Swinton. Tongue firmly in cheek, 49-year-old Anderson gave a short speech describing the process of putting the exhibition together with Malouf, 43, as “the culmination of several years of patient, frustrating negotiation, bitter, angry debate, sometimes completely irrational confrontation and often Machiavellian duplicity and deception.”

A painting of an animal in an Indonesian cave dates from at least 40,000 years ago, making it the world’s oldest piece of figurative art, new research has shown. The painting in Borneo, possibly depicting a native type of wild cattle, is among thousands of artworks discovered decades ago in the remote region. But it was only using technology called uranium series analysis that researchers have finally been able to work out just when they were painted. The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that cave painting did not emerge only in Europe, as was once thought. “We can see that figurative art developed and evolved more or less at the same time in Asia and in Europe,” researcher Maxime Aubert told AFP. In 2014, researchers dated figurative art on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi to 35,000 years ago, but some of the paintings examined