They are more than 2,000 years old but remain in “good condition”: Egypt on Saturday unveiled over 40 mummies dating back to the Ptolemaic era at a burial site in the centre of the country. Journalists clambered down a ladder and through an underground chamber beneath the sandy soil of Tunah Al-Gabal, 260 kilometres (160 miles) south of Cairo, to glimpse the recent finds. Archaeologist Rami Rasmi told AFP that 12 children and six animals were among the more than 40 mummies, while the rest were adult men and women. The remains were found laid on the floor or in open clay coffins in the crumbling chamber in Minya governorate. While mummification is mostly associated with ancient Egypt, the practice continued under the kingdom founded by Ptolemy, a successor to Alexander the Great, which lasted from 323 BC to 30 BC.

After almost a decade, a team of international experts on Thursday revealed the results of their painstaking work to preserve the tomb of Egypt’s legendary Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Nearly a victim of his own fame, long years of mass tourism had left their mark on the boy king’s burial place near Luxor on the east bank of the Nile River. “A hundred years of visits, after being sealed for 3,000 years… can you imagine the impact on the grave?” said Neville Agnew, head of the project led by the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute. “Visitors, humidity, dust…” lamented the scientist during the unveiling ceremony at the tomb, discovered in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings. Called to the rescue in 2009, Agnew has led a 25-member team — including archaeologists, architects, engineers and microbiologists — to preserve the tomb and fend off the ravages of time and tourism.

A drawing by Flemish Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens sold for $8.2 million in an auction in New York on Wednesday that was criticized by some in the Netherlands who said the work should have been offered to a Dutch museum. Sotheby’s described the small, rectangular “Nude Study of a Young Man with Raised Arms” as a key piece in the development of one of the artist’s pivotal commissions, and one of only a handful of drawings of comparable importance by Rubens to have come on the market in the last half century. Depicting a muscular, nearly nude young man who strains as he pushes an unseen weight above his head, the drawing was used in the preparation of Ruben’s famous “Raising of the Cross” triptych, painted in 1610. It was acquired by the Dutch royal family in 1838 by Prince William of Orange, who became the Netherlands’s King William II.