Researchers with a German-Austrian archaeological mission found a vast quantity of grave goods, including the wine jars, at a royal tomb in the Umm El Qa'āb necropolis, Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (MTA) announced.
Many of the wine jars are in a good state of preservation and some remain unopened with their stoppers still intact. Importantly, the jars were found to contain organic residue that the researchers interpreted as the remains of 5,000-year-old wine. The team also found a large quantity of well-preserved ancient grape seeds inside the jars.
The discovery of the preserved wine remains and ancient grape seeds is "unusual" at ancient Egyptian archaeological sites, Christiana Köhler, director of the mission with the University of Vienna (UV), Austria, told Newsweek.
The Umm El Qa'āb necropolis—located in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos—is home to several royal tombs from the Early Dynastic Period, which spanned roughly four centuries from around the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C.
The burial site has been the subject of repeated excavations by the German Archaeological Institute (GAI) in Cairo since the 1970s. The GAI forms part of the German-Austrian mission alongside the MTA, the UV, the University of Technology in Vienna and Lund University in Sweden.
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