SAQQARA, Egypt - A pair of 4,300-year-old pharaonic tombs discovered at Saqqara indicate that the sprawling necropolis south of Cairo is even larger than previously thought.
Egypt's top archaeologist says the rock-cut tombs were built for high officials.
One was responsible for the quarries used to build the nearby pyramids and another for a woman in charge of procuring entertainers for the pharaohs.
Zahi Hawass says the discovery indicates there's even more to the vast necropolis of Saqqara, located 20 kilometres south of the capital, Cairo.
In the past, excavations have focused on just one side of the two nearby pyramids -- the Step Pyramid of King Djoser and that of Unas, the last king of the 5th Dynasty.
The area where the two tombs were found, to the southwest, has been largely untouched.
"This means the royal cemetery is bigger than we thought," said Saleh Suleiman, the archaeologist responsible for the excavation of the two tombs.
Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said excavations will continue and further finds should shed light on the 5th and 6th dynasties of the Old Kingdom, which ruled over 4,000 years ago.
One of the tombs has a description above the entrance about the man, Yaamat, for whom it was built. The second tomb is twice the size and includes inscriptions and an image of a seated woman.
Aidan Dodson, a research fellow at the University of Bristol's Department of Archaeology and Anthropology in Bristol, England, who was not involved in the dig, said that while the tombs themselves aren't especially significant, the possibility of a much larger cemetery is.
"It shows that the blank areas of the maps of Saqqara aren't really empty at all. It's just that archaeologists haven't got round to digging them," he said.
Excavations have been going on at Saqqara for about 150 years, uncovering a vast necropolis of pyramids, tombs and funerary complexes mostly from the Old Kingdom, but including sites as recent as the Roman era.
