SPANISH archaeologists have discovered a millennia-old mummy in “very good condition” near the southern Egyptian town of Luxor, the antiquities ministry said Sunday.

    The find was in a tomb probably dating from between 1075-664 B.C., on the west bank of the Nile river 700 kilometers south of Cairo, a statement said.

    The mummy had been bound with linen stuck together with plaster.

    It was in a brightly colored wooden sarcophagus and had been buried near a temple from the era of fourth-millennium warrior king Thutmose III.

    The tomb likely belonged to a nobleman, Amenrenef, who was “a servant of the royal household,” the ministry said.

    The archaeological team’s head, Myriam Seco Alvarez, said the mummy was decorated with “many colorful decorations recalling religious symbols from ancient Egypt, such as the goddesses Isis and Nephtys displaying their wings, and the four sons of Horus.”

    The earliest evidence of mummification in Egypt suggests that the practice of wrapping bodies to preserve them after death dates back as far as 4500 B.C.

    King Thutmose III, sometimes called Egypt’s greatest conqueror or “the Napoleon of Egypt,” was the sixth Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty.

    Thutmose III constructed over fifty temples and commissioned the building of many tombs for nobles, which were made with greater craftsmanship than ever before.

    His own tomb was discovered by Victor Loret in 1898, in the Valley of the Kings.

    Luxor, a city of half a million people on the banks of the Nile, abounds with temples and tombs built by Egypt’s pharaohs.

    It is a key site for Egypt’s tourist industry which has been battered by political instability and jihadist violence since the 2011 revolution that toppled longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak.

    The excavation, restoration and enhancement project of the Temple of Millions of Years of the Pharaoh Thutmose III — where this latest tomb was found — began in 2008 and is the result of cooperation between the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and the Academy of Fine Arts Santa Isabel of Hungary of Seville.

    (SD-Agencies)