A huge 2,300-year-old funerary building and a number of mummy portraits were discovered in Egypt's southern province of Fayoum, about 37 miles (60 kilometers) south of Cairo, the country's antiquities ministry said on Thursday.
The building and the paintings, which are famously known as the Fayoum portraits, date back to the Ptolemaic and Roman eras in the 3rd century B.C. They were found in Fayoum's Gerza village, which was known as Philadelphia during the Roman period.
"The discovered structure is a large building styled as a funerary building with colored gypsum tiled floors," Adel Okasha, who heads the antiquities department in Cairo and Giza, said in a statement. "To the south of it, there is colonnade hall where the remains of four columns were found."
