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Archaeologists unveiled Tuesday the tombs of a Pharaonic butler and scribe that had been buried in the sand for more than 3,000 years.

The tombs, along with the painted coffins of a priest and his girlfriend, were discovered early this year at Saqqara near the famous Step Pyramid of King Djoser — the oldest of Egypt's more than 90 pyramids.

"The sands of Saqqara reveal lots of secrets," said Egypt's antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass, as he showed reporters around a 4,000-year-old tomb of mud bricks that belonged to a scribe of divine records, Ka-Hay, and his wife.

It doesn't look great because it was built from mud brick and not built of limestone, but I really believe that this tomb is very important," said Hawass, who was wearing his Indiana Jones-style hat. "This type of tomb could enrich our knowledge about the people who actually surrounded the kings of Saqqara, especially the people who lived 4,200 years ago."

The tomb featured a dark wooden door, which ancient Egyptians believed that the souls of the dead would use to leave their tomb. The door bore engravings in hieroglyphic text and pictures of the scribe and his wife.

South of the Step Pyramid, archeologists unveiled a second tomb, which belonged to a butler who died 3,350 years ago. Carved out of limestone, the tomb contained murals that showed scenes of people performing rituals and monkeys eating fruit. The blue and orange colors of the paint were surprisingly well preserved.

"This is a very, very lively scene," said Maarten Raven, the excavation's director and a curator at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, Netherlands.

Raven said he believed other tombs from the New Kingdom, similar to the one unveiled Tuesday, had yet to be uncovered in Saqqara, which is famous for Old Kingdom antiquities.

Many of the New Kingdom tombs, which date back from 1570 B.C. to 1070 B.C., can be found in the southern Egyptian city of Luxor.

"We hope one day this area will be open to visitors so people can see that Saqqara is not only Old Kingdom but New Kingdom as well," Raven said

Hawass also unveiled two wooden coffins, 4,000 years old, that were found south of the Step Pyramid. The coffins, painted light orange with blue hieroglyphics, contained human-shaped coffins known as anthropoids, in which lay the mummies of a priest and his girlfriend, Hawass said.

The ancient Egyptians believed anthropoids acted as a substitute body for the dead.

Although archaeologists have been exploring Egypt intensively for more than 150 years, Hawass believes only 30 percent of what lies under the sands at Saqqara has been uncovered.

Saqqara, about 12 miles south of Cairo, hosts a collection of temples, tombs and funerary complexes. Its Step Pyramid is the forerunner of the more sophisticated pyramids in Giza, which are believed to have been built about a century later.

Michel Barsoum, professor of materials engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and colleagues report in the current issue of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society that the pyramids were constructed with a combination of carved stones and blocks of limestone-based concrete.

The study, drawn on a research made in the mid-1980s by the French materials scientist, Joseph Davidovits, consists of a detailed examination of samples taken from the pyramids and their vicinity.

The aim was to determine whether the pyramid materials are natural or synthetic.

"Davidovits proposed that the pyramid blocks were cast in situ, with a wet mix of limestone particles and a binder, tamped into molds," wrote the researchers.

In time, the French scientist claimed, the wet mix hardened into a concrete that featured the appearance and properties of native limestone.

But Davidovits’ theory lacked hard evidence and was widely rejected by the Egyptologist community.

The longstanding belief is that the pyramids were built with blocks of limestone carved from nearby quarries. The blocks were cut to shape using copper tools, transported to the pyramid site and then hauled up huge ramps and set in place using wedges and levers.

Using scanning and transmission electron microscopy, Barsoum and his co-workers, Gilles Hug of the French National Aerospace Research Agency, and Adrish Ganguly of Drexel University, analyzed and compared the mineralogy of a number of pyramid samples with six different limestone samples from their vicinity.

They found that pyramid samples featured mineral ratios that did not exist in any known limestone sources.

"The most convincing argument is the presence of amorphous SiO2 (silica)," Barsoum told Discovery News. "In sedimentary rocks, the SiO2 is almost always crystalline."

He also noted that some samples of calcite and dolomite taken from pyramid samples featured water molecules trapped inside ­— again, he said, this is not a phenomenon found in nature.

The researchers believe that a limestone concrete, called a geopolymer, was used for, at most, 20 percent of the blocks — in the outer and inner casings and in the upper parts of the pyramids.

Davidovits, himself, tested a limestone-based concrete recipe at the Geopolymer Institute at Saint-Quentin.

He concluded that diatomaceous earth (a soil formed by the decay of tiny organisms called diatoms), dolomite and lime were mixed in water to produce a clay-like mixture. This was what the ancient Egyptians would have poured into wooden moulds at Giza to obtain concrete blocks in a few days.

Indeed, with this recipe, Davidovits produced a large concrete limestone block in ten days.

The researchers point out that pouring concrete would have spared the ancient builders from using steep ramps to push stones to the summit of the pyramids.

Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, dismissed the theory as "unlikely."

He noted that concrete was widely used at the pyramids in modern restoration work, suggesting that team may have taken samples from these modern cuts.

But Barsoum rejected such criticism.

"I would have to be a complete and utter fool to confuse Portland cement to what we saw," he said.

David Walker, a Columbia University geologist, said that Barsoum and colleagues have a strong case when considering the mineralogical constitution of the block chips they examined.

"Both sides in this controversy have good points. Some blocks are definitely natural and some are not," Walker said, adding that the mystery over how the ancient Egyptians may have poured concrete is "all the more intriguing

But Barsoum rejected such criticism.

"I would have to be a complete and utter fool to confuse Portland cement to what we saw," he said.

David Walker, a Columbia University geologist, said that Barsoum and colleagues have a strong case when considering the mineralogical constitution of the block chips they examined.

"Both sides in this controversy have good points. Some blocks are definitely natural and some are not," Walker said, adding that the mystery over how the ancient Egyptians may have poured concrete is "all the more intriguing