Ancient priest’s tomb painting shared as Hindu temple discovered under pyramids of Egypt.

A 4300-year-old tomb artwork that depicts ancient life discovered near Giza’s Great Pyramid is shared falsely claiming that a Hindu temple was discovered under the temple.

An image showing an excavated site under a pyramid is widely shared on social media claiming that it is an ancient Hindu temple found under the pyramids in Egypt. The image is shared with a caption “An ancient Hindu temple was found under the pyramids of Egypt during excavations. It can be seen that there is a Hindu Sun Temple under the pyramid. And pyramids are built over temples. Under the pyramid there are many doors of Hindu temples and also there are many shiv lingams”.

Twitter link| Archive link

Fact Check- 

We started our investigation by running a reverse image search on Google, whose results led us to a few media reports that contained the viral image.

We discovered an article on Livescience dated 15July, 2015, with a headline “Ancient Priest’s Tomb Painting Discovered Near Great Pyramid at Giza”.The image caption reads: “A painting discovered in the tomb of a priest, just 1,000 feet from the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt, depicts scenes of ancient life”. 

Livescience is a portal that catalogues developments in science, space, technology and history. The artwork depicts “vivid scenes of life, including boats sailing south on the Nile River, a bird hunting trip in a marsh, and a man named Perseneb, who is shown with his wife and dog,” according to the report.

Maksim Lebedev, a faculty member at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Department of History of the East, took the viral image. He headed a team of academics who found the nearly 4,300-year-old wall painting.

A news report by NBCnews, dated 16 July, 2014, has also carried the same viral image. “A wall painting, dating back over 4,300 years, has been discovered in a tomb located just east of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The new painting was discovered in 2012 by a team from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which has been excavating these tombs since 1996. The report adds that tomb, located 1,000 feet (300 meters) east of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and contains an offering room, central room and burial chamber. 

 FoxNews also carried the same viral image with similar information in 2015. The tomb is believed to date to the middle or late fifth dynasty (ca. 2450-2350 B.C)

Conclusion – 

Fact Crescendo found the claim made along with the viral image to be False. An old finding of a wall painting of a priest from an ancient Egypt culture in an Egyptian tomb was presented with the false claim that a Hindu temple was found under a pyramid.