Using satellite imagery to scan the Atbai Desert of Eastern Sudan without excavating, a team of archaeologists identified 260 previously unknown burial monuments spread across almost 1,000 kilometers of desert, all of them predating ancient Egypt.
The research was conducted by a team including archaeologists from Macquarie University, France's HiSoMA research unit, and the Polish Academy of Sciences. Their findings were published in the journal African Archaeological Review. According to Live Science, the monuments are large circular enclosures, some up to 80 meters, or 262 feet, in diameter, with humans and animals buried inside, often arranged around a central individual.
The burials, which the researchers call enclosure burials, contain the remains of people along with their cattle, sheep, and goats. Carbon dating and pottery analysis from a small number of previously excavated monuments place their construction between roughly 4000 and 3000 BCE. That period falls just before the formation of Pharaonic Egypt, the territorial kingdom most people associate with ancient Egyptian civilization.
Some of the enclosures show secondary burials arranged around a primary burial at the center, a pattern that archaeologists interpret as possible evidence of an emerging social hierarchy. The central individual may have been a chief or another important community figure. The question of when Saharan nomads began to develop a distinct elite class has been debated for decades, and most researchers point to the fourth millennium BCE as the period when that shift began.
The consistency of the monuments across nearly 1,000 kilometers of desert suggests they were built by a common nomadic culture rather than isolated communities. Most of the sites fall within modern Sudan on the slopes of the Red Sea Hills. The researchers note that the nomads who built them had little connection to the urban and agricultural Egyptians developing to the north. These were desert herders raising livestock, not farmers or city builders.
One of the key challenges of the project was working entirely through satellite imagery. Remote sensing allowed the team to search systematically across a landscape too vast and remote to survey on foot, but it also limited what they could learn. Pottery and carbon dates from excavated examples filled in some gaps, but the full picture of who these people were, how they organized themselves, and what the burials meant to them remains incomplete.
The team says that searching for similar monuments in other parts of the desert could help build a more complete picture of nomadic life across the prehistoric Sahara.
