5,000-year-old wooden boat used by the pharaohs is discovered by French archaeologists
French archaeologists have discovered a 5,000-year-old wooden boat in an expedition in Egypt, it has emerged.
The significant discovery was made in Abu Rawash, west of Cairo, the antiquities ministry in Egypt said.
Mohammed Ibrahim, the antiquities minister, said: ‘It goes back to the era of Pharaoh Den, one of the First Dynasty kings’.
French archaeologists have discovered a 5,000-year-old pharaonic solar boat in an expedition in Egypt, it has emerged
The six-metre long and 1.5-metre wide pharaonic solar boat ‘is in good condition,’ he added.
Its planks are now undergoing renovation before it is put on display in a museum.
The pharaohs believed that solar boats, buried close to them at death, would transport them in the afterlife.
According to Middle East Online, the boat’s wooden sheets were transported to the planned National Museum of Egyptiamn Civilisation were they will be restored.
One the museum is finished, it is expected they will be put on display at some point next year.
The group of French archeologists were working for the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology (IFAO).
The discovery was made in Abu Rawash, west of Cairo
An archaeologist is seen working on the skeleton of the newly discovered wooden boat. The pharaohs believed that solar boats, buried close to them at death, would transport them in the afterlife
The group first started its excavation work in Abu Rawash in the early 1900s.
In 1954 an Egyptian archaeologist discovered what may be the Pharaoh Khufu’s 43-metre solar ship, made of cedar, in a Giza pyramid.
The 4,500 year-old intact vessel is on display near the pyramid.
It is one of the oldest, largest, and best-preserved vessels from antiquity and has been identified as the world’s oldest intact ship.
It is known as a ‘solar barge’, a ritual vessel to carry the resurrected king with the sun god Ra across the heavens.
Nearly 2 million years ago, an early human used a stone tool to carve hunks of meat held in its mouth, an activity that left behind wear marks in its teeth.
And the direction of the grooves suggest that this individual had a dominant right hand.
Scratch that: Marks on Homo habilis teeth suggest which hand the early human used to cut its meat.
Right-handedness is significantly more common than left-handedness in modern humans, and the trait emerged early in the lineage’s evolution, researchers have said. This discovery, which presents the oldest evidence of right-handedness, could prompt a deeper look into the fossil record, to determine when human ancestors first demonstrated right-handed dominance.
Right-handed “handy man”
The fossil, a mostly intact upper jaw, was found in an archaeological dig site in northern Tanzania, in a location with stone tools and large mammal bones nearby. The jaw belonged to Homo habilis, a human ancestor that lived 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago and is the oldest known ancestor in the Homo lineage.
Homo habilis means “handy man,” and though the newly discovered specimen’s hands were nowhere to be found, its jaw and teeth provided researchers with unexpected evidence of whether it was a so-called “righty” or “lefty.”
The teeth were very well-preserved, with enamel still covering most of their surfaces. Close inspection of two central incisors in the jaw revealed concentrations of scratch marks; in one tooth in particular, they were primarily angled to the right side of the body.
According to the scientists, these marks were created over time, as the “handy man” was cutting up his meat. He would have gripped a hunk of flesh in his mouth, steadied the meat by pulling on it with one of his hands and used the other hand — which was probably the dominant one — to saw pieces of meat with a stone tool, which would occasionally scrape against his teeth.
a. A right-handed Homo habilis would have pulled at the meat with the left hand and cut with the right. b. A stereomicroscopic composite of the cast of one of the teeth used in the analysis.
The right-leaning direction of these scrapes — which have also been detected in fossil teeth belonging to Neanderthals and other human relatives — told the scientists that a tool held in the right hand had made the marks.
“Righty” vs. “lefty”
Humans aren’t the only mammal species that favors one hand over the other; this trait appears in animals “from kangaroos to chimpanzees,” the study authors wrote. However, having a dominant hand that appears overwhelmingly across an entire species is uniquely human; 90 percent of people are right-handed, the researchers estimated, compared with 50 percent of individuals in humans’ primate relatives.
But when did humans first develop a preference for using the right hand over the left? Fossil arm bones might hold clues, but researchers would need both arms from a single individual to tell which hand the individual used more often in life, and that’s proven hard to find in the fossil record.
However, this new discovery suggests that scientists could find the evidence preserved in fossil teeth, which are more plentiful than matched pairs of arm bones, the researchers said. While this is as yet the only example of dominant hand use in humans’ early lineage, other fossils may provide the clues researchers need to trace the origins of “righty” vs. “lefty,” the scientists said.
The findings were published online in the November issue of the Journal of Evolution.
Listen to the Recreated Voice of a 3,000-Year-Old Egyptian Mummy
Media outlets have likened the sound to a “brief groan,” a “long, exasperated ‘meh’ without the ‘m,’” and “rather like ‘eeuuughhh’”
Nesyamun was a priest and scribe whose duties included ritualistic chanting and singing.
In the nearly 200 years since his mummy’s arrival at the Leeds City Museum in northern England, an ancient Egyptian priest named Nesyamun has slowly but surely revealed his secrets.
Employed as a high-ranking priest and scribe at the Karnak state temple in Thebes, Nesyamun performed rituals filled with both song and speech. Active during the turbulent reign of Ramses XI, who served as Egypt’s pharaoh between 1099 and 1069 B.C., he died in his mid-50s, likely due to a severe allergic reaction, and suffered from ailments including gum disease and heavily worn teeth. And, as evidenced by inscriptions on his coffin, Nesyamun hoped his soul would one day speak to the gods much as he had in life.
A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports fulfills the 3,000-year-old priest’s vision of the afterlife, drawing on CT scans of his surprisingly intact vocal tract to engineer an approximation of his voice.
The sound bite, created with a speech synthesizing tool called the Vocal Tract Organ, reconstructs “the sound that would come out of his vocal tract if he was in his coffin and his larynx came to life again,” says study co-author David Howard, a speech scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London, to the New York Times’ Nicholas St. Fleur.
The clip itself is brief and vaguely underwhelming, capturing a single vowel sound media outlets have described as “resembl[ing] a brief groan,” “a bit like a long, exasperated ‘meh’ without the ‘m,’” “a sound caught between the words ‘bed’ and ‘bad,’” and “rather like ‘eeuuughhh.’”
Per the Washington Post’s Ben Guarino, Howard and his colleagues used a CT scan of Nesyamun’s vocal tract—a biologically unique speech-supporting tube that stretches from the larynx to the lips—to 3-D print a copy of his throat.
They then hooked this artificial organ to a loudspeaker and played an electronic signal mimicking the sound of a “human larynx acoustic output.” (Howard has previously used this technique on living humans, including himself, but the new research marks the first time the technology has been used to recreate a deceased individual’s voice, reports CNN’s Katie Hunt.)
Though the study serves as proof-of-concept for future voice recreation research, it has several practical limitations. As co-author and University of York archaeologist John Schofield tells Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky, Nesyamun’s supine burial position curbed the experiment’s scope.
Schofield explains, “The vocal tract has only one shape here—the shape as he lies in his sarcophagus—that produced just one sound.”
Another limiting factor, says Howard to CNN, was the priest’s lack of tongue muscles, which had long since wasted away. In truth, the speech scientist adds, the noise heard in the audio isn’t a “sound he would ever likely have made in practice because the bulk of his tongue isn’t there.”
Daniel Bodony, an aeroacoustics expert at the University of Illinois who was not involved in the study, tells the Post the team’s electronic approximation “sounds tinny” because Nesyamun’s mummy lacks fleshy, vibrating vocal folds capable of adding “richness and emotion” to one’s words.
In the future, the researchers may be able to overcome this and other obstacles by modifying their software to better approximate such factors as the size of the priest’s tongue and the position of his jaw. The team’s eventual goal is to move beyond singular vowel sounds to words and even full sentences.
“When visitors encounter the past, it is usually a visual encounter,” says Schofield to the Post. “With this voice we can change that. There is nothing more personal than someone’s voice.”
Still, some scholars—including Kara Cooney, an Egyptologist at the University of California, Los Angeles—have expressed concerns over the implications of the new study.
Though she acknowledges the work’s potential, Cooney tells the Times, “When you’re taking a human being and using so much inference about what they looked or sounded like, it can be done with an agenda that you might not even be aware of.”
Egypt says another trove of ancient coffins found in Saqqara
Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed another trove of ancient coffins in a vast necropolis south of Cairo, authorities said Monday.
The Tourism and Antiquities Ministry said in a statement that archaeologists found the collection of colorful, sealed sarcophagi buried more than 2,500 years ago at the Saqqara necropolis.
This undated photo provided by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities
Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said more than 80 coffins were found.
Archaeologists also found colorful, gilded wooden statues, the ministry said. Details of the new discovery will be announced in a news conference at the famed Step Pyramid of Djoser, it said.
Egypt has sought to publicize its archaeological finds in an effort to revive its key tourism sector, which was badly hit by the turmoil that followed the 2011 uprising. The sector was also dealt a further blow this year by the coronavirus pandemic.
Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly and Tourism and Antiquities Minister Khalid el-Anany toured the area and inspected the new discovery, which came just over two weeks after the ministry revealed 59 sealed sarcophagi, with mummies inside most of them, in the same area of Saqqara.
The Saqqara site is part of the necropolis at Egypt’s ancient capital of Memphis that includes the famed Giza Pyramids, as well as smaller pyramids at Abu Sir, Dahshur and Abu Ruwaysh. The ruins of Memphis were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1970s.
The plateau hosts at least 11 pyramids, including the Step Pyramid, along with hundreds of tombs of ancient officials and other sites that range from the 1st Dynasty (2920-2770 B.C.) to the Coptic period (395-642).
This undated photo provided by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities
Egypt announces discovery of 3,500-year-old Luxor tomb
Pharaonic tomb belongs to royal goldsmith who lived more than 3,500 years ago during the reign of the 18th dynasty.
Mummies were found in the New Kingdom tomb that belongs to a royal goldsmith in a burial shaft
Has announced the discovery of a pharaonic tomb in the southern city of Luxor belonging to a royal goldsmith who lived more than 3,500 years ago during the reign of the 18th dynasty.
The tomb is located on the west bank of the river Nile in a cemetery where noblemen and top government officials are buried.
Antiquities Minister Khaled el-Anany said the tomb is not in good condition, but it contains a statue of the goldsmith and his wife, as well as a funerary mask.
He said a shaft in the tomb contained mummies belonging to ancient Egyptian people who lived during the 21st and 22nd Dynasties.
An Egyptian antiquities worker is seen in the recently discovered tomb of Amenemhat, a goldsmith from the New Kingdom
The tomb was discovered by Egyptian archaeologists and could boost Egypt’s slowly recovering tourism industry.
In 2022, archaeologists unearthed several mummies, 10 colourful wooden sarcophagi and more than 1,000 funerary statues near the city of Luxor.
Ushabti figurines (small carved figurines) were often placed with the deceased in ancient Egyptian tombs to help with responsibilities in the afterlife.
Inside the tomb, archaeologists wearing white masks and latex gloves inspected the sarcophagi, which were covered with intricate drawings in red, blue, black, green, and yellow – and featured the carved faces of the dead.
It was opened to add more mummies during the 21st Dynasty, about 3,000 years ago, to protect them during a period when tomb-robbing was common.
Some coffins had deteriorated and broken over the years
Ancient tomb of Pharaoh Ramesses II official discovered at Saqqara
Archaeologists in Cairo have discovered the 3,200-year-old tomb of the chief treasurer of King Ramses II, one of Egypt’s most powerful pharaohs.
The final resting place of Ptah-M-Wia was unearthed in Saqqara, which had been used a necropolis for the Egyptian capital of Memphis for more than 3,000 years.
Saqqara includes other funereal marvels, including the Pyramid of Userkaf and the 4,700-year-old Step Tomb of Djoser, the oldest known pyramid in Egypt.
Archaeologist Ola Al-Ajezi said Ptah-M-Wia’s tomb typifies monumental gravesites in the region, known as tomb-temples, which include an ornate edifice followed by one or more courtyards.
Numerous engraved stone blocks were found buried deep in the sand, she added, as well as columns shaped like Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead.
Archaeologists unearthed the 3,200-year-old tomb of Ptah-M-Wia, chief treasurer of Ramses the Great. Inside wall paintings showing people leading cattle and other animals to the slaughter (above) relate to his role as chief supervisor of livestock and offerings at the pharaoh’s temple
‘All these pieces will be studied to be put back in their original places inside the tomb,’ Al-Ajezi said, according to Ahram Online. No human remains have been uncovered in the tomb so far.
Inscriptions in Ptah-M-Wia’s tomb indicate he held several positions under Ramses II, who reigned from 1279–1213 B.C., including chief treasurer and chief supervisor of livestock and offerings at the pharaoh’s temple in Thebes.
Archaeologists also found wall paintings showing people leading cattle and other animals to the slaughter, which may relate to the latter role.
Since minted coins weren’t invented yet, Live Science reported, as head of the treasury he would have overseen payments made in goods, precious metals and animals.
The third pharaoh in Egypt’s 19th Dynasty, Ramses II, also known as Ramses the Great, expanded the borders of the empire as far as Syria and was known for monumental construction projects like enlarging the temples at Luxor and Karnak.
Inscriptions in Ptah-M-Wia’s tomb indicate he held several positions under Ramses II, who reigned from 1279–1213 BC and is considered one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs
The same excavation team has also turned up tombs of other 19th Dynasty statesmen, a period that lasted from 1292 BC to 1189 BC, including those of Ptah-Mas, mayor of Memphis and Basir, a royal ambassador; and Eurkhi, the supreme commander of the army during the reign of Ramses II and his father, Seti I.
Exploration of Saqqara began in the mid-1800s but major discoveries started in the 1970s and 1980s, under Sayed Tawfik, Egypt’s chief archeologist and chairman of antiquities.
In 2011, an excavation team in the necropolis uncovered almost eight million dog mummies next to a temple devoted to Anubis., the canine-headed god of the underworld
Seven years later, archaeologists discovered the tomb of Wahtye, a high priest, decorated with hieroglyphs and statues dating back more than 4,400 years.
In September 2020, archaeologists at Saqqara discovered a cavern filled with more than 100 wooden coffins, the most ever found in Egypt.
Sarcophagi that are around 2,500 years old were among the dozens discovered in 2020 near Egypt’s Saqqara necropolis
Scientists Begin Unveiling the Secrets of the Mummies in the Alexandria ‘Dark Sarcophagus’
The massives stone coffin found in July contains a woman and two men, including one who survived brain surgery
Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities
In , archaeologists in Egypt revealed that they had found something creepily interesting in the city of Alexandria: a massive 30-ton, black granite sarcophagus.
Discovered on a building site, it was the largest stone coffin ever found in the city. Internet speculation ran wild, with people suggesting it was cursed, that opening it could lead to the end of the world, or that the massive 8.5-by-5-foot tomb contained a super-mummy.
Many were disappointed that when the coffin was opened it revealed three normal human bodies floating in a soup of red sewage (though it did spark a petition asking Egyptian authorities to let people drink the red liquid from the dark sarcophagus in order to “assume its powers”).
Now that the hoopla has died down, researchers have revealed the initial results of their scientific analysis. While it’s not as exciting as finding Alexander the Great, the residents of the tomb still offer interesting insights.
Nevine El-Aref at Ahram Online reports that a team of researchers led by Zeinab Hashish, director of the Department of Skeleton Remains Studies at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, analyzed the skulls, pelvises and other bones.
The bodies include one woman and two men who appear to have been deposited at different times and stacked on top of one another. The fact that a woman is included in the burial overturns an earlier hypothesis that the tomb’s inhabitants were soldiers.
The age for the woman was between 20 and 25; for one of the men, between 35 and 39; and the other man, between 40 and 44. That last skeleton has a hole in its skull, which healed long before the man died.
“This means that the cavity might be a result of a trepanation,” Hashish tells El-Aref. “This surgery is the oldest surgical intervention ever known since pre-history, but was rare in Egypt,” Hashish adds in a statement.
The remains are believed to date either to Egypt’s Ptolemaic period, 332 to 30 B.C., when it was ruled by a Greek dynasty, or the Roman period, when it was under the control of that empire, from 30 B.C. to 642 A.D.
Trepanation was a surgical procedure practiced throughout the ancient world, from South America to Africa and Asia, and it continued being practiced into the 16th century in some places.
The surgery involved cutting a hole into the skull for religious reasons or as a medical intervention—to relieve headaches, swelling of the brain and hypertension. There are only a handful of examples from Egypt, which makes this find special, although it’s impossible to know why this particular person received the treatment.
Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities
Bones weren’t the only item found in the coffin. Researchers also found a small gold artifact and three thin sheets of gold, each square embossed with an image.
Owen Jarus at LiveScience reports that one of the images may represent the seed pod of an opium poppy inside a shrine, which may have associations with death, sleep and rebirth. Another shows an unhooded snake with its mouth open, which could be a symbol of the goddess Isis and represent rebirth.
“As a rule of thumb, it would seem that snake jewelry was primarily a female thing,” Jack Ogden, the president of the Society of Jewellery Historians tells Jarus. “But I am not sure whether one could suggest that the presence of a snake here suggests it was connected with the female occupant of the sarcophagus.”
The third gold panel shows either a palm branch or a stalk of grain, both of which are related to fertility and rebirth.
The Ministry also weighed in on the disgusting red necro-Kool-Aid found in the sarcophagus, confirming that it is likely sewage water that infiltrated the coffin and mixed with decomposed mummy wrappings, though they plan to analyze the stuff more closely to figure out exactly what it’s made of.
The team also plans to continue studying the bones, using DNA tests to figure out whether the people inside the sarcophagus were related to one another. They will also use CT scans to learn more about the bones themselves. Even if those scans are successful, it leaves one big question out there—why were these bodies buried in such a huge, black sarcophagus?
It also seems the danger of the sarcophagus unleashing a curse upon the world has passed, since the coffin has been open for over a month and most of us are still around.
“I was the first to put my whole head inside the sarcophagus… and here I stand before you … I am fine,” Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities told reporters after opening it in July. “We’ve opened it and, thank God, the world has not fallen into darkness.”
Archaeologists Uncover 18,000 Ancient Egyptian ‘Notepads’
Researchers excavating the ancient Egyptian city of Athribis have discovered more than 18,000 ostraca—inscribed pottery shards that essentially served as “notepads,” writes Carly Cassella for Science Alert.
Archaeologist discovered a large number of ostraca, or inscribed fragments of pottery, at the ancient Egyptian temple of Athribis.
Ranging from shopping lists to trade records to schoolwork, the fragments offer a sense of daily life in the city some 2,000 years ago. Per Newsweek’s Robert Lea, the trove is the second-largest collection of ostraca ever found in Egypt.
Ancient Egyptians viewed ostraca as a cheaper alternative to papyrus. To inscribe the shards, users dipped a reed or hollow stick in ink. Though most of the ostraca unearthed in Athribis contain writing, the team also found pictorial ostraca depicting animals like scorpions and swallows, humans, geometric figures, and deities, according to a statement from the University of Tübingen, which conducted the excavation in partnership with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
A large number of the fragments appear to be linked to an ancient school. Over a hundred feature repetitive inscriptions on both the front and back, leading the team to speculate that students who misbehaved were forced to write out lines—a schoolroom punishment still used (and satirized in popular culture) .
Researchers found inscriptions of repetitive phrases, likely written by students as a form of punishment.
“There are lists of months, numbers, arithmetic problems, grammar exercises and a ‘bird alphabet’—each letter was assigned a bird whose name began with that letter,” says Egyptologist Christian Leitz in the statement.
Around 80 percent of the ostraca are written in demotic, an administrative script used during the reign of Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII (81 to 59 B.C.E. and 55 to 51 B.C.E.). Greek is the second-most represented script; hieratic, hieroglyphics, Greek, Arabic, and Coptic (an Egyptian dialect written in the Greek alphabet) also appear, testifying to Athribis’ multicultural history, per Science Alert.
“We will be able to make a case study of daily life in late Ptolemaic/early Roman time[s] once we have analyzed all the texts or at least a larger part of it, which will take years,” Leitz tells Newsweek.
Tübingen archaeologists began digging at Athribis—located about 120 miles north of Luxor—in 2003. Initially, excavations were focused on a large temple built by Ptolemy to honor the lion goddess Repit and her consort Min.
The temple was transformed into a nunnery after pagan worship was banned in Egypt in 380 C.E. More recently, the team has shifted focus to a separate sanctuary west of the temple.
A purchase receipt for bread written in Demotic script
According to the statement, Leitz and his team found the ostraca near a series of “multi-story buildings with staircases and vaults” to the west of the main dig site.
Prior to the excavation, reports Science Alert, the only comparable collection of ostraca discovered in Egypt was a cache of medical writings found in the workers’ settlement of Deir el-Medineh, near the Valley of the Kings, in the early 1900s.
“This is a very important discovery because it sheds light on the economy and trade in Atribis throughout history,” Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Egyptian antiquities ministry’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, tells Nevine El-Aref of Ahram Online.
“The text reveals the financial transactions of the area’s inhabitants, who bought and sold provisions such as wheat and bread.”
The 200,000-year-old city found in Southern Africa may rewrite history
In South Africa, about 150 km west of port Maputo, Mozambique, a giant stone city has been discovered. It became possible to determine the age of the site by measuring the erosion rate of the dolerite.
The 1500 square kilometer metropolis was believed to have been built between 160,000 and 200,000 years ago!
The ruins consist of huge stone circles, most of which are buried in the sand and can be seen only from the air or with the help of satellite imagery.
This ancient town is thought to be part of a larger network of 10,000 square kilometers. The organized nature of this ancient community and a road network connecting it to the terraced agriculture suggest that the metropolis was home to a highly advanced civilization.
The geology of the site is quite interesting too because of the numerous gold mines located in the area. According to researchers, this ancient civilization could have practiced gold mining.
What is quite curious, no one has ever wondered about the origin and the age of these stone circles before, despite the fact that local residents have encountered them multiple times.
In 2007, Michael Tellinger, researcher and writer passionate about human origins, and Johan Heine, a local fireman and pilot, decided to explore the site. Later, the results of their research inspired Tellinger to write a book titled Temples Of The African Gods.
According to Tellinger, the evidence they found suggests a completely different perspective on the history of humankind.
According to the conventional version of human history, the first civilization on Earth was Sumer and emerged in southern Mesopotamia about 6000 years ago.
But what if there was another, earlier civilization that was then lost in the mists of time? “The photographs, artifacts and evidence we accumulated, point towards a lost civilization that has never before been and precedes all others – not for a few hundred years, or a few thousand years … but many thousands of years,” he said.
Tellinger believes that this ancient African metropolis is the oldest structure built by the human on Earth. In fact, he thinks that the Sumerians and the Egyptians inherited knowledge from this advanced civilization.
This hypothesis is based on the fact that there are carvings of the Egyptian Ankh on the rocks of the ancient city.
How could there possibly be an image of the Egyptian god thousands of years before the Egyptian civilization emerged? “These discoveries are so staggering that they will not be easily digested by the mainstream historical and archaeological fraternity, as we have already experienced. It will require a complete paradigm shift in how we view our human history,” Tellinger said.
Tellinger’s findings raise more questions than answers, but we can hope that this incredible ancient city will attract more researchers in the future and that one day more light will be shed on this lost civilization and the unknown aspects of human history in general.
Ancient Cave Found in Egypt with Unique Predynastic Rock Carvings
The ancient cave was found in a mountainous area in Northern Sinai. The rock carvings are of a type not seen before in the region.
The cave where the rock art was discovered. Inset: One of the sections of rock carvings.
An archaeological mission from the Tourism and Antiquities Ministry discovered an ancient cave featuring a unique and diverse collection of carvings at Wadi al-Zulma, North Sinai.
The head of ministry’s Egyptian Antiquities Sector, Ayman Ashmawy, explained that the archaeological cave is located at the beginning of one of Wadi al-Zulma’s tributaries within a mountainous area of limestone that is difficult to reach – about 90 kilometers southeast of the city of al-Qantara Sharq, and 60 kilometers east of the Suez Canal.
The ancient cave was found in a mountainous area in Northern Sinai.
First of its Kind in Sinai
The carved images found in Northern Sinai are different from those found elsewhere in the Peninsula. They are more akin to bas-relief and the figures tend to be projected out of the surface of the cave walls.
The rock art found elsewhere in the area, such as those at al-Zaranji were made by chipping away the rocky surface of the caverns and apply pigments to color the engravings.
Ayman Ashmawy, told Egypt Independent that the newly explored ‘cave features an utterly unique assortment of carvings unlike those from the South Sinai valleys’. There are a great many more engravings than in the al-Zaranji cave.
The Director of Sinai Antiquities and head of the mission, Dr Hisham Hussein told Egypt in that ‘most of the scenes were carved along the walls of the inner cave and depict animals such as donkeys, camels, deer, mule and mountain goats’.
These enigmatic images could provide invaluable insights into the prehistory of Egypt.
According to a Tourism and Antiquities Ministry statement, the cave is 15 meters deep and 20 meters high. The ceiling is made of limestone, and the cave is filled with large amounts of animal waste.
Ashes found inside the cave indicate it’s continuous usage by locals as shelter, where they might have stayed with their flocks during rain or winter.
