Archaeologists in Sudan have discovered the remains of a 2,700-year-old temple.
The temple is thought to have belonged to the Kingdom of Kush, an ancient state located in what is now known as northern Sudan and southern Egypt.
Artur Obluski, an archaeologist with the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, leads the archaeologists who discovered the temple.
Archaeologists found the temple in Old Dongola, a deserted town in Northern State, Sudan, that dates back to the fifth century. The temple is the only such finding in this specific region.
Inscriptions in the ancient temple point to it being a place of worship for the god Amun-Ra of Kawa, who was worshiped in Kush. Amun-Ra is a fusion between Amun, the god of the air, and Ra, the god of the sun.
Amun-Ra is sometimes portrayed as a sphinx or human with a hawk head. Amun-Ra translates to “divinity in the power of the sun.”
Some of the stones found in the temple were adorned with pictures and carvings written in hieroglyphics. The text in these inscriptions dates the carvings to around 1000 BC due to the style of images and scripts used.
Whether this temple was built and founded in Old Dongola or was moved to its current location “from another site and reused for construction purposes,” expedition-affiliated Egyptologist Dr. Wieczorek notes in a press release. The site could have been moved from Gebel Barkal or Kawa, nearby areas reported as urban and religious centers in the 16th and 14th centuries BCE.
Other recent archeological discoveries in Northeastern Africa include several ancient tombs in Saqqara, a burial site near Cairo, Egypt. These tombs date back to approximately 2500-2100 B.C., and a priest named Khnumdjedef and a palace official named Meri are buried on this site. A gold leaf-covered mummy of a man named Hekashepes was also found, making it one of the oldest and most complete non-royal remains in Egypt.
The announcement of these discoveries comes amid a renewed push in Egypt to revive its tourism industry after a massive decline caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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