Sometimes a civilization builds monuments to its own obliteration so grandiose that they can be viewed from space. That’s basically the premise of a new study covered in The Conversation, written by archaeologists Julian Cooper, Maël Crépy, and Marie Bourgeois, who spent years scanning satellite imagery of eastern Sudan’s Atbai Desert looking for traces of ancient human activity, and they found it in the form of 260 massive circular burial sites scattered across nearly 1,000 kilometers of desert.
The team uncovered a series of enormous structures, some of which were around 80 meters wide, that acted as enclosures containing human remains, alongside those of cattle, sheep, and goats. In a lot of cases, bodies were arranged around a central figure, hinting that this was some kind of early form of depicting hierarchy. Maybe not a king per se, but maybe the first signs that certain people held a higher status within these nomadic communities.
Desert Clans Survived Outside of Ancient Egyptian Megacities
When we think of ancient cultures that inhabited northeastern Africa, we tend to think of Egypt and its iconic pyramids, its fabulous pharaohs, and its gargantuan monuments that, to this day, are still considered architectural wonders. But while there were thriving ancient megacities, there were also plenty of mobile desert clans somehow surviving within a Saharan desert that was drying out, since, believe it or not, there was a long stretch of North African history where it was a lot wetter than it is today.
The researchers say that all the evidence indicates that cattle were both livestock and a status symbol to these nomadic peoples. Owning large herds in a hostile desert environment would’ve been the ancient North African equivalent of owning a fleet of Lamborghinis. The reason people were buried with their animals nearby is the same reason pharaohs were entombed alongside treasures. They were taking the things they most prized with them into the afterlife.
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