A remarkable discovery has been made in Egypt’s western desert, according to archaeologists with the country’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquity.

The surprisingly well-preserved remains, which represent a Byzantine-era city, are located approximately 350 kilometers from the Nile in the New Valley Governorate within the Dakhla Oasis, one of the country’s several oases.

Features unearthed during excavations include residential and religious structures, one comprising an ancient Byzantine church which has been characterized as a basilica-style structure, as well as numerous artifacts, including pottery and coins featuring the likeness of Byzantine emperors and Christian symbols accompanied by Latin.

The church is believed to date to the middle of the fourth century and is situated near the entrance to the city. Nearby, a pair of towers once stood, which were used as lookout posts for defending the location.

An Ancient Egyptian City Resurfaces

The newly uncovered structures offer a unique glimpse at the lives of Egyptians during an era when the country was a part of the Byzantine Empire.

Hisham el-Leithy, Egypt’s Secretary General with the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that several thoroughfares were evident in the areas uncovered during excavations, which point to large public squares and open spaces where inhabitants of the ancient city would have once gathered.

One of the structures at the site is believed to have been the domicile of a church deacon dating to the late fourth century, which might have served as a temporary place of worship before construction of the city’s basilica.

Among the other artifacts uncovered at the site were hundreds of pottery fragments, known as ostraca, which are potsherds that were used for writing material.

Inscriptions on the fragments describe elements of daily life that include financial information, lists, and message exchanges between neighbors, according Diaa Zahran, who heads Egypt’s Islamic, Coptic, and Jewish antiquities department.

Additional Discoveries at Nearby Marina el-Alamein

In addition to the ancient Byzantine city, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquity has also revealed discoveries at the nearby site of Marina el-Alamein, located to the west of Alexandria.

There, The Guardian reports that archaeologists have uncovered 18 newly identified tombs, adding to the dozens that were already known at the site.

Archaeologists also found a 2.5-meter granite sarcophagus containing human remains, in addition to a plaster sphinx, and several burials featuring gold pieces placed in the mouths of the deceased—a funerary practice known as the “golden tongue” that reflected ancient beliefs about the afterlife.

Other artifacts uncovered at Marina el-Alamein include pottery, amphorae, lamps, altars, and other funerary artifacts, according to Ministry of Tourism and Antiquity officials.

Presently, skeletal remains that were uncovered within the granite sarcophagus are being studied, according to Eman Abdel-Khaliq, the site’s mission chief.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

For many centuries, the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria, also known as the Pharos, stood among the tallest constructions on Earth, garnering recognition as one of the famous Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

That all changed beginning in AD 956, and again in 1303, when a series of earthquakes damaged the legendary Pharos, plunging the massive stone used in its construction into the depths of the Mediterranean Sea.

Now, after more than seven centuries, the third-longest-surviving of the seven ancient wonders is rising again, offering archaeologists clues to the appearance and construction of this historic marvel.

Archaeologists with the PHAROS Project report the recovery of 22 massive blocks from the ancient lighthouse, which have remained at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea off Egypt’s coast since the monument’s destruction 723 years ago. The international research initiative aims to use its studies of the recovered materials to digitally rebuild the structure, revealing its appearance to the modern world for the first time in centuries.

Rediscovery of One of the Ancient World’s Seven Wonders

Originally constructed in the third century BC, the ancient structure stood more than 330 feet tall before the trio of earthquakes that ultimately destroyed it. Before its destruction, the lighthouse guided ships sailing the Mediterranean for more than 1,600 years. At the modern site where the Pharos once stood, the Citadel of Quitbay, which was originally constructed beginning in 1477, features some of the original blocks from the lighthouse.

The remains of the lighthouse have been known to archaeologists for more than a century. First described in 1916 by Gaston Jondet and Raymond Weill, and again in 1940 by Sir Leopold Saville, the lighthouse was officially rediscovered as part of a UNESCO-sponsored expedition in 1968, where archaeologist Honor Frost confirmed the ruins had indeed belonged to the Pharos.

However, political tensions at that time prevented further exploration, and the site remained unexplored for several decades. Then in 1994, imagery was obtained by archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur and cinemaphotographer Asma el-Bakri, which finally offered the world a first look at the massive ancient structure’s remains.

Today, the PHAROS Project, led by Isabelle Hairy, an archaeologist with Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, and working in cooperation with the Dassault Systèmes Foundation, has successfully retrieved 22 of the massive stone blocks that once composed the entrance to the lighthouse.

Additional recoveries include portions of doorways, lintels, paving slabs, and other portions of the ancient construction. Retrieving these sunken monoliths has been no small task, as some of the paving slabs alone weigh as much as 88 tons.

Rebuilding the Ancient Pharos

Although the recovery of the ancient slabs of stone that once comprised the famous monument is a promising archaeological endeavor, the PHAROS Project’s primary aim is to use knowledge gained from their study to digitally reconstruct the lighthouse.

To achieve this, Hairy and the team plan to scan each of the huge stone blocks using modern cutting-edge photogrammetry, which will be used to create 3D models of the structure’s components. Then these will be studied and assembled digitally, providing one of the clearest views of one of the ancient world’s most imposing structures.

The research builds on close to a decade of previous work that includes the digitization of more than 100 of the lighthouse’s features that remain underwater. Altogether, the digital reassembly of the Pharos will complement existing imagery from the ancient world that depicts the lighthouse, which includes its appearance in ancient artwork, currency from the time when the Pharos was still in use, and mosaics.

Additionally, historical accounts that preserve written descriptions, like those of Abou Haggag Youssef Ibn Mohammed el-Balawi el-Andaloussi, an Arab traveler who visited Alexandria in 1166 and produced one of the most complete descriptions of the structure, will be used as part of the reconstruction effort.

Together, these combined sources of information will allow Hairy and the PHAROS Project team to reconstruct the most complete and accurate depiction of this ancient wonder, long believed to be lost to history with all the other Wonders of the Ancient World, save only for the Great Pyramid at Giza.

With its digital reconstruction, soon another of these enigmatic Seven Wonders will be available for observation and study, bringing to life another long-lost marvel of antiquity for modern eyes.

Additional details about the PHAROS Project can be found on its official website.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

A “cursed” ancient Roman tablet, intended to invoke divine and demonic wrath upon one’s enemies, has been deciphered by researchers at Heidelberg University in Germany.

The magical lead tablet, originally discovered by Dutch archaeologists in the Netherlands, was crafted in the second century AD. Strangely, it is written in ancient Greek, although in an Egyptian style, rather than the Latin that would be expected for what was then a Roman province of Lower Germania.

Today, the excavation site within the city of Heerlen in the southeast of the Netherlands, near the German border, is home to the country’s largest ancient Roman ruins.

Curse Tablets

The object is not entirely unique, as it belongs to a category of curse tablets called katadesmoi in Greek and defixiones in Latin. The Greeks and Romans believed that cold, heavy iron was especially useful in binding supernatural entities, making it the go-to material for crafting such objects.

As this artifact’s material was both cold and heavy, it reminded ancient people of the bleak underworld. Additionally, lead is also easy to work with in practice, as it is both inexpensive and easy to inscribe.

These small tablets were typically inscribed with curses and then buried, with the intention of bringing misfortune upon rivals in matters of sport, law, or love.

At the time the tablet was created, Heerlen was a Roman military settlement known as Coriovallum. Dutch archaeologists unearthed the 9.3-by-4.8-centimeter katadesmos from a pit beneath the former town square.

Deciphering an Ancient Curse

Researchers at the University of Heidelberg’s Institute for Papyrology used reflectance transformation imaging, a technique that combines photographs taken under different lighting conditions to enhance subtle surface details. Their analysis revealed three distinct types of characters within the inscription.

The combination of Egyptian-style invocations of deities and demons written in ancient Greek is highly unusual for a region where Latin was the dominant written language. Also notable are three symbols known as “Characteres”—magical symbols believed to facilitate communication with supernatural entities—along with two male and two female names.

Dr. Rodney Ast, Academic Director of the Institute for Papyrology, suggests that these four individuals were either the targets of the curse or those on whose behalf it was created. However, Dr. Julia Lougovaya, a research associate at the institute, notes that the male names are Latin while the female names are Greek, a distinction that may hold additional significance.

“It cannot be ruled out that one of the two women was the author of the inscription and had brought the supposed ability to communicate with divine powers through such curses with her from Roman Egypt,” said Dr. Lougovaya.

Ancient Magical Practices

Magic played an important role in Egyptian society, where rituals aimed at healing and protection formed a visible part of religious life, while malicious spells were typically practiced more discreetly.

“In the early centuries A.D., Near Eastern, Egyptian, Jewish, and sometimes even Christian traditions increasingly merged and spread throughout the entire Roman Empire of that time – a development that the discovery from Heerlen impressively underscores,” explained Prof. Joachim Quack, Director of the Institute for Egyptology at Heidelberg University.

A forthcoming scholarly publication will provide the full transcription of the inscription and details of the analysis. The tablet is also scheduled to go on display at a museum in Heerlen in the future.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

A joint expedition to the ancient Egyptian city of Elkab has unearthed several previously unknown ancient rock art inscriptions, including what the team believes are the earliest known monumental Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Written over 1,000 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed, these ancient Egyptian writings, discovered by archaeologists from Yale University and the Royal Museums of Art and History (Brussels), laid the foundation for the later, better-known hieroglyphic writing system.

Yale Professor John Coleman Darnell, the expedition’s leader and the co-director of the Elkab Desert Survey Project, said the newly discovered inscriptions, which were not recorded by any previous scientific expedition, include samples as far back as 4,000 BCE.

Although the team concedes that these are not the first examples of this specific style of rock art, they are the first of this ancient age and “monumental” scale, making them of great significance in the history of ancient Egyptian writing systems.

“This was not what I was expecting to find when I set out on this period of work on the expedition,” Professor Darnell said of the historic find. “It was completely shocking to me.”

Earliest Monumental Egyptian Hieroglyphs Depict Cosmological Concepts

In a Yale news story announcing the discovery, Professor Darnell noted that the newly discovered rock art site of El-Khawy preserved some of the earliest and largest signs “from the formative stages of the hieroglyphic script.” The professor added that the discovery includes “rare” evidence for how this enigmatic ancient society invented its internationally recognized ancient writing system.

The expedition, which was directed by Darnell and Dirk Huyge, was undertaken in cooperation with the Ministry of Antiquities and the Aswan and Edfu inspectorates.

After photographing the newly discovered inscription, Darnell and Alberto Urcia, a digital archaeologist and associate research scientist in the University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, created a series of three-dimensional (3D) images. Darnell said the new technology allows archaeologists to record ancient sites and artworks “at a level of accuracy and detail that was absolutely impossible before.”

“It also means that we can record the site as a place, or a location, and not just as a series of inscriptions,” the professor added.

One of the more noteworthy examples of ancient monumental hieroglyphs, carved sometime between 4,000 and 3,500 BCE, depicted a herd of elephants. A closer examination also revealed that one of the elephants had an image of a smaller elephant inside of it, which Professor Darnell described as “an incredibly rare way of representing a pregnant female animal.”

A second discovery detailed by the joint expedition, which consists of four separate panels, was likely created sometime around 3,250 BCE. Written right to left, which ultimately became the dominant writing form in later Egyptian hieroglyphic languages, the panels show animal images of a bull’s head on a short pole, followed by two back-to-back saddlebill storks with a bald ‘ibis’ bird above and between them.

The research team said this arrangement of symbols is common in Egyptian representations created centuries after the newly discovered panels depicting the solar cycle. These same depictions typically include imagery of luminosity. Darnell suggested that the images may also express “the concept of royal authority over the ordered cosmos.”

“This is the First Time That Anyone Has Seen Them on Such a Massive Scale”

When discussing the importance of the new find, Professor Darnell noted the immense size of the individual tableaus and their elements. For example, each individual hieroglyph identified by the Yale-led team measures over half a meter in height. The professor also noted that the entire tableau “is about 70 centimeters (27.5 inches) in height,” whereas previously discovered signs of early Egyptian hieroglyphs were “only one or two centimeters in size.”

“This discovery isn’t new in the sense that this is the first time that anyone has seen these hieroglyphs,” Darnell explained, “this is the first time that anyone has seen them on such a massive scale.”

To offer a perspective on the discovery’s significance, the professor said a modern-world equivalent would be seeing smaller text displayed on your computer screen, “and then suddenly seeing very large ones made the same way,” only displayed up on a highway billboard.

When discussing the site’s location in the northeastern desert hinterland of Elkab, Darnell noted that it was a “very important” center in ancient Egypt, which demonstrates that the area’s budding communicative system “is not limited to the more commonly found small tokens or labels.”

The professor also said the study shows that ancient writing did not develop slowly “for bureaucratic use,” as researchers had previously believed. Instead, Darnell suggested that the discovery shows hieroglyphic-style writing “was more geographically widespread and topically diverse at the time of or shortly after its development.”

“This also suggests that there is a much more expansive use of the early writing system than is indicated from other surviving archaeological material,” the professor added.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

A curious recent discovery has revealed a promising new underground archaeological find at the ancient site of Buto in Egypt’s Nile Delta.

Researchers who were testing a remote sensing technology designed to locate buried structures and other below-ground features reported the unique find earlier this year, which could be a previously undiscovered tomb or temple now believed to date as far back as 2,600 years.

The discovery was made at the Tell el-Fara’in site, more commonly known as Buto, which comprises the remains of an ancient city that thrived around 5,600 years ago during Egypt’s Predynastic period.

Origins of a Mystery

Buto underwent several periods of destruction and reassembly throughout its history, making it a significant focus of past archaeological work.

Some of the city’s oldest portions are currently entombed beneath several centuries’ worth of accumulated mud and soil, a factor that significantly complicates traditional excavations. To help them locate an ideal location for future excavation, the team employed an approach that combined SAR (Sentinel-1 GRD) satellite imagery with electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) measurements, which helped them pinpoint an ideal location to dig that would best enable an investigation of Buto’s settlement phases.

“Sentinel-1 (C-band) satellite imagery captured on May 5, 2018, was processed using SNAP software (version 9.0.0) to identify large-scale anomalies indicative of buried structures,” the team reports in a paper detailing their findings, which appeared in Applied Geophysics in March.

“Based on these detected anomalies, the locations for ERT profiles were strategically selected to maximize the likelihood of indicating significant subsurface features,” the team explained.

ERT technology is ideal for such carefully targeted excavation, since it relies on electrical currents placed into the ground, which researchers then use to collect data that helps them assemble a three-dimensional model of the buried structures. This imagery is generated based on differences in the way various materials either display electrical conductivity or resistance.

Buried Discoveries Emerge

Based on the team’s scans, the top three meters of the area revealed a distinctive layer of material, which the team judged to be broken pottery and debris—likely associated with Roman periods of occupation.

However, going further down in their scans, descending to a depth of approximately six meters, the team discovered something more intriguing: what appeared to be some kind of large buried structure.

Based on its depth, the team believes this unique structure is likely associated with the Saite period, which dates it to around 2,600 years ago. Although it remains unknown precisely what the structure is, or what its exact purpose may have been, one possibility is that it could be a large shrine, or even a tomb.

Uncovering Religious Artifacts

Following the initial discovery, the team undertook preliminary excavations of a small 10 x 10-meter area. This revealed walls constructed of mudbrick, as well as religious artifacts in locations that aligned with the team’s scans.

“The presence of a small offering basin along with numerous religious amulets depicting Egyptian deities such as Isis, Horus, Taweret, and Wadjet further supports the temple hypothesis,” the team writes in their study.

Also among the religious artifacts uncovered at the site were a “remarkable bronze amulet with a suspension hole, representing Horus the child” as well as amulets featuring a crouching lion, an amulet of Anubis, and the remains of limestone statues “in sexual positions” along with “a faience plaque with relief carvings of Hathor on both sides.”

However, the team reports that one of the most significant artifacts recovered from this area of the excavation was a steatite scarab bearing the name of King Thutmose III, which the team believes “may have functioned as an amulet or seal.”

“Collectively, these artefacts indicate the presence of a religious site with strong cultic and ceremonial associations, further reinforcing the interpretation of the structure as a temple from the 26th Dynasty,” the team says.

Ongoing Excavations

While still in the early phases, the team’s discoveries so far help to validate the geophysical and remote sensing techniques that made the discovery possible. “The results of this study demonstrate the effectiveness of combining geophysical measurements and remote sensing data,” the team writes, adding that they provided “a very accurate vision in detecting buried settlements in a complex region.”

“3D inversion algorithms were particularly effective in delineating buried mudbrick walls and architectural structures, significantly enhancing our understanding of site formation processes,” the researchers add.

Going forward, the team recommends further ERT surveys, which may help to reveal additional information about the site’s deepest occupation levels. For the time being, the team believes the evidence in hand points to the interpretation of the site and its features as an ancient temple, and that evidence points to the possibility that another may be located nearby.

“Our findings suggest that, in addition to the known temple, another temple may remain buried under a thick clay layer, which will be investigated through extensive measurements in forthcoming studies,” the team writes.

The recent paper, “Multi-scale detection of buried archaeological elements across different occupation phases: an integrated approach using radar satellite imagery and electric resistivity tomography at Buto, northwestern Nile Delta of Egypt,” appeared in Applied Geophysics on March 10, 2026.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

Paleontologists have described an assemblage of marine fish fossils from the 62.2-million-year-old site of Qreiya 3 in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, providing a window into this transition.

The post Fish Fossils from Early Paleocene Fill 10-Million-Year Gap after Dinosaur Extinction appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

The mystery is real. Egypt’s pyramids are more than 4,500 years old, the Great Pyramid still feels impossible to many modern viewers, and yet the archive has yielded nothing that looks like a master plan in the modern sense. No papyrus roll has emerged with a neat elevation, no construction dossier for Khufu, no surviving […]

The post The Missing Blueprints of the Pyramids appeared first on Curiosmos.

For more than four and a half millennia, the Khufu Pyramid has stood on the Giza plateau, enduring dozens of earthquakes without serious structural damage.

The post Great Pyramid of Giza’s Design Naturally Shields It from Earthquakes, Archaeologists Say appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.