Category Archives: AFRICA

A mummy discovered in a vast burial ground of Egypt’s pharaohs could change how ancient history is understood

A mummy discovered in a vast burial ground of Egypt’s pharaohs could change how ancient history is understood

A new analysis of an ancient Egyptian mummy suggests that advanced mummification techniques were used 1,000 years earlier than previously believed, rewriting the understood history of ancient Egyptian funerary practices.

A mummy discovered in a vast burial ground of Egypt's pharaohs could change how ancient history is understood
Mohamed Mujahid (L), head of the Egyptian mission which discovered the tomb of the ancient Egyptian nobleman Khuwy inspects the tomb’s walls inside at the Saqqara necropolis on April 13, 2019.

The discovery centres around a mummy, known as Khuwy, believed to have been a high-ranking nobleman. He was excavated at the necropolis, a vast ancient burial ground of Egyptian pharaohs and royals near Cairo, in 2019.

Scientists now believe that Khuwy is much older than previously thought, dating back to Egypt’s Old Kingdom, which would make him one of the oldest Egyptian mummies ever to be discovered, The Observer reported.

The Old Kingdom spanned 2,700 to 2,200 B.C.E and was known as the “Age of the Pyramid Builders.”

Khuwy was embalmed using advanced techniques thought to have been developed much later. His skin was preserved using expensive resins made from tree sap, and his body was impregnated with resins and bound with high-quality linen dressings.

The new analysis suggests that ancient Egyptians living around 4,000 years ago were carrying out sophisticated burials.

“This would completely turn our understanding of the evolution of mummification on its head,” Professor Salima Ikram, head of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, told The Observer.

“If this is indeed an Old Kingdom mummy, all books about mummification and the history of the Old Kingdom will need to be revised.”

Workers excavate a burial site at Saqqara, January 17, 2021.

“Until now, we had thought that Old Kingdom mummification was relatively simple, with basic desiccation – not always successful – no removal of the brain, and only occasional removal of the internal organs,” Ikram told The Observer. Ikram was surprised by the amount of resin used to preserve the mummy, which is not often recorded in mummies from the Old Kingdom.

She added that typically more attention was paid to the exterior appearance of the deceased than the interior.

“This mummy is awash with resins and textiles and gives a completely different impression of mummification. In fact, it is more like mummies found 1,000 years later,” she said.

Ikram told The National that the resin used would have been imported from the Near East, most likely Lebanon, demonstrating that trade with neighbouring empires around that time was more extensive than previously thought.

The discovery has been documented in National Geographic’s new series, Lost Treasures of Egypt, which starts airing on 7 November. Tom Cook, who produced the series for Windfall Films, told The Observer that Ikram initially could not believe that Khuwy dated back to the Old Kingdom because of the advanced mummification techniques.

“They knew the pottery in the tomb was the Old Kingdom but [Ikram] didn’t think that the mummy was from [that period] because it was preserved too well,” Cook told the outlet.

“But over the course of the investigation, she started to come round [to the idea].”

Khuwy’s ornate tomb featured hieroglyphics that suggested the burial took place during the Fifth Dynasty period, spanning the early 25th to mid-24th century B.C.E, The Smithsonian said.

Archaeologists also found pottery and jars used to store body parts during the mummification process that dated back to that time.

Ikram’s team will conduct more tests to confirm that the remains do belong to Khuwy.

She told The National that one possibility was that another person could have been mummified and buried centuries later in a re-purposing of the tomb.

“I remain hesitant until we can conduct carbon-14 dating,” Ikram told the outlet, adding that it would likely take six to eight months.

New Discoveries Found Under Demolished Historic Palace In Egypt – Al-Monitor

New Discoveries Found Under Demolished Historic Palace In Egypt – Al-Monitor

An Egyptian archaeological mission working on the site of the Tawfiq Pasha Andraos Palace – which was recently demolished – unveiled a number of amphoras and lamps dating from the Byzantine era.

New Discoveries Found Under Demolished Historic Palace In Egypt – Al-Monitor

Mustafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said on October 17 that the find is part of a series in the city of Luxor, in southern Egypt. He said excavations were underway at the site.

In August, Egyptian authorities demolished the 120-year-old Tawfiq Pasha Andraos Palace near the Luxor Temple and overlooking the Nile, based on a decision by the Ministry of Antiquities that archaeological sites lay beneath it.

The palace hosted Saad Zaghloul, leader of the 1919 revolution after British authorities banned his travel. It contained many rare items and a gold-plated car, among other valuables. In 2013, the bodies of Andraos’ two daughters, killed in mysterious circumstances, were found inside the palace.

The palace of Andraos, which was a member of the Luxor House of Representatives from 1921 to 1935, is not the first to be demolished by the Egyptian authorities. In 2009, the Mubarak government destroyed the nearby palace of Yassa Andraos, Tawfik’s brother, as part of a plan to turn Luxor into an open museum.

But the move was controversial. “Even the Louvre museum has monuments underneath and has never been demolished,” Bassam al-Shammaa, Egyptologist and tour guide, told Al-Monitor.

“Nothing justifies destroying antiquity for the good of another, especially since Egypt has witnessed successive historical civilizations. It is simply unthinkable to demolish antiquity because there is another in below.

Shammaa added that Luxor Palace has located a short walk from famous Roman monuments opposite the first western edifice of Luxor Temple.

The most famous monument belongs to Emperor Hadrian and is dedicated to the god Serapis, whose statue can be found in the northwest corner of the Luxor Temple courtyard, very close to the Andraos Palace. The Roman monument, according to Shammaa, was built in AD 126.

Ahmed Amer, an archaeological researcher at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, said the finds marked a new stage for archaeology.

Recent findings, he said, offer new details about the lives of ancient Egyptians, both religious and secular. He mentioned a large and varied amount of antiquities that have been discovered in the Saqqara area, south of Cairo, in recent years.

Moreover, in the city of Luxor was found the lost city or the “City of Gold”, Amer added. All the antiquities discovered stimulate both science and tourism, he said, and many archaeological finds are scientifically examined but not presented to tourists.

Other recent finds under Tawfik Pasha Andraos Palace, Amer said, include a set of Roman bronze coins, part of a Roman-era wall, and an ancient storehouse. Lamps are made of different materials, and pottery is probably the most common, he said.

According to Amer, the lamps are dishes filled with oil and salt, on which floats a wick. These lamps often depicted various scenes from everyday life, images of animals and altered plant motifs. The oil is placed in the centre hole of the dish for lighting, with the wick protruding from a front hole.

The newly named human species may be the direct ancestor of modern humans

Newly named human species may be the direct ancestor of modern humans

Live Science reports that paleoanthropologist Mirjana Roksandic of the University of Winnipeg and her colleagues suggest renaming some human ancestors after examining fossils dating from 774,000 to 129,000 years ago.

Newly named human species may be the direct ancestor of modern humans
Homo bodoensis may help to untangle how human lineages moved and interacted across the globe.

The newly proposed species, Homo bodoensis — which lived more than half a million years ago in Africa — may help to untangle how human lineages moved and interacted across the globe.

Although modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only surviving human lineage, other human species once roamed Earth. For example, scientists recently discovered that the Indonesian island Flores was once home to the extinct species Homo floresiensis, often known as “the hobbit” for its miniature body.

Deciding whether a set of ancient human fossils belongs to one species or another is often a challenging problem open to heated debate. For instance, some researchers suggest that skeletal differences between modern humans and Neanderthals mean they were different species.

However, other scientists argue that because there is recent abundant genetic evidence that modern humans and Neanderthals once interbred and had fertile, viable offspring, Neanderthals should not be considered a single species.

In the new study, researchers analyzed human fossils dating from about 774,000 to 129,000 years ago (once known as the Middle Pleistocene and now renamed the Chibanian). Previous work suggested modern humans arose during this time in Africa, while Neanderthals emerged in Eurasia. However, much about this key chapter in human evolution remains poorly understood — a problem paleoanthropologists call “the muddle in the middle.”

Chibanian-era human fossils from Africa and Eurasia are often assigned to one of two species: Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis. However, both species often carried multiple, and often contradictory, definitions of the skeletal characteristics and other traits that described them.

Recent DNA evidence has revealed that some fossils in Europe dubbed H. heidelbergensis were actually from early Neanderthals. As such, H. heidelbergensis was a redundant name in those cases, the scientists noted.

The newly named species Homo bodoensis, a human ancestor, lived in Africa during the middle Pleistocene.

Similarly, recent analyses of many fossils in East Asia now suggest they should no longer be called H. heidelbergensis, the researchers added. For instance, many facial and other features seen in Chibanian East Asian human fossils differ from those seen in European and African fossils of the same age.

In addition, Chibanian fossils from Africa are sometimes called both H. heidelbergensis and H. rhodesiensis. The scientists also noted that H. rhodesiensis was a poorly defined label that was never widely accepted in science, due in part to its association with controversial English imperialist Cecil Rhodes

To help deal with all this confusion, the researchers now propose the existence of a new species, H. bodoensis, named after a 600,000-year-old skull found in Bodo D’ar, Ethiopia, in 1976.

This new name would encompass many fossils previously identified as either H. heidelbergensis or H. rhodesiensis.

The researchers suggest that H. bodoensis was the direct ancestor of H. sapiens, together forming a different branch of the human family tree than the one that gave rise to the Neanderthals and the mysterious Denisovans, which Siberian and Tibetan fossils suggested they lived about the same time as their Neanderthal cousins.

“Giving a new name to a species is always controversial,” study co-lead author Mirjana Roksandic, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, told Live Science. “However, if people start using it, it will survive and live.”

Homo bodoensis was named after a 600,000-year-old skull found in Ethiopia.

In this new classification, H. bodoensis will describe most Chibanian human fossils from Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Many Chibanian human fossils from Europe would get reclassified as Neanderthals. The names H. heidelbergensis and H. rhodesiensis would then disappear. Chibanian human fossils from East Asia may get their own names with more research.

“We are not claiming to rewrite human evolution,” Roksandic said. Instead, the researchers seek to organize the variation seen in ancient humans “in a way that makes it possible to discuss where it comes from and what it represents,” she explained. “Those differences can help us understand movement and interaction.”

In the future, the researchers want to see if they can find any H. bodoensis specimens in Europe from the Chibanian, Roksandic said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Thursday (Oct. 28) in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues News, and Reviews.

Giant ram head statues found on ‘Avenue of Sphinxes’ in Egypt

Giant ram head statues found on ‘Avenue of Sphinxes’ in Egypt

Three giant statues of ram heads — at least one of which had a cobra on top — have been discovered south of Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egyptologists announced. 

Karnak Temple was built between roughly 4,000 and 2,000 years ago, and much of it is dedicated to Amun-Ra, a god associated with the sun and Thebes, the capital of ancient Egypt (now the modern-day city of Luxor). The temple complex covers over 250 acres (100 hectares). 

On Oct. 11, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced that three giant ram heads had been found by an Egyptian archaeological team south of a gateway built by the Ptolemies, a dynasty of pharaohs descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals that ruled Egypt between 305 B.C and 30 B.C. 

Giant ram head statues found on 'Avenue of Sphinxes' in Egypt
An entire avenue of the ram-headed statues connected Karnak Temple to Luxor Temple.
The ram’s head would have rested on a body (shown here). They are shaped a bit like a sphinx.

In ancient times, these ram heads were part of three larger statues that had the bodies of creatures that looked a bit like sphinxes.

The statues featured in a large avenue of ram-headed statues that went south, running for 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometres) between Karnak Temple and Luxor Temple, Mustafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told the news site al-Monitor. 

This avenue is often called the “avenue of the sphinxes” and consisted of around 700 statues.

“An estimated 700 sphinxes lined the route between Karnak and Luxor temples and its magnificence can scarcely be imagined,” wrote Elizabeth Blyth, an independent scholar in her book “Karnak: Evolution of a Temple” (Routledge, 2006). While many of the surviving sphinxes date to the reign of Nectanebo I (380-362 B.C.) artwork suggests that the avenue existed at least as early as the 18th dynasty (1550-1295 B.C.), wrote Blyth. 

Avenue of the sphinxes or criosphinxes leading to the Karnak Temple Complex at Luxor, Egypt.

Egyptologists are in the process of conserving the ram heads and will put them back on statues showing the bodies of the creatures, Waziri said in the statement. 

READ ALSO: EGYPT’S SECRETS REVEALED: POSSIBLY A SECOND SPHINX & MYSTERIOUS HIDDEN CHAMBERS??

Archaeologists unearthed another discovery — the remains of a cobra statue — Waziri announced Oct. 17 on his Facebook page. This cobra statue would have originally been on top of one of the ram heads, so the conservation team plans to put it back on, Waziri said. 

The age of the statues is being investigated, but Waziri told Al-Monitor that the design of one of them suggests that it may date back to the reign of Amenhotep III, who ruled Egypt between 1390 B.C and 1352 B.C.,

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s list of Egyptian rulers, and was the grandfather of King Tutankhamun. Excavation, analysis and conservation work is ongoing. 

Shell beads found in Moroccan caves are at least 142,000 years old

Shell beads found in Moroccan caves are at least 142,000 years old

From ancient beads to modern bling, jewellery has allowed humans to make statements for millennia. Now, reports Ann Gibbons for Science magazine, a new analysis of beads found in Morocco offers a clearer picture of how long people have been making these fashion pronouncements: at least 142,000 to 150,000 years.

Shell beads found in Moroccan caves are at least 142,000 years old
Believed to be the world’s oldest jewellery, the perforated shells date to about 142,000 years ago.

Writing in the journal Science Advances, the researchers date 33 small seashells bored with holes to that timeframe—around 10,000 to 20,000 years earlier than previously recorded.

Discovered in Bizmoune Cave, the prehistoric jewellery shows how early humans communicated information about themselves to others.

“They were probably part of the way people expressed their identity with their clothing,” says study co-author Steven L. Kuhn, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, in a statement.

“Wearing beads has to do with meeting strangers, expanding social networks,” Kuhn tells Science. “You don’t have to signal your identity to your mother or whether you’re married to your husband or wife.”

Per the study, the seashells were found in a deposited layer dated to at least 142,000 years ago, extending the earliest records of this type of human activity from the Middle Stone Age into the late Middle Pleistocene period.

“[O]rnaments such as beads are among the earliest signs of symbolic behaviour among human ancestors,” the paper states. “Their appearance signals important developments in both cognition and social relations.”

The discovery suggests that humans in North Africa were making ornaments long before their peers in other parts of Africa and Asia.

Archaeologists recovered the 33 beads from a cave in western Morocco.

“While similar specimens have been found elsewhere in northwestern Africa, these examples extend their range to the far western edge of present-day Morocco, providing evidence for when and where ancient populations may have been connected over large geographic regions and allowing us to refine the mode and tempo of modern human origins,” Teresa Steele, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, tells Nature Middle East’s, Rieko Kawabata.

Unearthed between 2014 and 2018, the ancient jewellery was made from perforated shells of the mollusc Tritia gibbosula. All but one of the snail shells was found in the same layer of ash, which also included stone tools and animal bones.

The researchers dated the beads by measuring uranium decay in mineral deposits found in that same layer. Their analysis pinpointed the shells’ modification to between 120,000 and 171,000 years ago, with 142,000 years old as the jewellery’s likely minimum age.

According to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the earliest forms of jewellery were made from shells, stone and bone. Prehistoric people likely wore such adornments “as a protection from the dangers of life or as a mark of status or rank.”

READ ALSO: BONE TOOLS IN MOROCCO MAY BE EARLIEST EVIDENCE OF CLOTHING

The Moroccan beads join a growing body of millennia-old jewellery analyzed by archaeologists. In 2017, for instance, researchers on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi found a polished pendant crafted from the finger bone of a bear cuscus.

More recently, a team investigating the Qafzeh Cave in Israel discovered 120,000-year-old shells strung on a necklace as beads.

“It’s one thing to know that people were capable of making [jewellery],” says Kuhn in the statement, “but then the question becomes, ‘OK, what stimulated them to do it?’”

Dufana Boat: The 8,000 Years oldest Canoe in Africa & second oldest on earth

Dufana Boat: The 8,000 Years oldest Canoe in Africa & second oldest on earth

8,000 years ago, Nigeria. “Africa’s oldest known boat” the Dufuna Canoe was discovered near the region of the River Yobe. The Canoe was discovered by a Fulani herdsman in May 1987, in Dufuna Village while digging a well. The canoe’s “almost black wood”, said to be African mahogany, is “entirely an organic material”.

Various Radio-Carbon tests conducted in laboratories of reputable Universities in Europe and America indicate that the Canoe is over 8000 years old, thus making it the oldest in Africa and 3rd oldest in the World.

Little is known of the period to which the boat belongs, in archaeological terms, it is described as an early phase of the Later Stone Age, which began rather more than 12,000 years ago and ended with the appearance of pottery.

(Photo)-Nigeria. “Africa’s oldest known boat” (6,000 B.C.) the Dufuna Canoe was discovered near the region of the River Yobe. Various Radio-Carbon tests conducted in laboratories of reputable Universities in Europe and America indicate that the Canoe is over 8000 years old, thus making it the oldest in Africa and 3rd oldest in the World. Ranking the Dufuna canoe as the world’s third oldest known dugout. Older than it is the dugouts from Pesse, Netherlands; and Noyen-Sur-Seine, France. Which are very primitive in comparison to the modern design – even by our standards – of the Dufuna Canoe.

The lab results redefined the pre-history of African water transport, ranking the Dufuna canoe as the world’s third oldest known dugout. Older than it is the dugouts from Pesse, Netherlands, and Noyen-Sur-Seine, France. But evidence of an 8,000-year-old tradition of boat building in Africa throws cold water on the assumption that maritime transport developed much later there in comparison with Europe.

Peter Breunig of the University of Frankfurt, Germany, an archaeologist involved in the project, says the canoe’s age “forces a reconsideration of Africa’s role in the history of water transport”. It shows, he adds, “that the cultural history of Africa was not determined by Near Eastern and European influences but took its own, in many cases parallel, course”. Breunig, adding that it even outranks in style European finds of similar age.

According to him, “The bow and stern are both carefully worked to points, giving the boat a notably more elegant form”, compared to “the dugout made of conifer wood from Pesse in the Netherlands, whose blunt ends and thick sides seem crude”. To go by its stylistic sophistication, he reasons, “It is highly probable that the Dufuna boat does not represent the beginning of a tradition, but had already undergone a long development, and that the origins of water transport in Africa lie even further back in time.”

The canoe excavated at Dunfuna village in Fune local government of Yobe state dated to 8000 BCE and presently at Damaturu in Yobe State capital

Egypt’s oldest known boat is 5000 years old.

Presently undergoing conservation at Damaturu, Yobe State, it was dug out from a depth of five meters beneath the earth’s surface and measured 8.4 meters in length, 0.5 meters wide and about 5 cm thick varying at certain parts of the surface.

The canoe belongs to the Late Stone Age period (Neolithic Age) when humans ceased to roam the face of the earth hunting to become herdsmen and cultivators and in the process becoming modifiers of their environment with complex social structures in response to new problems and ways of dealing with situations.

“The discovery of this boat is an important landmark in the history of Nigeria in particular and Africa in general,” says Eluyemi.

Besides proving that the Nigerian society was at par (if not earlier) than that of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Minoa and Phoenicia, the discovery also provides the first concrete evidence that Africans possessed the ability to reason and have been exploring technology to modify their environment to suit their needs.

But more importantly “the canoe has shown that people in the Niger area had a history of advanced technology and that they had mastered the three major items of Paleolithic culture which were the fashioning, standardization and utilization of tools according to certain set traditions,” explains Eluyemi.

But beyond that, the discovery has also revealed that Nigerians were not static people. “It gives concrete evidence of transportation by seas as well as providing evidence of some form of long-distance commercial activities indicative of existing political and economic structures.”

One great benefit of the discovery is that it has helped archaeologists draw a relationship between what was happening in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world during that period. Indications are that while Nigerians were making canoes in Dufuna village in 6000 BC, the people of Catol Huyuk in Turkey were making pottery, textiles etc, like the people of Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), were forming urban communities and the Chinese were making painted pottery in the Yang Shao region.

But particularly of interest to archaeologists is the proof that some form of advanced civilization existed in the Lake Chad Basin around 6000 BC.

Documentation has shown that based on the minimal available technology during this period, the making of the Dufuna canoe must have been a ponderous task that called for mastery, specialization and ingenuity. A lot of work, man-hours and skill must also have been put into the production since no iron tools were in existence at the time.

The tools used were probably Post Pleistocene ungrounded core axe-like and pick-axe bifacial tools of microlithic appearance. It can be assumed that the canoe must have been made near a river to eliminate the difficulty of transporting it over long distances.

Archaeologists Find Oldest Home in Human History, Dating to 2 Million Years Ago

Archaeologists Find Oldest Home in Human History, Dating to 2 Million Years Ago

Archaeologists have identified Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa’s the Kalahari Desert as the world’s oldest home, thanks to new evidence confirming the theory that early humans were already occupying the site 2 million years ago.

Excavations at Wonderwerk Cave have determined it was occupied by humans some two million years ago, making it the world’s oldest-known home. Photo courtesy of Michael Chazan.

The dates for the cave—named for the Afrikaans word for “miracle”—were determined by testing the cave sediments, according to a new paper in Quaternary Science Reviews by researchers from the University of Toronto and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“We can now say with confidence that our human ancestors were making simple Oldowan stone tools inside the Wonderwerk Cave 1.8 million years ago,” lead author Ron Shaar said in a statement.

Wonderwerk is “a key site for the Earlier Stone Age,” according to the paper, but archaeologists have never found human remains there. Instead, the dating was obtained by investigating the different rock laters, also known as the stratified sedimentary sequence, reports Haaretz.

The cave contains traces of basal sediment, produced by retreating glaciers grinding against the bedrock, which would have to have been tracked in by early humans.

Archaeologists Find Oldest Home in Human History, Dating to 2 Million Years Ago
Ron Shaar taking samples for paleomagnestisim at Wonderwerk Cave.

Using magnetostratigraphy, a branch of stratigraphy that detects variations in the magnetic properties of rocks, the researchers dated 178 samples from the cave.

Measuring the magnetic signal of these ancient clay particles revealed the direction of the earth’s magnetic field—which changes poles every half million years or so—when the dust first entered the cave.

“Since the exact timing of these magnetic ‘reversals’ is globally recognized, it gave us clues to the antiquity of the entire sequence of layers in the cave,” Shaar explained.

The findings dated some of the sediment to 2 million years old. That matched the results that study team member Michael Chazan reached using cosmogenic dating in 2008. That earlier research, which many scholars rejected, measured cosmogenic nuclides caused by exposure to cosmic rays, which are produced and decay at a known rate. The new study also used this technique as a secondary dating method.

Wonderwerk Cave.

“Quartz particles in the sand have a built-in geological clock that starts ticking when they enter a cave,” Ari Matmon, another coauthor of the paper, added. “In our lab, we are able to measure the concentrations of specific isotopes in those particles and deduce how much time had passed since those grains of sand entered the cave.”

The cave also contains ancient stone tools such as hand axes, and the first evidence of early humans using fire, some one million years ago, as first reported in a 2012 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The evidence of the fire was found deep enough in the cave that it could only have been the result of human activity, not brought there by wildfire.

Though humans occupied the cave continuously over the last 2 million years, it was not discovered by modern humans until farmers came upon it in the 1940s. Excavations have been ongoing ever since.

Ron Shaar testing for paleomagnestisim at Wonderwerk Cave.
A 3-D scan of the excavated area that was sampled for dating.
Wonderwerk Cave.
A hand axe from Wonderwerk Cave, seen in front of the cave entrance.

World’s oldest ‘pet cemetery’ discovered in ancient Egypt

World’s oldest ‘pet cemetery’ discovered in ancient Egypt

World's oldest 'pet cemetery' discovered in ancient Egypt

A dig near the famous ancient Egyptian port city of Berenice has turned up a mysterious animal cemetery dating to the 1st century AD.

It emerged in the dunes to the northwest of the important ancient Red Sea port of Berenice, which saw traffic from far and wide, with ships coming from East Africa, Europe, and India.

Ninety per cent of the nearly 600 burial sites explored unearthed cats, though there were also dogs and macaque monkeys, a few of them definitely imported from outside Africa.

The find was published by a team led by Marta Osypinska, an archaeozoologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, in the journal World Archaeology.

Several characteristics make this discovery uniquely mysterious. For one thing, none of the animals was mummified, as they are at other archaeological sites, such as temples. Here, too, there was a greater variety of species and funeral practices. Also, unlike at other burial sites, there were no humans among the beasts.

While the animals obviously had a special place in their society, the paper says, to think of them the way we think of pets today might not be quite right. These “companion animals,” as the researchers call them, probably played more of a utilitarian role than the pampered pets of today.

Still, the animals were definitely treated well in death.

They’re accompanied by craft objects like pottery that is thought to have protected them, and the creatures also have adornments like beaded necklaces made of stone, glass, and faience and shell. They were uniformly found in a sleep-like position.

Other experts second the conviction that the site is truly something new.

“It’s something completely different than what we see elsewhere,” Bea De Cupere, an archaeologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, who was not involved with the project, tells Atlas Obscura.

READ ALSO: GRAVES OF NEARLY 600 CATS AND DOGS IN ANCIENT EGYPT MAY BE THE WORLD’S OLDEST PET CEMETERY

“I’ve seen thousands and thousands of bones in my career, and maybe 10 cats,” she says.

According to her research, the ships that came and went in these ports usually had cats aboard for pest control, suggesting that these may have been partly working animals.