Hoard of 5,500 Roman-era Silver Coins Unearthed in Germany
Archaeologists in Augsburg, Germany, revealed unearthed a historical hoard including 15 kg of silver coins from the Roman Empire’s era. In a historic Roman camp in Augsburg, more than 5,500 coins from the first and second century AD were uncovered.
According to the local newspaper emphasis, it comprises swords, tools, jewellery, and tableware and is the greatest Roman treasure of silver in Germany thus far.
Archaeologists in Augsburg made a Roman-era find for the second time in a few months, and experts said the more than 5,500 silver coins discovered at a disused manufacturing site were among the most important findings of this type in Germany.
Coins from Roman times: The silver treasure of Augsburg
The coins were found individually distributed in a construction pit in the Oberhausen district.
Rare silver coins discovered in Germany
The coins were discovered separately scattered in a construction trench near Oberhausen, the city’s core. Around 15 BC, Emperor Augustus’ stepsons built the city.
A military camp that eventually became a supply depot. That is why, behind Trier, Augsburg is Germany’s second-oldest city. Later, Emperor Hadrian awarded city powers to the “Augusta Vindelicum” town that had grown up around the military camp.
A period in Augsburg’s history about which virtually little is known.
The oldest coins date back to the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, making them more than 1950 years old, and the wealth is worth 11 times the yearly income of a Roman soldier during this time period.
For his part, German archaeologist Sebastian Gerhaus said: “What makes this treasure particularly important is that it is dinars dating back to the first and second centuries AD, and they still contain a very large amount of silver, and weapons, tools, jewellery.”
Stefan Krmnicek from the Institute for Classical Archeology at the University of Tübingen, “This amount of money must have been enormous by ancient standards. It is certainly not owned by someone who belonged to the lower social pyramid. This is most likely to think of people who were active in the military or in trade,” he said.
Augsburg, is a city that is richer in Roman history than almost any other in Germany. For this reason, where the found coins will be exhibited will be determined after the research.
Gaza farmer finds a 4,500-year-old statue of the Canaanite goddess
A farmer in the city of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, found a rare 4,500-year-old stone sculpture while working on his land. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said Monday that the 22-centimetre-tall limestone head is believed to represent the Canaanite goddess Anat and is estimated to be dated to around 2,500 B.C.
The sculpture is 22 cm tall, made of limestone, with a head but without a body, and attached to the head was the crown of the snake, which was used by the gods as a symbol of strength and invincibility.
“Anat was the goodness of love, beauty, and war in the Canaanite mythology,” said Jamal Abu Rida, the ministry´s director, in a statement.
Anat, Anath, or Anatha is a major northwest Semitic goddess. Syria, particularly Ugarit and Mount Lebanon. Canaanites, Amorites, Egyptians (Elephantine), Libyans, and Hebrews all worshipped him.
Gaza, which was on important trade routes for ancient civilisations, is home to numerous ancient treasures
Goddess Anat of fertility, sexual love, hunting, and war. From the fertile agricultural area along the eastern Mediterranean coast, her cult spread throughout the Levant by the middle of the third millennium BC.
Her attributes vary widely among different cultures and over time, and even within particular myths. She likely heavily influenced the character of the Greek goddess Athena.
Gaza, a narrow enclave on the Mediterranean, boasts a trove of antiquities and archaeological sites as it was a major land route connecting ancient civilizations in Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia.
However, unearthed artefacts regularly vanish, and development projects are given priority over the preservation of archaeological sites.
Bulldozers working for an Egyptian-funded housing project discovered the remnants of a Roman-era tomb in January, Gaza.
Flammable Residues Detected in Medieval Vessels from Jerusalem
A new analysis of residue in ancient ceramic vessels from 11th and 12th century Jerusalem has found that the jars may have had a more sinister purpose than storage.
Previous research into the iconic vessels, which are held in museums around the world, identified them as vessels for beer drinking, and containers for mercury, oil and medicines.
The jars are easily identifiable, spherical in shape with conical bases, and have been found in all sorts of archaeological contexts throughout the Middle East between the 9th and 15th centuries.
Conico-spherical jars are found throughout the Middle East in archaeological contexts dating from the 9th-15th centuries.
But a new study, led by Carney Matheson, of Griffith University in Queensland, has found that while some of the vessels were indeed used for these purposes, others contained a flammable and likely explosive material, suggesting they may have been used as a kind of crude hand grenade – an explanation supported by evidence from ancient texts.
The sherds studied were excavated from the Armenian Garden in Jerusalem in the 1960s, and analysed for trace residue to determine their contents.
“These vessels have been reported during the time of the Crusades as grenades thrown against Crusader strongholds, producing loud noises and bright flashes of light,” says Matheson.
The Crusades (1095-1291), were a series of violent religious wars initiated by the Latin Church during the Medieval period, culminating most famously in the attempted seizure of Jerusalem from Islamic rule. Jerusalem’s inhabitants, it seems, found ingenious ways to fight back.
So, what were these ancient grenades made from?
“Some researchers had proposed the vessels were used as grenades and held black powder, an explosive invented in ancient China and known to have been introduced into the Middle East and Europe by the 13th century,” Matheson says. “It has been proposed that black powder may have been introduced to the Middle East earlier, as early as these vessels from the 9th to 11th century.”
But the new study rules out black powder: “This research has shown that it is not black powder and likely a locally invented explosive material.”
The research also found that some of the vessels had been sealed with a resin.
“More research on these vessels and their explosive content will allow us to understand ancient explosive technology of the medieval period and the history of explosive weapons in the Eastern Mediterranean,” says Matheson.
Neanderthals Produced Symbolic Objects More than 115,000 Years Ago
At least 70,000 years ago Homo sapiens used perforated marine shells and colour pigments. From around 40,000 years ago he created decorative items, jewellery and cave art in Europe. Using Uranium-Thorium dating an international team of researchers co-directed by Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, now demonstrates that more than 115,000 years ago Neanderthals produced symbolic objects and that they created cave art more than 20,000 years before modern humans first arrived in Europe. The researchers conclude that our cousins’ cognitive abilities were equivalent to our own.
La Pasiega, section C, cave wall with paintings. The ladder shape composed of red horizontal and vertical lines (centre left) dates to older than 64,000 years and was made by Neanderthals.
Symbolic material culture, a collection of cultural and intellectual achievements handed down from generation to generation, has so far been attributed to our own species, Homo sapiens.
“The emergence of symbolic material culture represents a fundamental threshold in the evolution of humankind. It is one of the main pillars of what makes us human,” says Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Artefacts whose functional value lies not so much in their practical but rather in their symbolic use are proxies for fundamental aspects of human cognition as we know it.”
Dating cave art in La Pasiega: Using Uranium-Thorium dating an international team of researchers co-directed by Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, demonstrates that more than 115,000 years ago Neanderthals produced symbolic objects and that they created cave art more than 20,000 years before modern humans first arrived in Europe.
Dating cave art in La Pasiega: Using Uranium-Thorium dating an international team of researchers co-directed by Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, demonstrates that more than 115,000 years ago Neanderthals produced symbolic objects and that they created cave art more than 20,000 years before modern humans first arrived in Europe.
Early symbolic artefacts, like pigment-coloured shells that possibly served as body ornamentation, are documented for the Middle Stone Age in North and South Africa at around 70,000 years ago and are associated with anatomically and behaviourally modern humans.
There is evidence in Europe of cave art, sculpted figures, decorated bone tools and jewellery made of bone, tooth, ivory, shell or stone that dates back to the so-called “Upper Palaeolithic Revolution” around 40,000 years ago. These artefacts, researchers concluded, must have been created by modern humans who were spreading all over Europe after their arrival from Africa.
More than body and tool ornamentation, cave art is a particularly impressive example of symbolic behaviour. However, it has so far been attributed to modern humans only, and claims of a possible Neanderthal origin have been hampered by a lack of precise dating. However, the creators of cave art can usually not be identified directly, but only indirectly by determining the age of the objects. “Dating cave art accurately and precisely, but without destroying it, has so far been difficult to accomplish,” says Hoffmann. “Thanks to recent technical developments we can now obtain a minimum age for cave art using Uranium-Thorium (U-Th) dating of carbonate crusts overlying the pigments.”
U-Th dating, a very precise dating technique based on the radioactive decay of Uranium isotopes into Thorium, determines the age of calcium carbonate formations up to an age of 500,000 years. It thus goes back considerably further in time than the radiocarbon method.
Calcite crust on top of the red ladder shape sign. The U-Th method dates the formation of the crust which gives a minimum age for the underlying painting.
Dating of carbonate crusts
The researchers from Germany, the UK, France and Spain analysed more than 60 carbonate samples that consisted of less than ten milligrams each from three different cave sites in Spain: La Pasiega in north-eastern Spain, Maltravieso in western Spain and Ardales in southern Spain. All three sites contain paintings mostly in red, sometimes in black, that show groups of animals, dots and geometric signs, hand stencils, handprints and engravings.
“Our dating results show that the cave art at these three sites in Spain is much older than previously thought”, says team member Alistair Pike from the University of Southampton. “With an age in excess of 64,000 years, it predates the earliest traces of modern humans in Europe by more than 20,000 years.
The cave art must thus have been created by Neanderthals.” This early cave art was created in red pigments and comprises lines, dots, discs and hand stencils. According to the researchers, their creation involved planning a light source, mixing pigments for colouring and choosing a proper location.
Stencil of a Neanderthal hand on a cave wall in Maltravieso (colour enhanced), almost completely covered with calcite. It is older than 66,000 years.
Symbolic thinking in Neanderthals
“Neanderthals created meaningful symbols in meaningful places”, says Paul Pettitt from the University of Durham, also a team member and cave art specialist. In the Cueva Ardales, where excavations are currently being conducted by a German-Spanish team, the presence of Neanderthals has also been proven by analysing occupation layers. “This is certainly just the beginning of a new chapter in the study of ice age rock art”, says Gerd-Christian Weniger of the Foundation Neanderthal Museum Mettmann, one of the leaders of the Ardales excavations.
In the Iberian Peninsula, Neanderthal symbolic behaviour may actually have a long-term tradition. In a second study, also published this week by Hoffmann and colleagues, the researchers determined the age of an archaeological deposit located at the Cueva de Los Aviones, a sea cave in Southeast Spain. This cave contained perforated sea shells, red and yellow colourants and shell containers including complex mixes of pigments.
The researchers used U-Th dating to determine the age of the flowstone that was covering and protecting the deposit. “We dated the deposit underlying the flowstone to an age of about 115,000 years,” says Hoffmann. These dates are even older than similar finds in the south and north Africa associated with Homo sapiens, but at this time Neanderthals were living in western Europe.
A shell with remnants of pigments found in sediments in Cueva de Los Aviones. It dates to between 115,000 and 120,000 years.
Ancient origins of shared cognitive abilities
“According to our new data Neanderthals and modern humans shared symbolic thinking and must have been cognitively indistinguishable”, concludes João Zilhão, a team member from the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona and involved in both studies.
“On our search for the origins of language and advanced human cognition, we must therefore look much farther back in time, more than half a million years ago, to the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.”
Ancient Human DNA Can Be Recovered from Archaeological Sediments, Finds Study
Ancient human and animal DNA can remain stably localized in sediments, preserved in microscopic fragments of bone and faeces.
A sampling of an undisturbed block of impregnated sediment for ancient DNA analyses.
Sediments in which archaeological finds are embedded have long been regarded by most archaeologists as unimportant by-products of excavations. However, in recent years it has been shown that sediments can contain ancient biomolecules, including DNA.
“The retrieval of ancient human and faunal DNA from sediments offers exciting new opportunities to investigate the geographical and temporal distribution of ancient humans and other organisms at sites where their skeletal remains are rare or absent,” says Matthias Meyer, senior author of the study and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
To investigate the origin of DNA in the sediment, Max Planck researchers teamed up with an international group of geoarchaeologists — archaeologists who apply geological techniques to reconstruct the formation of sediment and sites — to study DNA preservation in sediment at a microscopic scale.
They used undisturbed blocks of sediment that had been previously removed from archaeological sites and soaked in synthetic plastic-like (polyester) resin. The hardened blocks were taken to the laboratory and sliced into sections for microscopic imaging and genetic analysis.
The surface of a section of the undisturbed block of impregnated sediment from Denisova Cave.
The researchers successfully extracted DNA from a collection of blocks of sediment prepared as long as 40 years ago, from sites in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.
“The fact that these blocks are an excellent source of ancient DNA – including that originating from hominins — despite often decades of storage in plastic, provides access to a vast untapped repository of genetic information.
The study opens up a new era of ancient DNA studies that will revisit samples stored in labs, allowing for analysis of sites that have long since been back-filled, which is especially important given travel restrictions and site inaccessibility in a pandemic world,” says Mike Morley from Flinders University in Australia who led some of the geoarchaeological analyses.
The abundance of micro remains in the sediment matrix
The scientists used blocks of sediment from Denisova Cave, a site located in the Altai Mountains in South Central Siberia where ancient DNA from Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans has been retrieved and showed that small organic particles yielded more DNA than sediment sampled randomly.
“It clearly shows that the high success rate of ancient mammalian DNA retrieval from Denisova Cave sediments comes from the abundance of micro remains in the sediment matrix rather than from free extracellular DNA from faeces, bodily fluids or decomposing cellular tissue potentially adsorbed onto mineral grains,” says Vera Aldeias, co-author of the study and researcher at the University of Algarve in Portugal.
“This study is a big step closer to understand precisely where and under what conditions ancient DNA is preserved in sediments,” says Morley.
The approach described in the study allows highly localized micro-scale sampling of sediment for DNA analyses and shows that ancient DNA (aDNA) is not uniformly distributed in the sediment, and that specific sediment features are more conducive to ancient DNA preservation than others.
“Linking sediment aDNA to the archaeological micro-context means that we can also address the possibility of physical movement of aDNA between sedimentary deposits,” says Susan Mentzer a researcher at the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (Germany).
Diyendo Massilani, the lead author of the study, was able to recover substantial amounts of Neanderthal DNA from only a few milligrams of sediment. He could identify the sex of the individuals who left their DNA behind, and showed that they belonged to a population related to a Neanderthal whose genome was previously reconstructed from a bone fragment discovered in the cave.
“The Neanderthal DNA in these small samples of plastic-embedded sediment was far more concentrated than what we typically find in loose material,” he says.
“With this approach, it will become possible in the future to analyze the DNA of many different ancient human individuals from just a small cube of solidified sediment. It is amusing to think that this is presumably so because they used the cave as a toilet ten of thousands of years ago.”
350-year-old remains in a Stone Age site in Portugal
A team of researchers have found an African man buried in a prehistoric shell midden in Amoreira in Portugal. The man lived just 350 years ago.
A team of researchers have found an African man buried in a prehistoric shell midden in Amoreira in Portugal. The man lived just 350 years ago. A shell midden is an archaeological feature consisting mainly of mollusc shells.
The discovery is very surprising because Amoreira and other midden sites in the Muge region in Portugal are well known by archaeologists for the cemeteries of the last hunter-gatherers living in the area 8,000 years back, a statement issued by Uppsala University in Sweden said.
Researchers from Uppsala University and the University of Lisbon, Portugal recently investigated this burial by combining biomolecular archaeology, ancient DNA, and historical records. The study was recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Sciences.
Where Was The First-Generation African From?
The scientists determined that these were the bone remains of a first-generation African, probably from Senegambia, which is a historical name for a geographical region in West Africa. The man arrived in Portugal via the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and died around 1630 and 1760 AD, the study said.
What Did The Man’s Diet Consist Of?
The researchers analysed his genetic signature and dietary isotope. The genetic signature indicated African ancestry, the study said. The man’s diet consisted of plant foods commonly found in Senegambia, the dietary isotope analysis showed. At that time, Senegambia was not in Portugal.
According to the study, the African man’s diet also consisted of minor consumption of low trophic level marine foods, such as bivalve molluscs.
How Did The Researchers Determine The Place Of Origin?
The researchers determined that the place of origin could be narrowed to the coastal areas of western Africa, in present-day Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia.
The study said that the oxygen isotopic signal in the bone bioapatite reflected the ingested water at the place of origin. Bioapatite is a form of calcium phosphate that is the major component in the mineralised part of vertebrate bone teeth.
Africans were brutally dislocated from their homeland for more than three centuries. They were forced to adopt a new religion, a new name, and a new language.
In order to preserve their socio-cultural identity, African communities in Portugal developed certain strategies, the study said. This was similar to what was documented in the Americas. The researchers used their results to search for other clues that could help them understand the motivations behind the unusual burial, the study said.
What Does The Unusual Burial Indicate?
According to the study, the burial of the man in an 8000-years-old site could be an example of the maintenance of African cultural beliefs and practices by African people who translocated to Europe. However, this practice is not documented in historical records.
Amoreira, like many other archaeological sites, was probably known by the local populations as an ancient burial ground, the study said. This is because animal and human bones are abundant at the site.
The grave was arranged with a layer of sand. Hence, it suggested a level of preparation for burial in a seemingly deviant place, the study said.
In Portugal, the dead were generally buried on religious grounds, from the Middle Ages up to the mid-nineteenth centuries. But this African man was not buried in a religious ground, the study said.
The researchers found that interestingly, up to the present day, shell middens are actively used in western Africa. The usage of shell middens, particularly in Senegambia, includes ancient and modern cemeteries, the study said.
The burial of the African man in a Portuguese shell midden could indicate the recognition of the site as a meaningful place by the African community of Amoreira, the study said. This was probably according to West African socio-cultural traditions.
In a cemetery of enslaved people in the Canary Islands, other examples of non-Christian funerary practices have been identified. The researchers noted in the study that future investigations may clarify if this was an isolated event or part of a broader movement.
Was The African Man Murdered?
The researchers attempted to identify this individual and found a document from the local church dated November 1, 1976, the statement said. The document mentions the murder of a young man named João at Arneiro de Amoreira. This is precisely the region where the bone remains were found.
According to the statement, the church registers state that the victim was buried in the churchyard. However, the bones were unearthed at Amoreira. The researchers’ findings indicate that the person’s parents were of African ancestry, the study said.
The authors noted in the study that the intersection of several lines of investigation enabled them to reconstruct specific aspects of the life and death of a first-generation African individual in Portugal during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade period.
Largest Human Family Tree Identifies Nearly 27 Million Ancestors
A team of scientists has combined modern and ancient genomes to build a new “genealogy of everyone,” in an achievement that sets the groundwork for future studies into our evolution and global spread.
A visualization showing the inferred human ancestral lineages over time and geographical location. Each line represents an ancestral relationship; the line’s width shows the frequency of the relationship. Colour indicates the estimated age of the ancestor. Image: Reproduced, with permission, from Wohns et al., A unified genealogy of modern and ancient genomes. Science (2022).
Thousands upon thousands of modern and ancient human genomes have been integrated into a coherent and unified genealogy, according to new research published in Science. It’s akin to a family tree, but it’s a whopper, as it contains nearly 27 million ancestors, making it the largest human genealogy ever created. The new map could be used to study human evolution and even assist with medical research having to do with hereditary diseases.
‘We have basically built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity that models as exactly as we can the history that generated all the genetic variation we find in humans today,” Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Big Data Institute and a co-author of the study, explained in a University of Oxford statement. “This genealogy allows us to see how every person’s genetic sequence relates to every other, along with all the points of the genome.”
The network shows how individuals around the world are related to each other, and it predicts common ancestors, including when they lived and where they came from. It also models key events in human history, such as human migrations out of Africa and dispersals to other parts of the globe.
Researchers have been collecting human genomes for years, but the challenge has been in making sense of it all from a larger, holistic perspective.
Comparisons of these genomes have been difficult owing to disparate methods of gathering the data, the presence of multiple databases, and variances in terms of data quality and analysis. To compound the problem, each human genome contains segments from multiple ancestries, whether from various ethnic groups or different human populations altogether, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.
These ancestries also exist across vast timescales, which represents yet another challenge. What’s needed are algorithms that can accommodate these challenges, and that’s exactly what the researchers are claiming to have achieved.
To create the map, Wong, with his colleagues, applied a “non-parametric tree-recording method” to modern and ancient human genomes, the oldest of which date back hundreds of thousands of years. I reached out to Sharon Browning, a biostatistician at the University of Washington who wasn’t involved in the research, to get her to take on the achievement.
“This paper is primarily about a great new tool for genetic studies called tskit, which is short for ‘tree sequence kit’,” explained Browning in an email. It’s called a tree because, “if you consider one small part of the genome in a number of individuals, and trace back the descent, eventually you get back to a single ancestor, like ‘mitochondrial Eve’ for the mitochondrial genome,” she said.
“That single ancestor is the root of the tree, and the set of individuals that you were considering are the tips of the branches of the tree.” Browning said the tree looks different along with different parts of the genome because of recombination (when the exchanging of genetic material results in variation), and that tskit is “used to infer the trees along the sequenced genome.”
A reconstruction of the face of a Neanderthal at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, Netherlands.
Indeed, the algorithms work by predicting where common ancestors must be present in the evolutionary family tree, by looking at genetic variation. And because the genomes are geotagged, it predicts where these common ancestors lived.
“Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships,” Anthony Wilder Wohns, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the Big Data Institute, said in the Oxford release.
“We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived. The power of our approach is that it makes very few assumptions about the underlying data and can also include both modern and ancient DNA samples.”
Browning said an earlier version of tskit showed promise, but it turned out to have significant limitations. The researchers have now addressed the limitations, “providing a tool that should be extremely useful across many different types of study,” she said. To which she added: “Although the authors provide a couple of applications, including their cool visualization of where human ancestors came from, the scope of possible applications is very large, and I would expect to see a flurry of activity from researchers developing these.”
Browning cautioned that the trees estimated by tskit “don’t come with uncertainty measures,” so she expects the results will be useful for positing new hypotheses, rather than for proving hypotheses. “Other more specialized methods will still be needed for verification purposes,” she said.
Looking ahead, the team hopes to add new genetic information to the system as it arrives. They don’t expect this to be a problem, as the system can accommodate millions more.
Ruins of an ancient temple for Zeus unearthed in Egypt’s Sinai
Egyptian archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a temple for the ancient Greek god Zeus in the Sinai Peninsula, antiquities authorities said Monday. The Tourism and Antiquities Ministry said in a statement the temple ruins were found in the Tell el-Farma archaeological site in northwestern Sinai.
Archaeologists work in the ruins of a temple for Zeus-Kasios, the ancient Greek god, at the Tell el-Farma archaeological site in the northwestern corner of the Sinai Peninsula. Tell el-Farma, also known by its ancient name Pelusium, dates back to the late Pharaonic period and was also used during Greco-Roman and Byzantine times.
Tell el-Farma, also known by its ancient name Pelusium, dates back to the late Pharaonic period and was also used during Greco-Roman and Byzantine times.
There are also remains dating to the Christian and early Islamic periods.
Archaeologists work at the Tell el-Farma archaeological site.
Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said archaeologists excavated the temple ruins through its entrance gate, where two huge fallen granite columns were visible. The gate was destroyed in a powerful earthquake in ancient times, he said.
Waziri said the ruins were found between the Pelusium Fort and a memorial church at the site. Archaeologists found a set of granite blocks probably used to build a staircase for worshipers to reach the temple.
Excavations at the area date back to early 1900 when French Egyptologist Jean Clédat found ancient Greek inscriptions that showed the existence of the Zeus-Kasios temple but he didn’t unearth it, according to the ministry.
Tell el-Farma, also known by its ancient name Pelusium, dates back to the late Pharaonic period and was also used during Greco-Roman and Byzantine times.
Zeus-Kasios is a conflation of Zeus, the God of the sky in ancient Greek mythology, and Mount Kasios in Syria, where Zeus once worshipped.
Hisham Hussein, the director of Sinai archaeological sites, said inscriptions found in the area show that Roman Emperor Hadrian (117-138) renovated the temple.
He said experts will study the unearthed blocks and do a photogrammetry survey to help determine the architectural design of the temple.
The temple ruins are the latest in a series of ancient discoveries Egypt has touted in the past couple of years in the hope of attracting more tourists.
The tourism industry has been reeling from the political turmoil following the 2011 popular uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak. The sector was also dealt further blows by the coronavirus pandemic and most recently Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
