Posted on 08/07/2011 7:31:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Hidden beneath an ancient palace in what is now central Sudan, archaeologists have discovered the oldest building in the city of Meroë, a structure that also may have housed royalty... flourished around 2,000 years ago, Meroë was centered on the Nile River... built palaces and small pyramids, and developed a writing system that scholars still can't fully translate today. Although Meroë has been excavated off and on for more than 150 years, archaeologists are not yet clear on how it came to be. The city seems to have emerged out of nowhere... the presence of such an ancient building at Meroë suggests that an early temple dedicated to Amun, a highly regarded Egyptian god, may have existed as well... By unearthing the oldest known building at Meroë and searching for even older examples, Grzymski is hoping to fill this gap... So far, the team has excavated a small section of the building, with radiocarbon dating indicating that it dates to about 900 B.C. The finds so far include a sizable mudbrick wall, pottery, and most notably, a cache of animal bones, most of which belonged to cattle... It's difficult to say for certain what the building was used for, but Grzymski suggests it was an early palace or administrative center... In the years leading up to World War I, John Garstang, a British archaeologist, discovered Meroë, uncovering an area filled with palaces and temples that he called the "royal city." Many of his finds were never published, and over the past two decades, archaeologists have been going over Garstang's notes, publishing them and looking for clues as to Meroë’s origins... His team tried to find the structure using magnetometry, a technique that can detect archaeological remains by searching for anomalies in the magnetic field. The attempt was unsuccessful...
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Only a small portion of the structure, possibly an ancient palace, has been excavated so far (part of it can be seen in the photo's bottom foreground) in central Sudan beneath another ancient palace. The structure is the oldest building ever found in the ancient city of Meroë. CREDIT: Photo copyright Royal Ontario Museum
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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not the level of masonry work I would think fit for a palace. But what do I know....
Lets see,,sloping ramp,poorly build masonry,thousands of cattle bones,,,couldnt possibly be a slaughterhouse,buthers shop,,must be a palace.
Soon to be claimed as another Muslim holy site.
Mud bricks don’t hold up so well after 2000 years.
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