Nabta Playa

The place

Nabta Playa is a dry lake bed in the Western Desert of southern Egypt, near the Tropic of Cancer and west of Abu Simbel. Thousands of years ago the Sahara was wetter than it is today. Summer rains filled the basin for part of the year, and groups of cattle herders returned to it season after season. The archaeologists Fred Wendorf and Romuald Schild led the long-running Combined Prehistoric Expedition that studied the site.

What the herders built

The survey recorded several lines of large stones laid across the old lake floor, a small "calendar circle" of upright stone slabs, two small stone mounds covering burials of cattle, and dozens of larger stone mounds grouped together (NSF project summary).

The circle is only about 3.7 metres (12 feet) across. It is made of sets of upright slabs with gaps between them. One pair of gaps lines up north and south. Another pair gives a line of sight toward the place on the horizon where the sun rose at the summer solstice. Midsummer was also when the rains began, so the sunrise marked the return of water to the basin.

In 1998 the astronomer J. McKim Malville, with Wendorf, Ali Mazar and Schild, published these results in Nature. They argued that the ceremonial complex was laid out to the cardinal directions and the solstice, and that it joined death, water and the sun in one symbolic plan. A survey with satellite positioning confirmed the north–south, east–west and solstice alignments. Press reports from the University of Colorado gave an age of about 6,000 to 6,500 years, which would make the alignments older than Stonehenge.

Why it matters

The authors suggested that when the desert dried and the herders left Nabta, around 4,800 radiocarbon years ago, they may have helped spur the growing social complexity of predynastic Upper Egypt. If so, ideas first worked out by Saharan herders, about water, cattle, the dead and the sky, may have flowed into the culture that became Kemet. That link is a reasonable proposal, not a proven fact.

What is still argued

The existence and layout of the stones are not in doubt. Some details are. Archaeologists have pointed out that the gaps in the circle are wide, so it could not have tracked dates precisely, and "calendar circle" may promise too much. In later work (2004), Malville, Schild and colleagues suggested that some megaliths may once have pointed to bright stars such as Arcturus, Sirius and the stars of Orion's Belt. Writers outside archaeology have gone further: the astrophysicist Thomas Brophy proposed star dates as early as about 16,500 BCE, which Malville, Wendorf and their colleagues have questioned. The site is labeled Documented for the monuments and their solstice and north–south alignments, which most specialists accept.

The reconstructed circle and some of the original stones can be seen at the Nubia Museum in Aswan.