“Nabta Playa”… Did the Egyptians build an astronomical observatory 7000 years ago? | sciences

Deep in the Sahara Desert, about 800 kilometers south of the Egyptian capital, Cairo, lies a barren land of sand and gravel that does not reveal anything. But in this silent void, there was once the pulse of the first life that contemplated the sky with a conscious eye.

Here, in a site known as Nabta Playa, man erected more than 7 thousand years ago the oldest astronomical stone circle in the world: a primitive observatory that predates the European “Stonehenge” by two thousand years. It stands as witness to a defining moment in the path of the human mind: when man tried to measure time with the stars of the sky.

Birth of an observatory out of sand

The story begins in the 1960s, when Egypt was building the High Dam in Aswan, which threatened to flood dozens of ancient archaeological sites. UNESCO intervened to save the great temples, but far from the Nile Valley, 100 kilometers west of the site of the current Abu Simbel Temple, the American archaeologist Fred Wendorf was searching for something different, namely the roots of Egypt before the Pharaohs, when the Nile was still a river formed in the memory of the earth.

In 1973, while trekking through the desert, a Bedouin guide named Eid noticed a group of huge stones standing in the middle of the dunes. The scene seemed strange and unnatural, so Eid led Wendorf and his team there, as it turned out study Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

At first, scientists thought the rocks were the result of erosion, but they quickly realized that the site was the bottom of an ancient lake, which meant that the stones were not from the same place, but rather were placed there intentionally.

The team returned several times, digging in the sand, until they discovered a circle of black basalt stones, lined up with surprising regularity. Its shape was not random, but rather it seemed as if it was pointing to something on the horizon.

First heaven

Wendorf searched for years to explain the order behind these stones. He then enlisted the help of astrophysicist and archaeologist Jay Mac Kim Mulville of the University of Colorado, who specializes in “archaeoastronomy.”

When Malville arrived at the site, he sat for a long time between the stone columns, which were no more than two meters high, trying to see what he had seen from those who built them 7,000 years ago.

He said later in Statements According to the famous Astronomy magazine: “It was a moment of mental clarity. I realized that the stones formed lines extending from a large burial mound, like rays emanating from the center of the sun.”

The stone circle at Nabta Playa consists of 6 rows of basalt stones, carefully placed in a circular circumference about 4 meters in diameter.

But what matters is not their shape, but rather their directions. Each group of stones is aligned towards a specific point on the horizon, just as astronomers do today when they point a telescope at a star.

Through astronomical calculations by Malville, it was shown that this alignment may correspond to the rising positions of some bright stars in 4800 BC, more than 6,800 years ago.

When Malville redrew the alignment on an ancient sky map using inverse astronomy software (which calculates the positions of stars in the past), he found that the match could hardly be a coincidence, She announced University of Colorado announced the disclosure in March 1998.

Star map

Of the stars they observed aligned with those stones

• Sirius: The brightest star in the sky, and its burning sunrise, that is, its first appearance before sunrise, coincided with the arrival of the rainy season. This same event was later the basis of the ancient Egyptian calendar, as the Egyptians linked the rising of Sirius with the flooding of the Nile.
• Rampart: An orange star in the Howl constellation, used as a sign of the summer equinox, and the alignment of one of the rows of stones points directly to its rising at that time.
• Alpha Centauri: One of the brightest stars in the southern sky. It was observed from the horizon at sunset. Its presence in the alignment indicates that the inhabitants of Nabta Playa tracked the daily and annual movement of the entire sky, north and south.
• The stars of the Orion constellation: especially the belt region, where 3 stars appear regularly aligned. Some stones point to these stars, indicating that Orion was a sacred symbol that may have been associated with the masculinity of the gods or the fertility of the earth, an idea that later moved to Egypt, where the stars of Orion became synonymous with the god Osiris.

In addition to the stars, some stone axes were marked towards the positions of sunrise and sunset on the longest and shortest days of the year, the summer and winter solstices. This meant that the inhabitants of Napata Playa were able to roughly measure the length of the solar year, and determine when the rainy season would begin.

When the sun was shining between two marked stones, the shepherds knew that rain was near, and that they should prepare to move toward the lake.

Perhaps the stones were a huge astronomical instrument used by the inhabitants of Napata Playa to measure the arrival of the summer solstice. That moment coincides with the arrival of rain, which gives life to the lake again.

Thus, before the pyramids of Giza or the Babylonian civilization appeared, these primitive shepherds determined the seasons by looking at the positions of the stars, in what is believed to be the first human attempt to organize time according to a cosmic system.

Between desert and rain

Environmentally, during the Neolithic era, Nabat Playa was a fertile seasonal oasis, filled with water 4 months every year. Around the lake, people built circular mud huts, dug wells, and stored millet and sorghum.

Life here was between hunting, herding and primitive agriculture. Scientists found tools for grinding grains, jewelry made of cow bones, and engravings of marine fish indicating long-distance trade that reached the Red Sea.

But by 3000 BC, the climate had changed again, the lakes dried up, and the oases turned into unforgiving sand. The population was forced to migrate north towards the Nile Valley or south to Nubia, carrying with them their symbols and memories of heaven.

Some researchers even believe that these migrations from Napata Playa contributed to the emergence of the ancient Egyptian civilization. Of course, all of the above remains controversial among researchers, but it seems that ancient humans were more aware of the night sky than scientists thought.