Archaeologists have announced the discovery of a sprawling Byzantine-era settlement, approximately 1,600 years old, unearthed beneath Egypt’s Western Desert at the Dakhla Oasis. The remarkably well-preserved city offers a rare glimpse into daily life during the 4th century.
The settlement features homes with vaulted roofs, bread ovens, kitchens, and stone mills. Its carefully planned layout includes broad north-south streets intersected by east-west roads, creating public squares. Two watchtowers and a heavily fortified building protected the city's outskirts, while a basilica church stands at its center, overlooking a main street.
Excavations yielded a rich assemblage of artifacts, including domestic pottery, bottles for oils and perfumes, oil lamps, and stone implements for grinding grain. Notably, approximately 200 inscribed pottery fragments, known as ostraca, were discovered. These fragments, bearing texts in both Coptic and Greek, record commercial transactions, correspondence, and other details of daily life, providing an exceptional documentary record of the city's inhabitants.
Bronze coins bearing the portraits of Byzantine emperors and gold coins dating to the reign of Roman emperor Constantius II (AD 337-361) were also uncovered. Experts state that this discovery provides one of the clearest pictures yet of life in Egypt's remote oases during the Byzantine Empire.
The city, located in Egypt's western New Valley province, is on UNESCO's Tentative List, a step toward potential World Heritage status.
This discovery was one of two major archaeological finds announced by Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. In a separate excavation at Marina el-Alamein, west of Alexandria, archaeologists uncovered 18 ancient tombs. These included an 8-foot-long granite sarcophagus, a damaged plaster sphinx, and several bodies buried with thin gold foils in their mouths, a practice known as the 'golden tongue,' believed to aid speech in the afterlife.
Egypt was part of the Byzantine Empire for over 250 years, from the late 4th to the mid-7th century AD. During this period, Christianity became dominant, towns expanded, and Egypt was a wealthy province. The newly discovered settlement dates to this era, a time when Roman traditions, Christian beliefs, and Egyptian culture intersected. Many settlements from this era were later abandoned or buried, making well-preserved discoveries like the Dakhla Oasis site exceptionally rare.
