Nabta Playa and the Ancient Astronomers of the Nubian Desert

Nabta Playa is a remarkable site composed of hundreds of prehistoric tumuli, stelae, and megalithic structures located in the Nubian Desert, approximately 100 kilometers west of Abu Simbel in southern Egypt. They are the result of an advanced urban community that arose approximately 11,000 years ago, and left behind a huge assembly of stones, which have been labelled by scientists as the oldest known astronomical alignments of megaliths in the world. Some archaeologists believe that the people of Nabta Playa were the precursor civilization for the first Nile cities that arose in Egypt thousands of years later.

One of the many ancient civilizations now featured on Google Earth’s feature Lost Civilizations, the ancient remains of Nabta Playa were first discovered in 1974 by a group of scientists led by Fred Wendorf, an Anthropology Professor from the Southern Methodist University in Texas, when they noticed potsherds and other artifacts sticking out of the desert sand. Wendorf made several more visits to the site during the 1970s and 1980s, each time discovering something new. But it was to be several decades before researchers discovered the dozens of stone structures that are known today, and began to realize the role and importance of these great megaliths.