Nabta Playa: Prehistoric Stone Circle in the Egyptian Sahara

Nabta Playa is a dry lake basin in the Western Desert of southern Egypt where herders and foragers gathered from about 9000 BC, when the Sahara was much wetter than today. Over thousands of years they left behind hearths, houses, early pottery, cattle burials and arrangements of standing stones, including a small stone circle of around 5000 BC often described as one of the oldest astronomical alignments in the world. The site is a key witness to life in the “Green Sahara” and to the cultures that preceded ancient Egypt.

A lake in the desert

A playa is a shallow basin that fills with water after rain and dries out again. Nabta Playa lies about 100 km west of Abu Simbel, close to the border with Sudan, in a region that today receives almost no rain at all.

Between roughly 9000 and 3500 BC, during the African Humid Period, shifts in the monsoon brought summer rains far north into the Sahara. Each year Nabta Playa filled with water, attracting people, animals and plants. The surrounding desert became a savanna-like landscape with grasses, acacias and seasonal pools, though it was never lush by modern standards.

Discovery and excavation

Nabta Playa was discovered in 1973 by the Combined Prehistoric Expedition, an international project led by the American archaeologist Fred Wendorf of Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the Polish archaeologist Romuald Schild. The team noticed scatters of artefacts and, later, large stones lying on the basin floor.

Excavations continued over many seasons from the 1970s into the 2000s. The results were published in detail, notably in Holocene Settlement of the Egyptian Sahara (2001). The megaliths were mapped and studied with the astronomer J. McKim Malville from the 1990s.

Early herders and potters

The first visitors arrived around 9000 BC. They camped seasonally by the lake, hunted gazelles and hares, gathered wild plants and dug wells to reach water as the lake shrank. Later Early Neolithic villages included rows of round huts and storage pits.

People at Nabta Playa made pottery decorated with impressed patterns from before 8000 BC, among the earliest pottery in north-east Africa. Pottery here was made by mobile foragers and herders, not by farmers, which contradicts the old idea that pottery always followed farming.

Wendorf and Schild argued that cattle bones from the earliest levels belonged to domesticated cattle, which would make this one of the earliest centres of cattle keeping in the world. The evidence is limited to a few bones, and many researchers doubt that cattle were domesticated so early here. By the Late Neolithic, after about 5500 BC, domestic cattle, sheep and goats were certainly present. Plant remains include wild sorghum and millets, as well as tubers and fruits.

Megaliths and cattle burials

From around 5500 BC, the Late Neolithic people of Nabta Playa began building monuments. In a small side valley, sometimes called the “Valley of Sacrifices”, they raised tumuli, low mounds of stone, over the remains of cattle. One chamber, dated to about 5400 BC, held the complete skeleton of a young cow, carefully buried. Other tumuli contained scattered cattle bones.

These burials suggest that cattle held great ritual and social importance, not only as food but as a source of wealth and identity. Many scholars see parallels with later pastoral societies in Africa and with the cattle symbolism of early Egypt, although direct links are hard to prove.

The Late and Final Neolithic people also set up large unshaped and shaped stone blocks, some weighing several tonnes, in lines across the basin. Beneath some “complex structures” excavators found large sculpted rocks buried over bedrock, whose purpose is unknown.

The calendar circle

The best-known monument at Nabta Playa is the small stone circle, about 4 metres across, set on a low dune. It consists of upright and fallen sandstone slabs. Within the ring, two pairs of taller stones form narrow “gates”.

In a paper in the journal Nature in 1998, Malville, Wendorf and colleagues argued that one line of sight through the gates pointed roughly north-south, and another towards the point on the horizon where the sun rose at the summer solstice. Near the Tropic of Cancer, the sun stands directly overhead around the solstice, a moment that coincided with the arrival of the summer rains.

The authors dated the circle to roughly 5000-4500 BC on the basis of radiocarbon dates from the surrounding area. They also proposed that lines of megaliths elsewhere in the basin were aligned on bright stars such as Sirius and those of Orion’s Belt. The solstice reading is widely considered plausible. The star alignments are more controversial, since they depend on uncertain dates and on choosing which stones to connect.

Because the original site was exposed to damage, the stones of the circle were removed from the desert, and a reconstruction now stands at the Nubia Museum in Aswan.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Nabta Playa is a 7,000-year-old observatory that recorded precise star charts. Fact: The circle may have marked the solstice and north, but claims of detailed star maps or advanced astronomy go far beyond the evidence.
• Myth: Nabta Playa is “Africa’s Stonehenge” and was its model. Fact: The circle is much older than Stonehenge but tiny by comparison, and there is no connection between the two. Stonehenge was built in Britain from about 3000 BC by entirely different people.
• Myth: The site was built by a lost civilisation. Fact: It was made by Neolithic herders whose camps, pottery and tools are well documented.

End and legacy

From the fourth millennium BC, the monsoon rains retreated and the Sahara became desert again. Nabta Playa no longer filled with water, and people abandoned the area, many probably moving towards the Nile Valley.

Wendorf and Schild suggested that these desert herders contributed ideas to the cultures that later formed Predynastic and Pharaonic Egypt, including the importance of cattle and possibly an interest in the sky. This is a reasonable hypothesis but difficult to prove. What is clear is that Nabta Playa records a long and inventive way of life in the eastern Sahara, part of the wider story of how cattle came to matter so much in Africa, told in Domestication of Cattle.

Timeline

• c. 9000 BC: People begin visiting Nabta Playa seasonally during the African Humid Period.
• c. 8500-8000 BC: Early decorated pottery is made at the site.
• c. 5500 BC: Late Neolithic herders with domestic cattle, sheep and goats occupy the basin.
• c. 5400 BC: A young cow is buried in a stone-covered chamber in the Valley of Sacrifices.
• c. 5000-4500 BC: Estimated date of the calendar circle.
• c. 3500 BC: Drying climate leads to the abandonment of the basin.
• 1973: Fred Wendorf’s Combined Prehistoric Expedition discovers the site.
• 1998: Malville, Wendorf and colleagues publish the astronomical interpretation in Nature.

Why it matters

Nabta Playa shows that the Sahara was once home to inventive communities of herders who built monuments, buried cattle with ceremony and watched the sky, long before the pharaohs. It is one of the earliest ceremonial sites in Africa, older by some two thousand years than the first phase of Stonehenge, and a vivid reminder of how changes in climate opened and then closed the Sahara to human settlement.