Nabta Playa

Lost within the vast desert towards southwest of Egypt, lies a Neolithic site that is regarded as the first megalithic astronomical observatory—a title that would in many cases, be conferred upon the more famous Stonehenge in England.

Nabta Playa is the name of the site that pre-dates the Stonehenge by millennia. Located about 800km south of Cairo (the Capital of Egypt), 100km west of Abu Simbel, and about 30km north of the Egypt-Sudan border, Nabta Playa is a large inland drainage basin that was in the past inhabited by nomadic peoples on an intermittent basis.

While it is now awash with sand, Nabta Playa was an inhabitable region around 10,000B.C. Due to a northward shift of monsoon rains, this meant that the area received a fair amount of precipitation, allowing for a while, plants, animals, and people to thrive.

The area was inhabited between 9000BC and 2800BC until the area reverted to its previous state of hyper-aridity, forcing the people to migrate elsewhere. The peak of Neolithic culture at the site is considered to be between 7000 to 6500 years ago.

Nabta Playa consists of an observatory and two main burial sites, known as “tumuli.” The site was discovered by chance in 1974 by a team that was heading to the Nile Valley from Libya. Excavations have led to the discovery of numerous pieces of pottery and a semblance of organized settlements with amenities such as wells.

The megaliths that make up the circle were quarried from a source at least half a kilometer away.

Scientists have so far deduced that some of the upright slabs were aligned with stars. The stars include Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Arcturus, Sirius, Dubhe (on Ursa Major), and stars on Orion’s Belt. Curiously, the site was located on the Tropic of Cancer.

The megaliths, 24 in total, were also aligned with the true north-south (which differs by a few degrees from the magnetic north-south many people are familiar with).

There also a series of small complexes that were all set up on table rocks, a fact that still baffles scientists to date.

Because the site was located on the edge of a lake, some scientists speculate that it could have been used to gauge whether floods were going to occur, as part of the complex would be submerged in such an instance.

Whatever happened to the people that used to live there still remains a mystery, but some researchers have postulated that the nomads who has encamped there were responsible for the rise of Ancient Egyptian civilization. This theory is founded by the fact that the Ancient Egyptian civilization rose up shortly after the nomads left Nabta Playa, and that both cultures held cattle in high esteem—a cultural observance that hadn’t existed in the Ancient Egyptian societies before.

By Matengo Chwanya

Edited by: Nancy Nguyen

Sources: Ancient wisdom,

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