Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

APPENDIX 3
SAVING NABTA PLAYA
Will the Oldest Prehistoric Astronomical Complex in the World Be Destroyed?
In July 1998, a short letter published in the highly respected scientific journal Nature sent a huge wave of interest across
scientific communities worldwide. Professor Fred Wendorf, an American anthropologist, and his colleagues, astronomer
Kim Malville and fellow anthropologist Romuald Schild, made a startling announcement: they had discovered in Egypt’s
Western Desert, at a location 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Abu Simbel, the oldest astronomical megalithic site in
the world, predating Stonehenge by at least one thousand years. They called the site Nabta Playa. Wendorf and his team
then concluded that the African-origin prehistoric people of Nabta Playa were most probably the ancestors of the
pharaohs, and it was them, with their well-developed knowledge of astronomy, agriculture, and cattle-herding, who
provided the impetus that inspired the great civilization of ancient Egypt.
The news went around the world like wildfire, and soon many academics were becoming convinced that it was,
indeed, in the Western Desert of Egypt (also called the Eastern Sahara or Egyptian Sahara) that civilization began and,
eventually, in the fourth millennium BCE spread to the adjacent Nile Valley, where it then spawned the pharaonic
culture. In view of this realization, Nabta Playa acquired immense importance for the study of the origins of civilization
as well as other elements of early humans, such as astronomy, the domestication of cattle, the development of
agriculture, and early religious ideologies. A team headed by Fred Wendorf, calling itself the Combined Prehistoric
Expedition (CPE) was allocated a concession by the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt (SCA) to study and
excavate at Nabta Playa.
In fact, Nabta Playa was discovered in 1974 by Wendorf and his team, but it was not until the early 1990s that they
realized that the many megaliths strewn about the site were not in their natural place but instead had been deliberately
placed by humans. Gradually the team became aware that this was no ordinary prehistoric Neolithic site, but instead was
a ceremonial complex of unique value. In 1991–1992 the anthropologist Maria Nieves Zedeño, of the University of
Arizona, and her colleague Alex Applegate of Southern Methodist University (SMU) joined the Combined Prehistoric
Expedition (CPE) under the guidance of Fred Wendorf and Romuald Schild and were assigned the reconstruction of a
stone circle—the so-called Calendar Circle. In 1997 the archaeoastronomer Kim Malville of the University of Colorado
in Boulder was invited to join the CPE at Nabta Playa. Malville, who had much experience in the study of ancient
astronomical alignments, quickly realized that not only did the Calendar Circle have solar alignments to the summer
solstice and equinoxes but also that several of the nearby megalithic alignments that emanated from a conglomerate of
large stones (called Complex Structure A, or simply CSA) were astronomically aligned to the rising point of important
stars: Alpha Canis Major (Sirius), Alpha Ursa Major (Dhube), and the three bright stars of Orion’s belt.
Knowing that these stars had also been important to the ancient Egyptians in their sky religion (as expressed in the
Pyramid Texts and other funerary literature, such as the Coffin Texts, the Book of the Dead, and the so-called Carlsberg
Papyrus), Wendorf, Schild, and Malville published a series of articles (their most recent in 2007) in which they expressed
their strong suspicion that the evidence found at Nabta Playa (the stellar and solar alignments, the cow cult, the burial
customs) shows a direct connection to the pharaonic civilization of the nearby Nile Valley. This hypothesis was further
fortified by the fact that radiocarbon dating at Nabta Playa showed that the presence of the people who had populated this
desert region ceased to exist at around 3400 BCE, when the southwestern desert of Egypt became superarid—a date that
most tellingly, coincided with the emergence of the pharaonic civilization in southern Egypt along the Nile. It very much
seemed that the more ancient people of Nabta Playa migrated to the nearby Nile Valley, bringing along their body of
astronomical knowledge and domesticated cattle that kick-started the pharaonic civilization.
In view of the immense cultural importance of Nabta Playa, however, the supervision and protection of the site
during the periods when the CPE team was not there was practically nonexistent. The CPE was generally present on the
site from around January to the end of March, but before and after this the high temperatures of the region made any
work very difficult if not impossible, and thus Nabta Playa was left without any security system or guards. When the
astrophysicist Thomas Brophy visited Nabta Playa in October 2003, there was no one on the site, and he noted the lack of