Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

Figure 4.14. Bagnold Circle in, top, 2008, and bottom, 1930
It took us two days of grueling travel in some of the most desolate places we had ever seen to reach Bagnold Circle.
We wondered how Ralph Bagnold, in those days with vehicles that must have been very primitive by comparison,
managed to come here through this testing terrain. Bagnold, who was a veteran of trench warfare in World War I, became
a pioneer of deep desert exploration—especially, of the Sahara—throughout the 1930s. During World War II he was
chosen to lead the British army’s Long Range Desert Group. He was also a physicist who contributed valuable
knowledge of the physics of blown sand, which is still used in planetary science research today. 30 He is credited with
developing, for desert exploration, a sun compass that was not affected by magnetic anomalies. Bagnold’s early
expeditions in the Egyptian Sahara were in search of the fabled lost city of Zarzoura. It was on one such expedition in
1930, when he was traveling in the deep desert hundreds of kilometers southwest of Dakhla oasis, that he reported: “In a
small basin in the hills we came the next day [October 27, 1930] upon a circle 27 feet in diameter of thin slabs of
sandstone, 18 to 24 inches high. Half were lying prone, but the rest were still vertical in the sand. There was no doorway
or other sign of orientation, and though we searched within and without the circle, no implements could be found. 31
As we approached Bagnold Circle, we were keenly aware that no studies of its possible astronomical alignments had
ever been conducted. As Wendorf, Schild, and Malville wrote in 2008, “. . . a well-known stone circle was discovered by
Bagnold (1931 [sic] in the Libyan Desert. . . . No evidence of astronomical orientations had been reported, and none is
readily discernable in photographs of the circle.” 32
Because of its incredible remoteness, few people have actually seen Bagnold Circle, let alone studied it in detail on
location. *32
As far as we know it was not visited until the 1990s, when four-wheel-drive vehicles became available in Egypt and
the military authorities slackened their rules for tourists’ deep desert travel. In a 1998 visit by Zarzoora Expeditions of
the Egyptian Wael T. Abed, the group apparently placed a cairn (small pile of stones) in the center of the circle. In 2001–
2002, the Fliegel Jezerniczky Expedition (FJE) also visited Bagnold Circle. Additionally, Mahmoud Marai brought small
groups to Bagnold Circle a few times from 2004 to 2007. It was Marai who guided us to Bagnold Circle in April 2008.
Yet neither the Zarzoora Expedition nor the FJE checked for any possible astronomical alignments at Bagnold Circle—
nor had anyone else, as far as we could tell. *33 33
Bagnold Circle lies in a shallow basin, probably an ancient seasonal lake similar to the one at Nabta Playa. †34 The
physical features we noted first were two prominent, upright, and elongated stones (very reminiscent of the gate stones of
the Calendar Circle at Nabta Playa) that defined an east–west alignment. One of these stones on the west side was white,
and the stone on the eastern side was black, which may indicate a symbolic significance of some sort. For our GPS we
took readings of this alignment as well as readings for the north–south alignment, which also had at each end a very darkcolored
stone, nearly black, and a very light-colored stone, nearly white. The conditions of the stones suggest extreme
age: they have been deeply scoured by millennia of wind erosion. Some of the stones have suffered such extreme erosion
that their tops have fallen off and are still on the ground where they fell. Notwithstanding this erosion, the circle is
remarkably well preserved, considering its vast age. The two alignments—east–west and north–south—strongly imply an