Arkeonews
By Leman Altuntaş
14 May 2026
Satellite archaeology has revealed 260 previously unknown stone burial monuments in Sudan’s Atbai Desert, opening a rare window onto life in the Eastern Sahara before the rise of pharaonic Egypt.
In the dry lands between the Nile and the Red Sea, hundreds of stone circles are rewriting what archaeologists know about life in the Eastern Sahara before the rise of pharaonic Egypt.
A new archaeological study has identified 260 previously unknown monumental tombs in the Atbai Desert, a vast and still poorly explored region stretching across eastern Sudan between the Nubian Nile and the Red Sea Hills. The structures, known as Atbai Enclosure Burials, appear to belong to a mobile pastoralist culture that flourished during the fourth and third millennia BC, with some related examples reaching back even earlier.
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