A substantial Egyptian settlement has been found in Kharga Oasis, Egypt.

Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosny, announced that the settlement is dated to the Second Intermediate Period (ca.1650-1550 BC) and was discovered during excavation work as part of the Theban Desert Road Survey. This project serves to investigate and map the ancient desert routes in the Western desert.

Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), said that the newly discovered settlement is 1km long from north to south and 250m wide from east to west. It lies along the bustling caravan routes connecting the Nile Valley of Egypt and the western oasis with points as far as Darfur in western Sudan. Hawass continued that archaeological evidence at the site indicated that its inhabitants were part of an administrative center and they were engaged in baking on a massive scale.

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Experts are exploring the depths of Lake Qarun, south of Cairo, with remote sensing radar in an attempt to find sunken artifacts.

Antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass said the work was launched a few days ago. “It is the first time ever that the antiquities department carries out an archaeological mission in Lake Qarun.”

Khaled Saeed, who heads the department of pre-historic affairs at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the team under his supervision hopes to pinpoint “huge basalt rocks” at the bottom of Lake Qarun.

According to Saeed, the discovery of the rocks was first made by Egyptian-American scientist Faruq al-Baz, a veteran of NASA’s Apollo programme, five years ago.

Baz, who now runs the Centre for Space Studies at Boston University, was carrying out a satellite survey of Egypt’s Western Desert when he and his team discovered in the Lake Qarun area “a large number of huge blocks of rock.”

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A team of archaeologists have used radar imaging to determine the extent of the 3,500-year-old ruins of Hyksos.

Egypt was ruled for a century from 1664-1569 B.C. by the Hyksos, a warrior people from Asia, possibly Semitic in origin, whose summer capital was in the northern Delta area.

Irene Mueller, the head of the Austrian team, said the main purpose of the project is to determine how far the underground city extends.

The radar imaging showed the outlines of streets, houses and temples underneath the green farm fields and modern town of Tel al-Dabaa.

Archaeology chief Zahi Hawass said in the statement that such noninvasive techniques are the best way define the extent of the site. Egypt’s Delta is densely populated and heavily farmed, making extensive excavation difficult, unlike in southern Egypt with its more famous desert tombs and temples.

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Radiocarbon dating has proved that the chronology of the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms is correct.

The researchers dated seeds found in pharaohs’ tombs, including some from the tomb of the King Tutankhamun.

They write in the journal Science that some of the samples are more than 4,500 years old.

Radiocarbon dating of ancient Egyptian objects is nothing new.

But this time, the scientists say, they were able to use a very precise statistical technique to actually verify the Egyptian history.

“The very first dating done with radiocarbon was dating Egyptian material of known dates, to check that [the method] worked,” said Andrew Shortland from Cranfield University in the UK.

“Now, for the very first time, [we] managed to get radiocarbon techniques so good, that we can do it completely the opposite way around. We can say, from using radiocarbon, whether the Egyptian history is correct or not.

“Previously radiocarbon hasn’t had a voice on this because the errors had been so great. Now radiocarbon is able to distinguish between different ideas of reconstructing the history.”

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Prehistoric rock art, which dates back 8,000 years, may hold clues to the dawn of the Egyptian civilization.

Amateur explorers stumbled across the cave, which includes 5,000 images painted or engraved into stone, in the vast, empty desert near Egypt’s southwest border with Libya and Sudan.

Rudolph Kuper, a German archaeologist, said the detail depicted in the “Cave of the Beasts” indicate the site is at least 8,000 years old, likely the work of hunter-gatherers whose descendants may have been among the early settlers of the then-swampy and inhospitable Nile Valley.

The cave is 10 km (6 miles) from the “Cave of the Swimmers” romanticised in the film the “English Patient”, but with far more, and better preserved, images.

By studying the sandstone cave and other nearby sites, the archaeologists are trying to build a timeline to compare the culture and technologies of the peoples who inhabited the area.

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