The biggest archaeological discovery of the past five decades was uncovered in Egypt, a 4500-year-old temple. The discovery of what is believed to be one of Egypt’s six lost “temples of the sun" has been made by a team of archaeologists. Researchers excavating the Abu Ghurab site, south of Cairo ,uncovered the remnants of a sun temple. According to the Telegraph, Egyptian pharaohs are thought to have built just six sun temples. While pyramids were built to preserve a pharaoh’s standing as a heavenly entity in the afterlife, sun temples acted as their shrine and were much smaller in scale.
This sun temple is an extremely rare find, being the third ever discovered and the first unearthed in the last five decades. The recent temple is considered to have been erected between 2400 and 2370 BCE.
The remains were discovered buried beneath another temple near Abu Ghurab, some 12 miles south of Cairo. Archaeologists digging at the Abu Ghurab site in 1898 unearthed the sun temple of Nyuserra, the sixth pharaoh of Egypt’s 5th dynasty, who ruled about the mid-25th century BCE. Since then, there have been no other finds, until now. However, it turns out that they did not discover everything the site has to offer.
“Archaeologists in the nineteenth century excavated only a small part of this mud bricks structure beneath the stone temple of Nyuserra and concluded that this was a previous building phase of the same temple," expedition co-director Massimiliano Nuzzolo told CNN. “Now our finds demonstrate that this was a completely different building, erected before.”
Nuzzolo and his crew acquired seals with rulers’ names carved on them, as well as dozens of beer jars. The later pitchers have been traced to the mid-25th century BCE, implying that they were crafted before Nyuserra.
Archaeologists have also found a pair of limestone columns from a portico and an entryway threshold in the older shrine. According to Nuzzolo, Nyuserra most likely utilised the bones of the prior temple to build his new.
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