| Oldest Temple in
Egypt Tell Ibrahim Awad Reveals Temple Upon Temple Beneath the rich rubble of a Middle Kingdom temple are ruins of the oldest-known temple in Egypt at Tell Ibrahim Awad in the eastern Nile Delta. Traces of five temples, the earliest dating to 3200 B.C., underlie a 4,000-year old Middle Kingdom temple. The Dutch-Russian-American team conducting the excavations, led by Willem van Haarlem of Netherlands Flemish Institute in Cairo, expects further excavation to push back the Predynastic temple date to 3400 B.C. Before the discovery, the oldest-known temple was at Hierakonpolis, which dated to 3200 B.C. The temple is a small, simple temple built of sun-dried mud brick, unlike any construction previously found in Egypt. "It is the first temple that used bricks," says van Haarlem. "Other temples were wood constructions." Even more unusual is that a series of similar temples was built on top of each other in such a long succession of time. The temple was apparently the province of a baboon cult, which was a common one at that time. Artifacts, such as ivory statues and potsherds and fragments of a large baboon, identify the group. "The baboon cult was an ancestor cult, and the baboon was a benevolent figure. Also, the Egyptian god of writing, Thoth, could take the form of a baboon. The cult continued for a long time in different forms." |
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