At least 35 densely clustered small pyramids have been found at Sedeinga, a site in Sudan.
Scientists are shocked about how close together the pyramids, discovered between 2009 and 2012, are to each other, LiveScience.com reported. During field season in 2011, the research time discovered 13 pyramids within roughly 5,381 square feet - slightly larger than an NBA basketball court, the website reported.
The pyramids were built around 2,000 years ago, when the Kush kingdom flourished in Sudan, according to LiveScience.com. The Kush people's desire to build pyramids, evidently, may have been influenced by Egyptian funerary architecture.
Pyramid building went on for centuries, researchers found, according to LiveScience.com.
"The density of the pyramids is huge," researcher Vincent Francigny, a research associate with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, told LiveScience.com. "Because it lasted for hundreds of years, they built more, more, more pyramids and after centuries, they started to fill all the spaces that were still available in the necropolis."
The largest pyramids found are about 33 feet wide at the base, and the smallest, likely for children, was only 30 inches long. Pyramid building in Sedeinga went on until the residents eventually ran out of space, LiveScience.com reported.
"They reached a point where it was so filled with people and graves that they had to reuse the oldest one," Francigny, who is also the excavation director of the French Archaeological Mission to Sedeinga, told LiveScience.com.
Francigny and team leader Claude Rilly also noticed that several Sedeinga pyramids were connected with an inner cupola, or circular structure. They compared the design to a "French Formal Garden." Rilly and Francigny wrote in an article cited by LiveScience.com that they're not sure why these ancient peoples designed the pyramids this way. But something they discovered last year may have given them a hint.
"What we found this year is very intriguing," Francigny told LiveScience.com. "A grave of a child and it was covered by only a kind of circle, almost complete, of brick." He said this indicates that pyramid-building in Sedeinga may have been combined with a local circle-building tradition called tumulus construction, LiveScience.com reported.
One striking feature of these pyramids was an offering table depicting the goddess Isis and the jackal-headed god Anubis. According to LiveScience.com, the inscription 0n the table, written in Meriotic language, reads:
Oh Isis! Oh Osiris!
It is Aba-la.
Make her drink plentiful water;
Make her eat plentiful bread;
Make her be served a good meal.
This, as LiveScience.com reported, was probably a final send-off for a woman -- maybe a grandmother -- who died 2,000 years ago.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
