Africa’s Oldest Defensive Wall Outside Egypt Found in Morocco
For more than a century, scholars treated North Africa’s Maghreb as a blank on the map of Mediterranean prehistory. A wall in Morocco now says the blank was a gap in research, not in history.
Archaeologists from Italy, Morocco and England have described a system of ditches and ramparts at Oued Beht, in a river valley about 80 kilometers east of Rabat. The walls are the oldest known structures of their kind in North Africa outside the Nile Valley. The study appeared on September 7 in the journal Libyan Studies.
A wall built to be defended
The centerpiece is a heavily fortified wall on the southern side of the site. The team thinks its base was built between 3,500 and 4,000 years ago from clay, ash, silt and stones. Giulio Lucarini of Italy’s National Research Council, the study’s first author, said a work like this is not improvised, because it needs planning, the right spot in the landscape and labor coordinated over time.
A farming hub worth guarding
The defenses imply the settlement was worth protecting. The team suggests it was an early farming hub with livestock, cultivated crops and large storage facilities, and it found dozens of bell-shaped pits that probably held grain. The storage capacity was larger than the needs of the people living there, so the facilities may have served a wider community across the surrounding territory.
Nobody knows who the defenders feared. Lucarini said the walls may reflect growing competition over land and resources, control of movement through the landscape and perhaps more formal leadership, rather than invaders.
Links across the Strait of Gibraltar
Iberia, just across the strait, shows African ivory and ostrich eggshell from early contacts with North Africa, and Oued Beht helps show the African side of that relationship. The two shores did not look alike, though. Contemporary Iberian sites are large fortified hilltop settlements with bronze metalwork and rich burials, while the defensive system at Oued Beht seems much smaller.
Iman Nagy, a landscape archaeologist at UCLA who was not part of the study, said the site challenges models that assume large architecture or social complexity must have arrived from elsewhere.
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