Hidden 2,600-Year-Old Mudbrick Complex Found Beneath Egypt’s Buto
Beneath the mounds of Buto in Egypt’s Nile Delta, researchers have found a large mudbrick structure that sat hidden for roughly 2,600 years. Satellite radar and electrical scans of the ground located it, and a small test excavation confirmed its thick walls. The builders apparently laid a deliberate bed of clean sand under the walls, which may explain why the mud architecture survived in such a wet landscape.
Buto, the city of the cobra goddess
Buto, known today as Tell el-Fara’in, lies in the northwestern Nile Delta. In ancient times it was a sacred city linked to Wadjet, the cobra goddess who protected the pharaohs. The site is made up of several large mounds, and the new work focused on one of them, called Kom C.
The delta is a hard place for archaeologists. The ground is waterlogged clay, the water table is high, and mudbrick walls usually dissolve or collapse in these conditions. That makes any well-preserved mudbrick building here unusual, and it is part of why this result drew attention.
How the team found it without digging
The researchers started from space. They studied Sentinel-1 radar imagery from the European Space Agency, which picked out a large oval anomaly in the ground of about 128 by 62 meters. They then moved to the surface and ran 15 parallel electrical resistivity tomography surveys across roughly 5,400 square meters. This method sends current into the ground and measures how easily it passes through different materials, so buried walls show up differently from the soil around them. The team built a 3D model from the results.
The model showed a rectangular mudbrick structure of about 20 by 25 meters, with substantial walls and an associated enclosure. It lies about 3 to 6 meters below the surface. The upper 3 meters of the mound contain Ptolemaic and Roman material, so the older building sits beneath later layers of the city’s history.
A test dig confirms the walls and turns up offerings
To check the scans, the team excavated a 10 by 10 meter area in Kom C. The dig found thick mudbrick walls at the depths the model predicted. The structure dates to Egypt’s 26th Dynasty, the Saite period, which spans roughly 688 to 525 BC.
The excavation also produced several objects. These include ushabti figurines, small funerary figures that Egyptians placed in burials to serve the dead in the afterlife. The team found a limestone altar with carved channels, and dried residues on it that the authors describe as consistent with animal blood, which may point to offerings. They also recovered a faience figurine of a baboon, an animal associated with Thoth, the god of wisdom.
The engineered sand foundation
One of the most interesting findings lies below the walls. At around 6 to 7 meters depth, the scans and dig revealed a thick layer of relatively clean sand. Natural sand in this area lies much deeper, so the researchers conclude that people brought this layer in on purpose.
The authors suggest the sand could have helped in several ways. It may have spread the weight of the building, improved drainage, reduced movement in the clay, and kept groundwater away from the walls. If so, the Saite builders understood the delta’s soil problems and designed around them. That would help explain why this mudbrick structure lasted more than two and a half thousand years.
What we still do not know
The purpose of the building remains uncertain. The authors suggest it could be a tomb, a religious shrine, or another major building. The altar, the ushabti and the baboon figurine hint that at least part of it served religious or funerary uses, but the researchers say further work is necessary. The blood interpretation also rests on residues that are only consistent with blood, so lab analysis will need to confirm it.
Deeper levels are still unexplored. The team plans wider-spacing electrical surveys, along with palaeobotanical and geological studies, to learn more about the structure and its setting. For now, Buto shows how radar from orbit and scans of the ground can find big buildings in a landscape where digging blindly would be slow and risky.