A Sentinel-1 radar satellite flagged an oval anomaly about 420 feet (128 meters) long and 203 feet (62 meters) wide under a mound at Buto, in Egypt’s northwestern Nile Delta, and ground surveys then found a mudbrick building from the 26th Dynasty beneath it. The deposits have lain under Nile mud for about 2,600 years. An Egyptian team led by Mohamed Abouarab of Kafrelsheikh University reported the work in the journal Acta Geophysica.
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Excavation so far is limited to one test trench, and the building’s purpose is still undecided.
Sentinel-1 and the Kom C anomaly
Sentinel-1 is a European Copernicus radar mission whose instruments, the European Space Agency says, supply all-weather, day-and-night imagery of Earth’s surface. The Buto team used radar data from May 5, 2018, according to The Debrief, to flag large anomalies that might indicate buried structures. The target was Kom C, a mound at Buto, now Tell el-Fara’in, that sits below the groundwater table and had been excavated only down to Ptolemaic and Roman layers. Live Science reports the oval at roughly the size of a football field, and the 420-foot figure in the radar data is the one that drew attention to the site.
Satellite radar can only suggest where to look. To test the signal, the team ran 15 parallel lines of electrical resistivity tomography covering about 5,400 square meters (58,100 square feet), a method that sends current into the ground and maps how soil and buried material resist it. The profiles showed Ptolemaic and Roman debris from the surface to about 3 meters, a large mudbrick building at about 3 to 6 meters, and a clean sand layer at about 6 to 7 meters. The study, “Multi-scale detection of buried archaeological elements across different occupation phases,” is credited to Abouarab and nine co-authors including Abdelaziz Elfadaly.
The groundwater problem explains why the layered approach was needed. Buto sits in the Nile Delta, where the water table is high and buried mudbrick is slow, wet and hard to excavate. A trench cannot be opened across a 420-foot area without knowing where to dig, so radar narrows the search from the whole mound to a few candidate spots, and resistivity surveys then show what lies at depth before any soil is moved. For a site excavated only to its Ptolemaic and Roman layers, that sequence allowed the team to reach 26th Dynasty remains with one small trench.
A sand cushion under Saite mudbrick
Elfadaly, a co-author at Egypt’s National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, pointed to a significant, clean sand foundation layer beneath the mudbrick walls as the reason the structure survived. The Saite builders likely laid the sand to spread the building’s weight and drain groundwater. Hussein Bassir of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, who was not involved in the study, called using pure sand as a stabilizing cushion a brilliant, deliberate tactic.
A 10-by-10-meter excavation trench then tested what the instruments had implied. According to Live Science, it produced ushabti figurines, a limestone altar with residues consistent with animal blood, and a faience baboon figurine linked to the god Thoth. Gizmodo’s Nov. 3 report adds amulets of deities such as Wadjet and a small offering basin, and The Debrief lists amulets of Isis, Horus, Anubis and Taweret plus a steatite scarab bearing the name of Thutmose III. Objects of that kind tie the building to religious practice, not to ordinary housing.
The date range gives the find its weight. The 26th Dynasty ran from 688 to 525 B.C., and Live Science places the building in that Saite period, a time when Delta cities such as Buto held both religious and political importance. Gizmodo calls Buto a religious and political center and notes amulets of Wadjet, the cobra goddess associated with the town, among the finds, which matches what is known of the place.
How large the building is, and what it was
The sources disagree on scale, and the disagreement matters. Live Science gives 420 by 203 feet for the oval anomaly. ScienceAlert, in an April 3 report, describes a partially buried mudbrick structure of about 25 by 20 meters at 3 to 6 meters depth. The 420-foot oval is therefore best read as the extent of the signal the satellite and ground surveys picked up, within which a smaller walled building was confirmed by the trench. The journal paper is the place to settle the point, and its full text could not be retrieved for this report.
On function, the authors are cautious. Gizmodo lists a secondary temple, a religious service complex, a priestly residence or a funerary structure as possibilities, and says further excavation is needed. The Debrief quotes the team’s conclusion that another temple may remain buried under a thick clay layer nearby, in addition to the known temple, and that further resistivity surveys of the deepest occupation levels are planned. Whether the Saite building is that temple, a neighbor to it, or something else is what future seasons at Buto will have to answer.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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