In the Nubian Desert about 100 km west of Abu Simbel stands a small circle of stones set up around 4000 BC, and it is roughly a thousand years older than Stonehenge. It marks the approximate direction of summer solstice sunrise, with the honest caveat archaeoastronomers make: the gaps between the paired gate stones are a little too wide for precision, so read it as approximate rather than instrument-grade. Other alignments here have been argued to point at the risings of Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri and Orion’s Belt, and the dating for those is contested. The people who built it were herders, and from about 5500 BC they were burying cattle in clay-lined roofed chambers under stone tumuli, which looks like the start of a thread that runs all the way into Egyptian religion. The stones themselves have been moved and reconstructed at the Nubian Museum in Aswan.
Nubian Desert, Egypt
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