Sudanese pyramid sprawl: 35 ancient pyramids discovered in Sedeinga

Picture taken 02 March 2007, shows the Royal pyramids, (500 km) north of Khartoum, Sudan, built in Nubia about 800 years after the last Egyptian pyramid was built. (AFP Photo/Khaled Desouki)

Archaeologists have reportedly discovered 35 small ancient pyramids in Sudan at a site known as Sedeinga dating back around 2,000 years. Scientists are stunned over how densely the pyramids appeared to be heaped together.

­According to a LiveScience report, the closely clustered pyramids were discovered between 2009 and 2012.

In 2011, archaeologists tracked down 13 pyramids squeezed into an area of 500 square meters.
The pyramids reportedly go back to the days when a kingdom named Kush, which shared a border with Egypt and later with the Roman Empire, was in full blossom in Sudan. The desire of the kingdom's people to build pyramids was apparently influenced by Egyptian funerary architecture, according to the report.


"The density of the pyramids is huge," a research associate with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Vincent Francigny, told LiveScience.

"Because it lasted for hundreds of years they built more, more, and more pyramids and after centuries they started to fill all the spaces that were still available in the necropolis," he noted.

According to researchers, the biggest pyramids discovered at Sedeinga are about 7 meters wide at their base. The smallest, likely constructed for the burial of a child, is only ¾ of a meter long.

The excavation director Vincent Francigny said that the building continued until there was room to build more pyramids.

"They reached a point where it was so filled with people and graves that they had to reuse the oldest one," he explained.