Egypt7th–6th century BC · Buto (Tell el-Fara'in), Kafr el-Sheikh, Egypt
Satellite radar helps find 2,600-year-old building on a sand foundation in Egypt's Nile Delta
At Buto, ground scans and a trench confirmed a large Saite-period mudbrick structure whose builders laid clean sand beneath it to cope with waterlogged clay.
In brief 3 key points
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- A 2,600-year-old mudbrick building lies 3 to 6 metres underground.
- The team thinks its builders laid clean sand to steady it on shifting clay.
- Whether it was a tomb, a shrine or a house for priests remains uncertain.
Researchers have found a large mudbrick building, about 2,600 years old, buried under a mound at Buto in Egypt's northwestern Nile Delta. Satellite radar spotted it first. Ground scans and a trench then confirmed it. The builders set it on a thick layer of clean sand, which the team thinks kept it stable on the delta's shifting clay.
The building dates from the Saite period, Egypt's 26th dynasty, in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. The study appeared in March 2026 in the journal Acta Geophysica. Its first author is M. A. R. Abouarab. Co-author Abdelaziz Elfadaly is an associate research professor at Egypt's National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences.
A sacred city below the water table
Buto, today called Tell el-Fara'in, was the home of Wadjet, the cobra goddess of Lower Egypt. People lived there from the Predynastic period, around 3800–3100 BC, to the Early Islamic era. The paper describes it as a religious counterpart to Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt.
Most of the visible mounds are Ptolemaic and Roman. Earlier digs at the southern mound, Kom C, reached only those layers before hitting groundwater. The older levels lie in waterlogged delta clay, out of reach of normal excavation.
The team began with a radar image taken on 5 May 2018 by the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 satellite. It showed an oval anomaly under Kom C, 128 metres long and 62 metres wide. That is roughly the size of a football field.
They then ran 15 parallel lines of electrical resistivity tomography across about 5,400 square metres. This method passes electric current through the ground and maps how strongly different layers resist it. Walls, sand and wet clay each show up differently.
The top 3 metres held scattered Ptolemaic and Roman debris: mudbricks, pottery sherds and broken limestone. Later residents had pulled down older buildings to reuse the material. Between 3 and 6 metres lay the large Saite mudbrick structure.
The team dated it by its layer, the shape of its mudbricks and the style of its pottery. According to Live Science, they also radiocarbon dated organic material found with it. Its purpose is not settled. The paper calls it possibly a large tomb or shrine, and Live Science reports that the study also suggests a house for priests.
Clean sand under the walls
At 6 to 7 metres down, the scans showed a thick layer of clean sand. The team reads it as deliberate ground levelling by Saite builders. Below it is a deeper layer that may date from the late 8th century BC.
Delta clay swells when wet and shrinks as it dries, which slowly shifts anything heavy on top. A sand cushion spreads a building's weight and lets water drain away. According to Elfadaly, it also stops groundwater rising into the mudbrick and softening it.
“The detection of a significant, clean sand foundation layer beneath the mudbrick walls explains how these heavy structures survived the high water table and shifting clayey soil of Buto.”
Abdelaziz Elfadaly, National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences
The team then dug a 10 by 10 metre area, divided into four squares, to a depth of 6 to 7 metres. It exposed thick mudbrick walls resting on the sand. Nearby were ushabti figurines, small servant statues placed in tombs to work for the dead in the afterlife.
Elfadaly said the finds also included a limestone altar with carved channels. These held dried residues consistent with animal blood, which the team takes as a sign of offerings. The study also notes a rarer object: a faience figurine of a baboon, a sacred animal of Thoth, god of wisdom.
The Saite kings ruled from Sais, a nearby delta city, after a long spell of Assyrian and Libyan domination. Hussein Bassir, director of the Antiquities Museum at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, was not involved in the study. He praised the builders' choice of foundation.
“Using pure sand as a stabilizing cushion was a brilliant, deliberate tactic.”
Hussein Bassir, director of the Antiquities Museum, Bibliotheca Alexandrina
The team plans to return with wider-spaced resistivity surveys to reach deeper layers. Specialists in ancient plants and in past geological change will join them. Their work may help reconstruct the landscape around Buto when the walls were built.
Sources (2)
Peer-reviewed paperfrom National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences
- Buried for 2,600 years beneath Nile mud, a massive ancient Egyptian complex was just found — from space (Live Science: archaeology)
- Multi-scale detection of buried archaeological elements across different occupation phases: an integrated approach using radar satellite imagery and electric resistivity tomography at Buto, northweste (Acta Geophysica)
Paper: Abouarab, M. A. R., Elfadaly, A., Elbehery, W., Wafa, O., Aboalkassim, I., Younes, A., Hiekl, A. M. A., Saada, S. A., Wilson, P., & Ibrahim, A. (2026). Multi-scale detection of buried archaeological elements across different occupation phases: an integrated approach using radar satellite imagery and electric resistivity tomography at Buto, northwestern Nile Delta of Egypt. Acta Geophysica, 74(2). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11600-026-01809-4
Edited by Guiseppe Weijermars
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