3,000-year-old ruins and artifacts found at massive gold mine in Egypt, photos show
Seen from above, Sukari gold mine in southeastern Egypt looks like a massive chasm with terraced sides. A rock formation looms next to the pit, and toy-sized machines move around inside it.
The view is undeniably modern and, as archaeologists were recently reminded, also very ancient.
Archaeologists spent the past two years excavating the ruins of a 3,000-year-old mining camp at Sukari Mountain, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a Feb. 25 Facebook post. The project involved digging up and documenting any finds, then restoring and relocating them to a site away from modern-day mining operations.
Photos show the ancient worksite. Archaeologists identified one section of ruins as a mining factory where stones were crushed, passed through a filtration system, then put into smelting ovens in order to extract gold.
Other sections of the ruins included the homes of workers, other workshops, places of worship, administrative buildings and even bathhouses — everything needed to support the day-to-day lives of miners.
Excavations also uncovered a wealth of artifacts. Photos show a few of the clay and stone statues, mostly in fragments, found at the site.
Archaeologists identified the partial figures as Bastet, an Egyptian deity who often took the form of a cat, and Harpocrates, another form of the sun god Horus typically depicted as a child.
Other artifacts included over 620 pottery pieces with a mix of hieroglyphics, Greek and demotic writings on them, bronze coins, precious stone beads and tools made of shells, among other items.
Another photo shows one of the ancient stone offering tablets unearthed at the site.
Archaeologists said their finds provide a better understanding of ancient Egyptian mining technology and offer a glimpse into the life of miners.
Today, “Sukari is a large-scale, modern gold mine comprising both a low-cost bulk tonnage open-pit and a high-grade underground mining operation,” according to the company that owns the site, AngloGold Ashanti.
“Gold has been mined at Sukari since the Pharaonic and Roman times,” the company said. Gold mining restarted at the site in the early 1900s and continued on and off ever since.
A video shared on YouTube by Momen El Shenawy in 2020 shows the Sukari gold mine. The mine is near the southeastern coast of Egypt and a roughly 480-mile drive southeast from Cairo.
Google Translate was used to translate the Facebook post from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
This story was originally published February 26, 2025 at 6:49 AM with the headline "3,000-year-old ruins and artifacts found at massive gold mine in Egypt, photos show."
