Science: Older than Egypt?

For years, Italian Anthropologist Fabrizio Mori has been trekking into the Libyan Desert to look for graffiti, ancient inscriptions on rocks. Near the oasis of Ghat, 500 miles south of the Mediterranean coast, he found on his last expedition a shallow cave with many graffiti scratched on its walls. When he dug into the sandy floor, he found a peculiar bundle: a goatskin wrapped around the desiccated body of a child. The entrails had been removed and replaced by a bundle of herbs.

Such deliberate mummification was practiced chiefly by the ancient Egyptians. But when Dr. Mori took the mummy back to Italy and had its age measured by the carbon 14 method, it proved to be 5,400 years old—considerably older than the oldest known civilization in the valley of the Nile 900 miles to the east.

The discovery suggested a clue to one of the great puzzles of Egyptology: Where was the birthplace of Egyptian culture? Although many authorities believe it is the world’s oldest, they have been perplexed by the fact that it did not develop gradually in the Nile Valley. About 3200 B.C. the First Dynasty appeared there suddenly and full grown, with an elaborate religion, laws, arts and crafts, and a system of writing. Until that time the Nile Valley was apparently inhabited by neolithic people on a low cultural level. Dr. Mori’s mummy provides support for the theory that Egyptian culture grew by slow stages in the Sahara, which was not then a desert. When the climate grew insupportably dry, the already civilized Egyptians took refuge in the Nile Valley, and the sands of the Sahara swept over their former home.

The mummy does not prove that there is a civilization buried in the Sahara but it does mean that, in the next few years, the desert will be swarming with anthropologists looking for one.