Hundreds of ancient coins and inscribed pottery fragments discovered at Byzantine site in Egypt

Egyptian archaeologists working at Dakhleh Oasis, 565km south-west of Cairo, have excavated a mud-brick settlement, revealing hundreds of inscribed pot sherds, bronze and gold coins, and religious and domestic buildings. 

These findings will help experts to reconstruct daily life at the oasis during Egypt’s Byzantine era, which lasted from roughly AD284 to AD641, and highlight the desert region’s rich cultural heritage.

“The excavations are important because many settlement sites are under threat from agricultural expansion, it is well preserved and is yielding significant finds,” the archaeologist Colin Hope of Monash University, Australia—an expert on Dakhleh Oasis who was not involved in the excavations—tells The Art Newspaper. 

“Like other locations in Dakhleh, it is revealing the wealth of the agricultural communities, their interconnections locally and nationwide. There would have been many such communities throughout Dakhleh of smaller size.”