Archaeologists discover 3,500-year-old Egyptian fortress buried in the desert

Archaeologists have uncovered a 3,500 year old Egyptian fortress in North Sinai near the Mediterranean coast. The site spans about 2 acres and sits along an ancient military road that once linked Egypt to lands to the northeast.

The fort preserves an interior zigzag wall, 11 defensive towers, small ovens, and a hardened lump of long dried dough. The team shared these details in an October 2025 interview.

Fortress on Egypt’s war road

The work was led by Hesham Hussein, undersecretary for Lower Egypt and Sinai Archaeology at Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (EMTA). His research focuses on border fortifications and settlement archaeology in Sinai.

The fort stands at Tell el Kharouba near the ancient Way of Horus, a route that connected the Nile Delta to Canaan. Scholars show that a chain of forts policed movement across the frontier during the New Kingdom, a period of Egyptian power and building.

Some towers held foundation deposits, ritual bundles buried at new buildings, a collection entry shows typical objects placed for protection. A ceramic handle stamped with Thutmose I, who ruled early in the Eighteenth Dynasty, anchors the likely date.

Archaeologists mapped 11 towers and a southern wall about 345 feet long and 8 feet thick. They also recorded an interior zigzag barrier on the western side running roughly 246 feet from north to south.

Life inside Egypt’s fortress

Small ovens lined outer recesses near the residential quarter. They were likely used “for daily domestic activities inside the fortress,” said Hussein.

His team reported a piece of fossilized dough beside one oven, a quiet trace of a meal never baked. Food preparation left marks that survived in the dry soil for millennia.

“The garrison likely ranged between 400 and 700 soldiers,” said Hussein. Housing blocks and courtyards inside the fort match the needs of a unit of that size.

Archaeologists also noted blocks of volcanic stone carried from islands in the Aegean. That material hints at coastal supply runs serving the site across different seasons.

Archaeologists are studying the residential quarter to learn how soldiers organized their days. Storage rooms, ovens, and small work areas show how food preparation and repair tasks supported life inside a busy garrison.

Researchers are also mapping pathways between towers, courtyards, and living blocks. These routes may reveal how guards rotated shifts, moved supplies, and responded to activity along the ancient military road.

Egypt’s zigzag fortress design

One interior wall uses a zigzag plan that breaks up wind flow and sand pressure. It also adds internal corners that act like bracing where long straight runs might crack.

The pattern “helped reinforce the wall’s stability and reduce the impact of wind and sand erosion,” said Hussein. The design responds to desert conditions that wear down mud brick faster than people expect.

A central entry in the southern wall shows evidence of modification across phases. Changes to the width and layout suggest repairs and redesign when the fort’s mission shifted.

What this find changes

“The discovery of this fort is a very exciting one,” said James Hoffmeier, an archaeologist at Trinity International University (TIU). His earlier excavations at Tell el Borg traced the same military corridor across North Sinai.

The new site and Tell el Borg were “part of the military road from Egypt to Canaan which made Egypt’s control of the east Mediterranean coast possible for most of four centuries,” said Hoffmeier. Control of that shoreline secured Egypt’s eastern approaches during a long stretch of imperial history.

Continued work will “expand greatly our understanding of the nature of Egypt’s early New Kingdom’s securement of Northeast Sinai along the ‘Ways of Horus’,” said Gregory Mumford, an Egyptologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

His point highlights how a single fort can clarify the larger defense network that guarded the border.

Searching for the missing port

Archaeologists think a military harbor once served this fortress, based on imported volcanic stone and the fort’s position near the coast. Teams now survey the surrounding terrain for signs of quays, storage areas, or channels cut through shifting dunes.

A port would explain how supplies reached a garrison of several hundred soldiers. It would also show how Egypt linked coastal logistics with inland border defense during the early New Kingdom.

Excavation and analysis are still underway at Tell el Kharouba. Researchers hope to locate a nearby harbor that might explain imported stone and steady resupply.

Any coastal facility would place this fort inside a broader logistics web. It would also help archaeologists track how people, grain, and garrison rotations moved through Egypt’s frontier posts.

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