Magnetic tracing at Abu Sir (land of forgotten pyramids), northern Egypt

Abstract

An integrated magnetic study was conducted at Abu Sir, a locality in northern Egypt also known as the "Land of the Forgotten Pyramids." Two magnetic tools were applied over an area of 25,600 m 2 in order to trace and detect hidden archaeological features near the Temple of the Sun. The acquisition of the magnetic data was initiated by measuring the magnetic susceptibility of the topsoil samples collected within the entire study area. This was followed by a gradiometer survey to measure the vertical gradient of the geomagnetic field over a restricted area of 14,400 m 2 . The magnetic susceptibility results are characterized by high values in the middle of the study area and a small extension of high values to the southwest. This pattern may indicate the presence of ritual monuments. The magnetic susceptibility measurements identified regions of interest to be targeted during the gradiometer survey. The gradiometer results revealed the existence of numerous archaeological features of different shapes and sizes composed of mud bricks. These features may represent tombs, burial rooms, and dissected walls, and all of them probably belong to the 5th Dynasty of pharaohs. The depth of the expected buried archaeological features was estimated from the gradiometer results and is about 1.2 m for deep features and 0.42 m for shallow features.

Satellite-Aided Analysis of the Position of the Sun Temples and the Dynastic History of the Vth Egyptian Dynasty

“…Non-invasive analyses in search of traces of eventually buried monuments at Abu Gurab have proved inconclusive so far (see, e.g., [9,10]). Actually, the present author has verified on site in several zones of the Abu Gurab-Saqqara South ridge that noninvasive analyses are likely doomed to be ineffective due to the inhomogeneous accumulation of desert sand mixed with pottery fragments and garbage in artificial dunes, which-sadly-were created in the course of the last 150 years or so of excavations of the main monuments nearby.…”

Discovery of the causeway and the mortuary temple of the Pyramid of Amenemhat II using near‐surface magnetic investigation, Dahshour, Giza, Egypt

“…Magnetic methods were first used in the 1950s (Aitken, Webster and Rees 1958) and have since become the backbone of archaeological prospecting, successfully detecting many ancient relics, particularly those made of mud bricks (Abdallatif 1998; Kamei et al 2002; Ghazala, El‐Mahmoudi and Abdallatif 2003; Herbich 2003; Abdallatif, Mousa and Elbassiony 2003; Odah et al 2005; Abdallatif et al 2005).…”

Archaeo-Geophysical Survey around Itay El-Baroud Area, Nile Delta, Egypt

“…It filters out the effects of the regional magnetic field, is only weakly influenced by magnetic time variations and better divines shallow magnetic features (Bossuet et al, 2001). The measurements of the vertical magnetic gradient for the purposes of archaeological investigations has been extensively used in Egypt (Kamei et al, 2002;Abdallatif et al, 2003Abdallatif et al, , 2005Ghazala et al, 2003;Herbich, 2003;Abbas et al, 2005;Odah et al, 2005;Wilson, 2006).…”