Archaeology, Luxor: discovery of a Roman city of 1800 years ago

An 1,800-year-old Roman city has been discovered in Luxor, the Thebes of the pharaohs, about 500km south of Cairo. According to Egyptian archaeologists, it is “an entire residential city, found intact” on the eastern bank of the Nile. Dating back to the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, the settlement is the “oldest and most important city found on eastern Luxor,” according to Mostafa Waziri, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. The archaeological team uncovered a number of residential buildings, as well as two pigeon towers used to house homing birds and metal workshops, Waziri said. Inside the workshops there was a treasure of vases, tools, in bronze and copper from Roman forging. Most archaeological work in Luxor has focused on temples and tombs, so the city is a somewhat unusual find. This year alone, 60 mummies and a new royal tomb have already been discovered in Luxor.

Luxor (about 500km south of Cairo) is also home to the Valley of the Kings and Queens, where numerous rock tombs have been dug. Egypt’s focus on promoting discoveries like those at Luxor is part of a larger effort to revive tourism in the country after years of political turmoil and the Covid-19 pandemic. The country’s tourism industry accounts for about two million jobs and 10% of gross domestic product. Meanwhile, later this year, the country is expected to open the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum, a new Cairo institution that will house many archaeological treasures.

Egypt has revealed several important discoveries in recent months, mainly in the necropolis of Saqqara, south of Cairo, but also, in January in Luxor, that of a tomb of an 18th dynasty royal wife, that of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, dating to 3,500 years ago.
For some experts, these announcement effects have more political and economic significance than scientific. The country of 104 million inhabitants in serious economic crisis is in fact counting on tourism to straighten out its finances: the government is aiming for 30 million tourists a year by 2028, against 13 million before Covid-19.
To revitalize this sector, which has been in the throes of recurring crises since the 2011 Arab Spring but which employs two million people and generates over 10% of its GDP, Cairo has been promising for months, for example, the imminent opening of its “Great Egyptian Museum “, near the Giza plateau, the one on which the iconic pyramids stand. Lastly, it was informally scheduled for last year, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the deciphering of the Rosetta stone and the centenary of the discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh-boy Tutankhamun.