Illegal Gold-Hunting Diggers Damaged Sudan’s 2,000-Year-Old Historic Site

Conny Waters - AncientPages.com - Illegal gold hunters have devastated a 2,000-year-old ancient site of Jabal Maragha located in Sudan, in the eastern region of the Sahara desert.

The ancient site of Jabal Maragha, Sudan destroyed by gold hunters. Credits: Africanews

Last month, the site was visited by a team of archaeologists and officials from Sudan’s antiquities but the researchers were not able to recognize the place.

The site of Jabal Maragha – located approximately 270km (170 miles) north of the capital Khartoum, and dated to the Meroitic period between 350 BC and 350 AD – was found hardly recognizable.

At the site, there were found two huge mechanical diggers and five men at work, who had excavated a large trench about 17 meters (55 feet) deep, and 20 meters long. In this way, they destroyed almost all signs of this 2,000 -year-old site.

Archeologists in Sudan assess the damage done by gold hunters digging up ancient sites looking for buried treasure / © AFP Photo

"They had only one goal in digging here - to find gold... they did something crazy; to save time, they used heavy machinery," a shocked archaeologist Habab Idriss Ahmed, who has worked at the historic location since 1999, told the AFP news agency.

"They did something crazy; to save time, they used heavy machinery."

The rust-colored sand was scarred with tyre tracks, some cut deep into the ground, from the trucks that transported the equipment.

“They had completely excavated it because the ground is composed of layers of sandstone and pyrite,” said Hatem al-Nour, Sudan’s director of antiquities and museums.

“And as this rock is metallic their detector would start ringing. So they thought there was gold.”

AFP reports that Sudan is Africa's third-largest producer of gold, after South Africa and Ghana, with commercial mining bringing in $1.2bn (£900m) to the government last year.

The big problem is illegal mining, which is encouraged by some local authorities and businessmen who supply treasure hunters with machines.

Written by Conny Waters - AncientPages.com Staff Writer