More re Kharga discovery

Yale Office of Public Affairs and Communications

With slideshow.

A Yale team led by Professor of Egyptology John Coleman Darnell has unearthed a lost city—site of a massive bread-making industry—that flourished more than 3,500 years ago in the Western desert of Egypt.

The discovery of the remains of this mud-brick settlement, which functioned as an administrative center as well as major supplier of bread, stands to shed new light on an obscure era in Egyptian history, the Second Intermediate Period, when rival factions contended for domination of what had been a prosperous state united under Pharaonic rule, asserts Darnell.

During this period, invaders from Asia, the Hyksos, seized control of the Nile Delta in the north; the Nubian kingdom of Kerma was centered in the south, and what remained of
Pharaonic power struggled to survive in the Thebaid, the region around modern Luxor.
Egyptologists have focused on these three contending groups during this intermediate period, and how the weakest of these, the Pharaonic forces based in Thebes, managed to come out on top has always been something of a mystery, says Darnell.