A 3,200-year-old Egyptian inscription found near an ancient military road may indicate the location of a long-lost city, archaeologists have announced.
Found at the site of Tell Abu Seifi (also spelled Seify), the inscription mentions Ramesses II, who reigned from about 1279 to 1213 B.C. It says that
Tell Abu Seifi is located near what the ancient Egyptians called the “Way of Horus” (or “Ways of Horus”), a road that connected the eastern Nile Delta with the southern Levant and was dotted with fortresses.
Peter Brand, a professor of history at the University of Memphis in Tennessee who was not involved in the excavation, said the evidence indicates that Tell Abu Seifi, which is near the modern-day city of Qantara, is Mesn. “Several fortifications were built along the ‘Ways of Horus’ and Mesen, near modern Qantara, was likely one of the ‘jumping off’ points for Egyptian armies departing for Canaan, Lebanon, and Syria,” he told Live Science in an email.
A road leading out of Africa and into the Middle East was key, as the Egyptians went on several military campaigns to expand their empire around that time.
“The Egyptian empire dominated this part of the Middle East,” Brand said. “Ramesses II’s father had built a series of the forts along the Ways and Ramesses himself marched his armies across Sinai during his military campaign.” This included his famous Battle of Kadesh, in what is now Syria, against the Hittite Empire, a kingdom based in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey).
The site’s temple also hints at its importance.
The “temple of the god Horus of Mesen was the most important religious center in the area,” Brand said. He noted that the newfound inscription mentions “how Ramesses II restored a statue of Horus of Mesen.” Remarkably, the pedestal of a statue just like this was previously found at the site.
These two clues indicate that Tell Abu Seifi is Mesn, Brand said.
Other scholars were not ready to identify Tell Abu Seifi as Mesn. James Hoffmeier, an archaeologist and professor at Trinity International University who has conducted extensive work in the region, said that while the case is strong, he wants to see more evidence, such as ceramics from the site, to be sure.
One problem is that similar inscriptions mentioning Mesn have been found at other sites in the region, raising the question of whether those sites could be Mesn, Gregory Mumford, an anthropology professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was not involved in the excavations, told Live Science in an email. These sites include a fortress at Kom el-Qolzoum on the Suez and a fort at Tjaru in the northwest Sinai Desert. Mumford proposed that Mesn could be a broad area that encompasses multiple sites in the region.
Other scholars also said more information on the discoveries was needed.
Oren Siegel, an Egyptology professor at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the excavation, said this is a “really exciting find” but he wants to wait for more information before commenting in detail. Shirly Ben Dor Evian, an Egyptology professor at the University of Haifa in Israel who wasn’t involved in the excavation, also said more information, particularly on the hieroglyphic inscriptions, was needed.
Research into the site is ongoing. Hussein noted that, interestingly, historical records show there was a second settlement named Mesn located in southern Egypt.
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