Evidence of large-scale gold extraction in the ancient Nubian kingdom of Kush has been found along the Nile River, archaeologists will announce today.

The discovery is part of a race to save as many antiquities as possible before a dam inundates a hundred-mile (160-kilometer) stretch of the Nile in northern Sudan.

The presence of gold in the African region "may have been one of the main reasons for the colonization of Sudan by the ancient Egyptians," said Salah Mohammed Ahmed, the head of Sudan's antiquities agency.

Spreading out from the Nile, ancient Nubia followed the river from southern Egypt deep into what is now northern Sudan. In the time of the pharaohs, Nubian lands were the subject of numerous incursions from the north by the Egyptians.

Archaeologists from the University of Chicago found more than 55 grinding stones at Hosh el-Geruf, about 225 miles (362 kilometres) north of the Sudanese capital of Khartoum...

Four photos can be found here.

Ancient Gold Centre Discovered on the Nile, Dan Morrison, National Geographic News, District of Columbia, USA, June 18, 2007.

cf. Ancient gold unearthed in Sudan, BBC News, UK, June 19, 2007.

Archaeologists from the University of Chicago have discovered a gold processing centre along the middle Nile, an installation that produced the precious metal sometime between 2000 and 1500 B.C. The centre, along with a cemetery they discovered, documents extensive control by the first sub-Saharan kingdom, the kingdom of Kush.

The team from the University’s Oriental Institute found more than 55 grinding stones made of granite-like gneiss along the Nile at the site of Hosh el-Geruf, about 225 miles north of Khartoum, Sudan. The region was also known also known as Nubia in ancient times.

Groups of similar grinding stones have been found on desert sites, mostly in Egypt, where they were used to grind ore to recover the precious metal. The ground ore was likely washed with water nearby to separate the gold flakes.

“This large number of grinding stones and other tools used to crush and grind ore shows that the site was a centre for organized gold production,” said Geoff Emberling, Director of the Oriental Institute Museum and a co-leader of the expedition...

Archaeologists rescue clues to ancient kingdom from the rising Nile, William Harms, University of Chicago via EurekAlert, USA, June 19, 2007.

cf. Archaeologists Rescue Ancient Civilization from Rising Nile, William Harms, University of Chicago via NewsWise, USA, June 19, 2007.

Archaeologists have unearthed a 4,000-year-old gold-processing centre along the middle Nile in Sudan that suggests the ancient kingdom of Kush was much larger than scholars previously believed and would have rivalled the domain of the Egyptians to the north.

Kush, which was called Nubia by the Greeks, was the first urban civilization in sub-Saharan Africa. The discovery of the gold centre and a related graveyard is providing new information about the relationship between rulers in the capital city, Kerma, and its peripheral subjects, said archaeologist Geoff Emberling of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, who is announcing the find today.

Believed to have flourished from about 2400 BC until the 2nd century AD, Kush "is gradually coming out of the shadow of Egypt," said archaeologist Derek A. Welsby of the British Museum, who was not involved in the excavation.

"We didn't know that Kush extended into the 4th Cataract zone" of the Nile, Welsby said, referring to the region where Emberling excavated...

Ancient Kush rivalled Egypt, experts say, Thomas H. Maugh II, The Los Angeles Times, California, USA, June 19, 2007.

Over the last few years, archaeological teams from Britain, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sudan and the United States have raced to dig at sites that will soon be underwater. The teams were surprised to find hundreds of settlement ruins, cemeteries and examples of rock art that had never been studied. One of the most comprehensive salvage operations has been conducted by groups headed by Henryk Paner of the Gdansk Archaeological Museum in Poland, which surveyed 711 ancient sites in 2003 alone.

“This area is so incredibly rich in archaeology,” Derek Welsby of the British Museum said in a report last winter in Archaeology magazine.

The scale of the salvage effort hardly compares to the response in the 1960s to the Aswan High Dam, which flooded a part of Nubia that then reached into what is southern Egypt. Imposing temples that the pharaohs erected at Abu Simbel and Philae were dismantled and restored on higher ground.

The Kushites, however, left no such grand architecture to be rescued. Their kingdom declined and eventually disappeared by the end of the 16th century B.C., as Egypt grew more powerful and expansive under rulers of the period known as the New Kingdom.

In Sudan, the Merowe Dam, built by Chinese engineers with French and German subcontractors, stands at the downstream end of the fourth cataract, a narrow passage of rapids and islands. The rising Nile waters will create a lake 2 miles wide and 100 miles long, displacing more than 50,000 people...

Scholars Race to Recover a Lost Kingdom on the Nile, John Noble Wilford, The New York Times, New York, USA, June 19, 2007.