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Archaeologists have unearthed the lost “Golden City,” buried beneath the sands for millennia. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the end of a five-year excavation.
Aton, once a thriving city of gold miners, was discovered beneath the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. The team uncovered remnants of houses, workshops, administrative buildings, temples, and baths. Among the artifacts are items dating to later periods, like the Roman era (30 B.C. – 639 A.D.) and Islamic times (642 – 1517 A.D.).
This suggests Aton remained active for many centuries, producing gold for pharaohs across several Egyptian dynasties. Rulers used that precious metal to adorn themselves, their palaces, and their tombs.
Excavators found 628 fragments of pottery and stone inscribed in Greek, hieroglyphs, and demotic script. That mix of languages suggests Aton was a multicultural, multilingual city.
What else is known about this remarkable city?
The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities called the excavation a “significant step in preserving the country’s ancient mining heritage.”
Aton is closely linked to the reign of Amenhotep III, one of the most powerful pharaohs, who ruled from 1391 to 1353 B.C.
Named after the Egyptian sun god, the city was founded between 1386 and 1353 B.C. For many years, Aton was considered the main administrative and industrial center of Egypt, according to the Daily Mail.
However, in the 1350s B.C., just a few years after the ascension of Akhenaten, the father of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, the city was abandoned. The capital of Egypt then moved to Amarna, roughly 400 kilometers from the “Golden City.”
Center for the Extraction and Refining of Precious Metals
The finds shed new light on ancient Egypt’s mining industry and the daily lives of the workers in the area.
Archaeologists uncovered miners’ settlements, gold-processing facilities, and specialized workshops for extracting gold from quartz veins. The ruins revealed evidence of a complex, multi-stage purification process that ranged from crushing quartz to smelting ore in clay furnaces to obtain pure gold.
The team also found bronze coins from the Ptolemaic dynasty, the longest and final dynasty of ancient Egypt, which ruled from 305 to 30 B.C. The excavators uncovered five altars—stone slabs used to hold food and drink offerings for gods or the spirits of the dead.
During the excavations, researchers frequently found terracotta figurines of people and animals, stone sculptures of deities, ceramic vessels for storing perfumes, medicines, and incense, and jewelry made from precious stones.
Archaeologists discovered the lost “Golden City” while excavating the west bank of Luxor in search of the burial temple of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The decision to dig in that area followed previous discoveries of temples belonging to other pharaohs.
“Within weeks, much to the team’s surprise, formations of mud bricks began to appear in all directions,” recalled lead researcher Zahi Hawass, an archaeologist and former Minister of Tourism and Antiquities of Egypt.
He said numerous international archaeological missions had been unable to locate Aton for many years. Now researchers have uncovered many of the city’s secrets, information that will help rewrite its rich history.
