By Peter Lesser

 

Thirty-five small pyramids have been discovered at the Sedeinga site in Sudan. The pyramids, discovered along with their graves, have been slowly uncovered since 2009.

Their dense concentration is surprising to researchers, who in 2011 found 13 pyramids clustered together into roughly 5,381, an area slightly larger than a basketball court, according to CBS News.

 

They date back to nearly 2,000 years ago during the reign of the Kush kingdom in Sudan. Researchers believe that the pyramids were built based on Egyptian funerary architecture, as the Kush kingdom shared a border with Egypt.

 

The largest pyramids discovered are about 22 feet wide at the base. The smallest, which likely functioned as a grave for a small child, is only 30 inches long. The tops of the pyramids have worn away due to the passage of time, but Vincent Francigny, a research associate with the American Museum of Natural History in New York told LiveScience that he believes the tops would have been decorated with capstones depicting either birds or lotus flowers on top of a solar orb.

The structure of the pyramids takes a very peculiar form that's never been seen in Sedeinga. They're designed with a circular structure connected to the pyramid corners through cross-braces. Researched had been curious as to why they chose to construct the pyramids in such a way until 2012.

"What we found, is very intriguing," said Francigny. " A grave of a child and it was covered by only a kind of circle, almost complete, of brick." He believes that when they began building pyramids in Sedeinga, they adopted a local circle-building tradition that resulted in pyramids with circular structures within.

These new findings could hopefully spark a more ambitious trend that will lead to further discoveries, unveiling mysteries that lay dormant in the sand. Experts argue that there must be more pyramids that remain undiscovered.

According the Daily Mail, for several years satellites have been able to see shapes of homes, temples, tombs, and other structures built thousands of years ago that are still mostly covered by sand or whose outlines are invisible to the naked eye.

There's no way to tell what's buried beneath the sand, but investigations undoubtedly continue. The new discoveries in Sedeinga are exciting and proceed to puzzle together the pieces of our unknown past.