5,000-year-old rock art depicts ancient Egypt’s ‘terrifying’ conquest of the Sinai Peninsula — but the pharaoh’s name has been erased from history
Archaeologists have discovered 5,000-year-old rock art in the Sinai Desert that depicts ancient Egypt’s brutal conquest of the region.
The work “shows in a terrifying way how the Egyptians colonized Sinai and subjugated the inhabitants,” the archaeologists said in a statement. statement.
The scene shows a man raising his arms in triumph while another man is kneeling with an arrow in his chest and his hands tied behind his back. There is also a boat nearby and an inscription that says Min, an Egyptian deity associated with fertility, is “the ruler of the copper region,” the archaeologists wrote in a new study published in the 2025 edition of the journal. Blatter Abrahams.
“[Looking] “In the overall composition, we can assume that the boat was associated with the Egyptian ruler, the triumphant man with the god Min… and the submissive and killed man with the local inhabitants,” the archaeologists wrote in the journal. They noted that in Ancient Egyptboats were often used as a metaphor for the pharaoh.
Other examples of rock art, dating back around 5,000 years, have already been discovered in Sinai, suggesting that the Egyptians conquered the region around this time.
“The motivation for Egyptian expeditions to southwest Sinai was not simply an abstract expansion of territory, but more specifically the availability of mineral resources, notably copper and turquoise,” the team wrote.
At that time, Sinai was mainly inhabited by nomadic groups, the study co-author said. Ludwig Morenzprofessor of Egyptology at the University of Bonn. The “rock panel certainly represents one of the first depictions of dominance over another territory,” Morenz told Live Science in an email.
An interesting detail is that there was an inscription near the image of the boat that could have named the Egyptian ruler, but it was deliberately erased, the archaeologists noted in the newspaper. We don’t know who deleted it, when and why. There have been a number of instances in Egyptian history where the name of a pharaoh has been erased after a new pharaoh came to power, but it is unclear whether this is the case here.
The rock art was discovered by Mustafa Nour El-Din, an archaeologist from the Aswan Inspectorate at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, during a survey conducted in 2025. Archaeologists believe that more rock art remains to be discovered nearby.
“Research has just begun and we are planning a larger first campaign,” the team wrote.
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