Watchtower in Ancient Egypt: how it worked

Watchtower

A slim lookout tower. Egypt guarded its borders with forts and watchposts, especially in the south, toward Nubia.

Biggest forts

Along the Nile in Nubia, about 1900 BC

Famous fort

Buhen, with walls and towers of mud brick

Desert guards

The Medjay

Reports

Letters sent between the forts

History Guarding the south

Around 1900 BC, Egyptian kings built a chain of mud-brick forts along the Nile in Nubia, to the south. The fort at Buhen had thick walls with towers, a deep ditch and a drawbridge. Soldiers there sent letters to one another reporting everyone who passed by. Most of these forts now lie under Lake Nasser, the huge lake behind the Aswan High Dam.

The walls of the fortress of Buhen in Nubia, uncovered by archaeologists before Lake Nasser flooded the site. Photo: Rex Keating, CC BY-SA 3.0 igo, via Wikimedia Commons

History The Medjay

The Medjay were at first Nubian desert scouts who worked for Egypt. Later the name was used for a kind of police, who guarded the desert roads and the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

The fortified gate of Medinet Habu, the temple of Ramesses III, built like a fortress tower. Photo: Marc Ryckaert, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

History Saved from the lake

When the Aswan High Dam was built in the 1960s, its rising lake covered most of the old forts. Archaeologists recorded Buhen before the water came, and its stone temple, built in the time of Queen Hatshepsut, was taken apart and rebuilt in the garden of the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum.