Ancient Egyptians were famous for their huge buildings and everyone has already heard something about the pyramids of Giza, the temple of Karnak and Abu Simbel but how many among us has already heard something about Egyptian fortresses ?

A long time before the European fortresses were built, the Egyptian already mastered the building of imposing military complexes. The Buhen fort in Nubia one of the best examples of it.

Hatshepsut (1479-1458 BC) is famous for her peaceful reign. She wasn't really a good military leader but she wanted to prevent wary neighbouring kingdoms to cross the Egyptian border and bring her peaceful reign to an end. In order to impress her direct neighbours, Hatshepsut ordered the construction of huge fortresses around Egypt that would dissuade enemies from attacking the country. This tactic worked for a while until Hatshepsut's ennemies realises that those fortresses were only huge piles of rocks built to impress foreign armies. So let's have a closer look at one of these fortresses, the Nubian fortress of Buhen located 250 km south of Aswan in Lower-Egypt.

The first bricks of this building were laid during the Old Kingdom. The building was then fortified during the 12th dynasty (1938-1759 BC). The fortress had one of its walls bordering the Nile river which was streaming just behing the picture you can see above this text. The first wall you can see on the picture, the lower one, has a thickness of 4 meters. Just behing the first wall, another bigger wall protected the fortress. A moat separated both walls. The second wall had one big tower at each of its extremities. The smaller towers you can see between the big towers were built with a distance of 5 meters from each others. If you count the amount of towers and multiply it by 5, you can see that the fortress had a width of about 100 meters ! The main entry was secured by two towers (the towers with the flags on the picture). A wooden gate blocked the entry and a draw bridge was used to cross the distance between the first and the second wall.

Inside the castle, you could find houses, a temple and the residence of the commandant which were all dedicated to the protection of Egypt's border. But as the borders of Egypt were growing, those big castle became little cities while other castle where build along the new borders.

The remain of this fortress were discovered in 1819 but the most important excavations date from this century. Just like lots of other Egyptian fortresses, the Buhen fortress lies now under the water of the new Nasser lake which was artificially created with the Aswan Dam.

Once more, the ancient Egyptians have shown us that they were real masters in the construction of huge buildings. The fortresses that were built in Europe during the Middle-Ages were much smaller than this one. We could consider those Egyptian fortresses as a kind of precursor for the European fortified cities.