Dakhleh (also spelled Dahkla or is the name of an important oasis located in the Western Desert of Egypt about 300 kilometers west of Luxor. As an oasis, Dakhleh has a long human occupation history, beginning perhaps 12,000 years ago. Substantial occupations at Dakhleh include Old Kingdom (ca 2686-2181 BC), Saite Pharaohs of the second Intermediate period (664-525 BC), the Persian Kings (525-359 BC), and the Late Roman period (3rd and 4th century AD.
Dakhleh was occupied before and during the early Egyptian Neolithic and Predynastic periods, and so has a role in understanding the rise of the Egyptian state.
Neolithic Dakhleh
The artifact assemblage called Bashendi B at Dakhleh has been compared to that of similarly dated Fayum, suggesting a possible connection between the hunter-gatherers at Dakhleh with the contemporaneous Neolithic Fayum culture of circa 6500-5200 RCYBP. These include concave-based arrowheads, planes/tranchets, side-blow flake scrapers, amazonite beads, marine shell artifacts and pottery styles. However, evidence for the increasing sedentism and cattle pastoralism at Dakhleh Oasis is lacking.
There is, however, ample evidence for a population decrease at Dakhleh beginning in early part of the 7th millennium BP, coinciding with the desertification of the eastern edges of the Sahara, followed by an repopulation about 6500 BP. This and the artifacts found along the Nile suggests people at Dakhleh were forced to migrate towards the Nile, perforce becoming part of the Egyptian rise. This suggests that when the climate became increasingly arid, Dakhleh was one of the few refuges apart from the Nile itself.
Archaeology at Dakhleh
Excavations at Dakhleh have been conducted for the last 30 years by the Dakhleh Oasis Project. Other
Sources
Bagnall, Roger S., Paola Davoli, Olaf E. Kaper, and Helen Whitehouse 2006 Roman Amheida: Excavating a town in Egypt's Dakhleh Oasis. Minerva 17(6):26-29.
Warfe, A. R. 2003 Cultural Origins of the Egyptian Neolithic and Predynastic: An Evaluation of the Evidence From the Dakhleh Oasis (South Central Egypt). African Archaeological Review 20(4):175-202.
This glossary entry is part of the Dictionary of Archaeology.
