During excavations in the port city of Berenike on the Red Sea, archaeologists have uncovered an extraordinary shrine: in the cult complex, which is about 1600 years old, they came across skeletons of falcons, most of them without skulls, as well as eggshells of these birds. In addition, a stele with images of gods came to light, on which a cult law is named. As the diggers around Joan Oller Guzmán from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona report in the magazine "American Journal of Archaeology", it is probably a place of worship for the god Chons. Apparently, the Blemmyans, a semi-nomadic people at that time, made sacrifices here.
The falcon shrine was found in an area of Berenike known as the northern complex.
Greek inscriptions, which the Blemmyian royal names are called, reveal that the probably religious complex from the 4th to 6th centuries was connected to the Blemmyern.
During the excavation work, which took place in 2019, the excavators discovered a base in front of which a statue - a so -called cube stool - and a sacrificial bench stood.
They released the remains of 15 falcons around the base, 13 of them without a head.
Unlike often handed down for Egypt, the birds had not been mummified.
Not far from the pedestal there was an image stele with an inscription. The plate depicts a goddess, the falcon-headed god Chons next to an obelisk, as well as the child god Harpocrates. The gods are confronted by a pharaoh who offers a sacrifice. Below the image field there is a Greek inscription: "It is unseemly to cook a head here." Apparently, this is a cult law that the archaeologists around Guzmán associate with the headless hawks: perhaps the animals were cooked, but without a head for religious reasons. The offerings were then buried in the ground in front of the pedestal.
When the falcon shrine was created, the port city of Berenike was several centuries old. King Ptolemaios II Philadelphos (308–246 BC) had it in the second quarter of the 3rd century BC. Founded and named after his mother Berenike I. During Roman times, the rulers over this harbor handled Arabia, India and the Horn of Africa. From the 4th century, the Blemmyer probably had the city under their control. The nomadic people originally came from Nubia, which was located in the area of today's southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Berenike was left around the middle of the 6th century.
