Armand Ruhlmann

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4,000-year-old wall at Oued Beht is North Africa's oldest defensive structure outside Egypt

Deceased; his survey notes framed the question the new excavation answered

In the 1930s, the French archaeologist Armand Ruhlmann mapped three walls across a ridge above the Oued Beht river in northwest Morocco and guessed they were defensive. Nobody could date them. New excavations and 17 radiocarbon dates place the ditch and rampart at 3,500 to 4,000 years old, making it the oldest defensive construction found in North Africa outside the Nile Valley.

Updated Nov 1