After 18 years of excavation, a Yale archaeology team has unearthed a large industrial center in the deserts of Western Egypt, shedding light on a little-known period in Egyptian history, the University announced last week. Egyptology professor and Department Chair John Darnell and his team worked their way through the previously unearthed site of Umm Mawagir in the western deserts of Egypt and discovered large piles of ash next to clay ovens, buried in the sand. At first, the team wondered why so many ovens were clustered so close together in the northern part of the town, far from areas where people lived. They realized the ovens must have been used for large-scale production, not private use, at the newly discovered site — once an oasis but now a no man’s land. “Very little of what we do is the classical announcement of a find,” saidDarnell’s colleague and wife, Deborah, coordinator of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. “We don’t have a lot of the flashy objects. Our objects are humble but of staggering importance.” The Darnells began exploring the roads in the desert west of Luxor in 1992, when they unearthed outposts along the way suggesting that a major urban center had once existed in the remote region. The site they eventually found, Umm Mawagir, is more than 3,500 years old, and what they discovered could change how archaeologists and historians view the late Middle Kingdom, a period of civil war between outside invaders and the then-pharaoh’s government. In the past, it was thought that there were three regions along the Nile competing with the pharaoh for power. [...]