The ancient site known as Nabta Playa is between 6,000-6,500 years old and was discovered by an international archeologist team lead by professor Fred Weindorfof the Southern Methodist Unversity of Dallas,Texas. The site stands on the shores of what was once an ancient lake which existed in the now parched land scape.It contains standing stones as much as 2.75m [9ft] height dragged to the site from a mile or more away.Several of the stones are lined up in an east-west direction and appear to have been used as vertical sighting stones alinged with the sun at the summer solstice. During the summer and autmn,other stones would have been partially submerged in the lake and may have served as markers for the onset of the rainy season.

While the carefully arranged stones of this site seem to have had symbolic and ceremonial functions. It may thus have integrated the temporal cycles of the life-giving waters as a kind of cosmic clock tied to the underlying principles of life and death. As,such ,the site might even be called a proto-temple and while the people of this region may or may have been amung the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians of pharoanic times,these same factors of life and death,water,and the sun certainly lie at the symbolic core of all later Egyptian temples.

The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt
Richard H. Wilkinson