A handout picture released by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) shows Egyptian workers on the site of the new discovery of remains of a substantial settlement at al-Kharga Oasis discovered by the American-Egyptian mission from Yale University. The city is a thousand years earlier than the major surviving ancient remains at the Umm El-Mawagir area in Kharga Oasis. The settlement is dated to the Second Intermediate Period (ca.1650-1550 BC). -AFP Photo

CAIRO: Archaeologists have uncovered a pharaonic settlement in an Egyptian oasis that may have supplied food for troops along Saharan trade routes, Egypt's antiquities department said on Wednesday.

Yale University's American-Egyptian mission, which found the site in Kharga, the most southerly of the ring of oases that circle Egypt's Western Desert, believes it was a major administrative centre dating back to around 1600 BC.

The head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, said that the site measured one kilometre (more than half a mile) by 250 metres (yards) and lay along the bustling desert caravan routes connecting the Nile Valley through the Western Desert with points as distant as Darfur in western Sudan.

The head of the Yale mission, John Coleman Darnell, said part of an ancient bakery was also found with enough remains in rubbish dumps outside to suggest it may even have been feeding an army, the antiquities department said.

Egyptian Culture Minister Faruq Hosni said the find was made as part of a wider effort to map pharaonic Egypt's trade routes into the Sahara dubbed the Theban Desert Road Survey. -AFP