Scientists May Have Just Discovered One of World’s Earliest Skyscrapers - Newsweek

New research on a sprawling palace in Ethiopia dating back about 2,800 years found that the towering structure could have “reached skyscraper proportions.”

The study, a collaboration led by the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (BTU), examined the Grat Be’al Gibri palace at Yeha, in the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands.

The structure is said to be the largest known palace complex of its time in South Arabia and East Africa, with a floor area of around 60 meters by 60 meters (over 196 feet). Dating from around 800 B.C., the palace is believed to have been destroyed by fire “as early as antiquity,” and only parts of its ground floor and podium remain today, BTU said in a statement.

The Grat Be’al Gibri palace used rubble masonry with clay mortar reinforced by horizontal timber beams, professor Davide Tanasi, a classical archaeologist at the University of South Florida, told Newsweek.

In the recent study, scientists created a virtual 3D model of two wall sections of the palace (a wall corner and a doorway) and analyzed their load-bearing capacity using the finite element method (FEM).

The new findings confirm that clay walls and timber and stone, with wooden beams laid in a horizontal grid, were already an established technology in Yeha and the wider Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands, historian Kwasi Konadu, the former John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Endowed Chair of Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University, told Newsweek.

These 3D simulations show that this system had “a remarkable load-bearing capacity,” Tanasi said. Konadu explained that the study indicates “this architectural and building system was more capable than what the surviving ground floor suggests.”

Before the latest study, ancient sources cited by Arab historians mentioned structures with up to 20 floors, and South Arabian rock carvings and wall paintings depict such multi-story structures. But no engineering analyses substantiated these accounts.

Tanasi said that the new findings are “very significant” as they provide “a quantitative assessment of a construction system that archaeologists had already recognized as sophisticated.”

According to the recent study, this wall system could have safely supported at least 19 floors. “This would have meant that the Palace of Yeha could well have reached skyscraper proportions,” BTU said in a statement.

However, Konadu pointed out that “a wall carrying 19 floors is not the same as a structure that stood 19 floors high,” noting that the 19 floors refer to the number of levels, not a building's physical height.

Tanasi said that the 19 floors refer to the structural load factor used in the engineering model, “essentially indicating how much additional load the wall could theoretically withstand before failure, not to a building height of 19 stories.”

While Tanasi and Konadu advised caution about calling the Grat Be’al Gibri palace a “skyscraper” in the modern sense, both agreed that the new research challenges existing assumptions about how advanced large-scale construction was in the ancient world.

The latest research challenges “the older narrative of treating Arabia as the source of such systems in the northern Horn of Africa,” Konadu said, noting that archaeologists have “already pointed out the long-standing, local traditions of monumental building and local engineering, as evident in the multistory palaces, townhouses, and steles in the region.”

Konadu said the new findings affirm that “African builders expertly calculated height, material, and load some three thousand years ago.”

The latest study broadens our perspective, Tanasi said, as discussions of advanced ancient engineering have often focused on Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome.

“But Yeha shows that equally sophisticated traditions existed in the Ethio-Sabaean world, where African and South Arabian building traditions interacted,” Tanasi said.

“For us as structural engineers, it is particularly exciting that our methods from modern civil engineering–such as the application of the FEM and the modelling of fuzzy material parameters–can be applied directly to a 2,800-year-old structure,” Martin Drieschner, chair of structural analysis and dynamics at BTU and lead researcher in the study, said in a statement.

“This underlines just how powerful numerical simulation is, even beyond traditional civil engineering applications.”

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Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Sirena Bergman and Sam Wilson.