Astonishing secret city built 5,000 years ago by lost civilisation discovered underneath empty desert

Researchers think that they have found traces of an astonishing secret city built 5,000 years ago as archaeological work on a desert site continues.

Thanks to advancements in science and technology, as well as the vast planet we live on, archaeologists are regularly able to make breakthroughs in the world of history, such as the 50-year-old mystery of the owner of an Ancient Egyptian tomb that was solved recently.

It was only last month in North Macedonia that researchers made a 'once in a lifetime discovery' when they unearthed the capital city of an ancient civilisation.

And now, in a desert that was once believed to empty, archaeologists think they have found another ancient city, more than 20 years on from work first beginning on the site.

According to the Daily Mail, it was Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, current Prime Minister of Dubai, who first realised that there might be more to the Rub' al Khali empty quarter desert than first appeared, after he flew over it in 2002 and noticed dune formations and a large black deposit.

The Rub' al Khali empty quarter desert (Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images)

Ever since then, work has been done on the archaeological site Saruq Al-Hadid, and now experts believe that there could be a 5,000-year-old civilisation buried beneath the sands.

Researchers from Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi employed Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology to look below the desert's surface, without disturbing the dunes, as pulses of energy can reveal what is down there when they bounce back to the surface.

And hidden just 10 feet below the sand were clear signs of metal structures, artefacts and layers of animal bones which archaeologists describe as midden deposits, with the radar data also hinting at ancient human activity.

"With the climate, plus the fact that a lot of the country is desert, it was too logistically challenging to survey the desert on the ground," Dr Francis said. "That's why satellite imagery was crucial. We needed equipment that could look under the sand.

The ruler of Dubai was seemingly the first to spot that something might be hidden there (Tim de Waele/Getty Images)

While it's impossible to know right now exactly what might be down there, there have been legends passed through generations which describe the city of Ubar, which was buried beneath the sand in ancient times after being destroyed, either from a natural disaster or at the hands of a god, who punished the city for its hubris.

T. E. Lawrence, the British officer and archaeologist popularly known as 'Lawrence of Arabia', described Ubar as 'the Atlantis of the sands', a city 'of immeasurable wealth, destroyed by God for arrogance, swallowed forever by the sands of the Rub' al-Khali desert'.

There is still a lot more work to be done and while science and myth don't usually go hand in hand, the advancements in technology might just point towards the existence of an ancient city such as Ubar.