Illegal gold diggers have destroyed a 2,000-year-old archaeological site in Sudan in the eastern region of the Sahara desert, the BBC cited officials as saying on Monday, August 24.

The Jabal Maragha site, which dates from the Meroitic period between 350 BC and 350 AD, is said to have either been a small settlement or a checkpoint.

Officials from Sudan's antiquities and museums department said when they visited the site, some 270km north of the capital Khartoum, last month they found two mechanical diggers and five men at work.

They had excavated a vast trench about 17 metres deep, and 20 metres long.

"They had only one goal in digging here - to find gold... they did something crazy; to save time, they used heavy machinery," a shocked archaeologist Habab Idriss Ahmed, who has worked at the historic location since 1999, told the AFP news agency.

Sudan is home to hundreds of pyramids and other ancient sites, although they are not as well known as those in its northern neighbour, Egypt.

Sudan's archaeologists warned that the destruction was not unique but part of a growing problem.