Where was the Lost Kingdom of Yam? | An Ancient Civilization Swallowed by the Desert

One of the most enduring problems in Egyptology is the location of Yam, a kingdom that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom traded with. What specialists know about this civilization come from a handful of lines in a few Old Kingdom texts, and while it is known that a trading mission to the land of Yam took between six and eight months, it’s not at all clear where Yam was located.
For Egyptologists, Yam is literally a “lost civilization”. Theories abound as to where it could have possibly been, but the two main contenders were a location in Upper Nubia, and a location somewhere in the sands of the Western Desert.
Since the 2000s, a series of what seem like chance archaeological discoveries have been totally changing the state of knowledge, and the Lost Kingdom of Yam may have at last been found.
SOURCES:
A hieroglyphic inscription found at Jebel Uweinat mentioning Yam and Tekhebet, Clayton et al 2008
Reconsidering the Location of Yam, Cooper 2012