They discovered that the Egyptian pyramids were built on the course of a lost branch of the Nile River

The greatest concentration of ancient Egyptian pyramids is found grouped along a narrow desert strip, without knowing the reason for this particular location. A team led by Egyptian-American researcher Iman Ghonim is now offering a possible answer after discovering through satellite images the existence of an ancient branch of the Nile River, 64 km long, which ran beneath farmland and desert centuries ago. Buried, but which would have been necessary to build the 31 pyramids located at this location 4,700 years ago.

“We used satellite radar images along with geophysical data and deep soil samples to investigate the subsurface structure and sedimentology in the Nile Valley next to these pyramids,” the authors explain in the work published Thursday this year in the journal Nature. communication earth and environment, “We have identified sections of an important extinct branch of the Nile River, which flows into the foothills of the western desert plateau, where most of the pyramids are located.”

The author, who proposes to call it a lost branch of the river ahramat (meaning ‘pyramid’ in Arabic), says the discovery could explain why these pyramid fields were concentrated on this particular strip of desert near the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis, as they were easily accessible from the river bank. Could have reached. At the time they were created.

The finding that the causeways of many of the pyramids ended at the proposed banks of an arm of the Ahramat River was – in his view – further evidence that the river was used to transport building materials. His argument is that many of the pyramids of the Old and Middle Kingdoms ran up the branch and ended at valley temples, which in the past served as river ports along it.

A “buried” river

This ‘alignment’ of 31 pyramids is located in the plains between Giza and Lisht, built over a period of about 1,000 years starting about 4,700 years ago, on the edge of the inaccessible Western Desert, now part of the Sahara. . Sedimentary evidence shows that the Nile used to have a high flow and at some places the river divided into several branches. Researchers had previously speculated that one of these branches might have passed through the pyramid areas, but this had not been confirmed until now.

We suggest that the Ahramat played a role in the construction of the monuments and was used as a transportation waterway for workers and materials.

“We suggest that the Ahramat branch played a role in the construction of the monuments and was simultaneously active and used as a transportation waterway for workers and construction materials to the pyramid sites,” the researchers wrote. As for the disappearance of this branch of the Nile, scientists suggest that a large accumulation of wind-blown sand, related to a severe drought that began about 4,200 years ago, caused the eastward migration of the branch and its eventual sedimentation. Could be one of.

CSIC archaeologist José Manuel Galán, leader of the Spanish Jehuty project, believes the discovery is very interesting because it confirms what Egyptologists already suspected. “The transportation of the stone blocks was, in fact, done by water,” he tells elDiario.es. “We assumed it, and it was easily predictable, but it’s another thing to see it, as the authors of this study did.” He believes that a separate issue is that the pyramids are aligned due to the existence of this canal, something that he finds more doubtful since the entire pyramid complex is located in an area that was prone to flooding. “One of the beautiful things that is being discovered now is that the landscape was much more watery than we thought, the Karnak temple was on an island, and there are old photographs in which you can see that the water reached the base of the island Pyramid.”

“We knew it to some extent,” agrees Sergio Alarcon, a Harvard University researcher who worked at Saqqara. “We knew that there were channels, but we had not seen that this channel was the same and that it was so long.” He recalls that, in the 2000s, a series of diaries were discovered from a team working on stone transportation, in which they described how they transported them during periods of river flooding, when it was difficult to get there. There was more depth in the channels. Cheops Complex. “We had other types of evidence that told us about all that,” he says, “but now it’s been confirmed through other means.”

With regard to the underlying hypothesis put forward by the authors, that the position of the pyramids varied depending on whether this branch of the river was more or less close to them, they believe that there are many other factors to consider. “It is possible that the pyramids were moved for this reason, but there were also other religious and traditional reasons that could have led to the choice of these locations,” he concluded.