Archaeology
Soil samples show an ancient river snaked through the desert near Egyptian pyramid cluster
IF YOU thought ancient Egyptian pyramids were built in the desert, you have been living in denial. Many were built along anow extinct branch of the river Nile, geological surveys have revealed, which may explain why some pyramids, including the Great Pyramid of Giza, are clustered in a thin strip of inhospitable land.
“Since ancient times, the Nile has provided sustenance to Egyptian settlements, and it functions as the main water corridor that allowed for the transportation of goods and building materials in the past,” says Tim Ralph at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “For this reason, most of the key cities and monuments were built in close proximity to the banks of the Nile and its peripheral branches.”
More than 100 pyramids were constructed between 4700 and 3500 years ago as grand tombs for Egypt’s pharaohs. Thirty-one of these, including the pyramids of Dahshur, Giza and Saqqara, are dotted along the edge of Egypt’s Western desert, several kilometres away from the Nile.
To transport the enormous number of people and resources needed to build these pyramids, researchers suspected that the Nile may have once had an offshoot that flowed by the construction sites.
To investigate, Ralph and his colleagues looked at radar satellite imagery and land elevation data of the region. Depressions in the landscape indicated that the old water channel may have stretched 64 kilometres past the pyramid fields between the northern city of Giza and the village of Lisht in the south. It was also close to the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis and the Abusir, Saqqara and Dahshur pyramid complexes.
