For
4,500 years, the
pyramids of Giza have loomed over the western bank of the Nile
River as a geometric mountain chain. The Great Pyramid, built to commemorate
the reign of Pharaoh Khufu, the second king of Egypt’s fourth dynasty, covers
5.2 hectares and stood more than 145m upon its completion around 2560 BC.
Remarkably, ancient architects somehow transported 2.3 million limestone and
granite blocks, each weighing an average of more than 2 tonnes, across
kilometers of desert from the banks of the Nile to the pyramid site on the Giza
Plateau.
اضافة اعلان
Hauling these
stones over land would have been grueling. Scientists have long believed that
utilizing a river or channel made the process possible, but today the Nile is
kilometers away from the pyramids. But a team of researchers recently reported
evidence that a lost arm of the Nile once cut through this stretch of desert
and would have greatly simplified transporting the giant slabs to the pyramid
complex.
Using clues
preserved in the desert soil, the scientists reconstructed the rise and fall of
the Khufu Branch, a now defunct Nile tributary, over the past 8,000 years.
Their findings, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, propose that the Khufu Branch, which dried up around 600 BC, played a
critical role in the construction of the ancient wonders. “It was impossible to
build the pyramids here without this branch of the Nile,” said Hader Sheisha,
an environmental geographer at the European Center for Research and Teaching in
Environmental Geoscience and an author of the new study.
The project was
stirred by the unearthing of a trove of papyrus fragments at the site of an
ancient harbor near the
Red Sea in 2013. Some of the scrolls date to Khufu’s
reign and recount the efforts of an official named Merer and his men to
transport limestone up the Nile to Giza, where it was fashioned into the Great
Pyramid’s outer layer. “When I read about that,” Sheisha said, “I was so
interested because this confirms that the transport of the pyramid’s building
materials were moved over water.”
Transporting
goods on the Nile was nothing new, said Joseph Manning, a classicist at
Yale University who has studied the effect of volcanic eruptions on the Nile during subsequent
periods of Egyptian history and was not involved in the new research. “We know
that water was up close to the Giza pyramids; that’s how stone was
transported,” he said.
It was impossible to build the pyramids here without this branch of the Nile,
According to
Manning, researchers have theorized that ancient engineers could have carved
channels through the desert or used an offshoot of the Nile to transport the
pyramid’s materials, but evidence of these lost waterways remained scarce. This
obscured the route Merer and others had taken to reach Giza Harbor, the
manufactured pyramid-building hub located more than 6.4km west of the Nile’s
banks.
Seeking evidence
of an ancient water route, the researchers drilled down into the desert near
the Giza harbor site and along the Khufu Branch’s hypothesized route, where
they collected five sediment cores. Digging down more than 9m, they captured a
sedimentary time-lapse of Giza across thousands of years.
Knowing more about the environment can solve part of the enigma of the pyramids’ construction,
At a lab in
France, Sheisha and her colleagues sifted through the cores for pollen grains,
tiny yet durable environmental clues that help researchers identify past plant
life. They discovered 61 species of plants, including ferns, palms, and sedges
that were concentrated in different parts of the core, providing a window into
how the local ecosystem had changed over millennia, said Christophe Morhange, a
geomorphologist at Aix-Marseille
University in France and an author of the new
study. Pollen from plants like cattails and papyrus attested to an aquatic,
marshlike environment, while pollen from drought-resistant plants like grasses
helped to pinpoint “when the Nile was further away from the pyramids” during
dry spells, Morhange said.
The researchers
used the data gleaned from the pollen grains to estimate past river levels and
re-create Giza’s waterlogged past. About 8,000 years ago, during a damp era
known as the African Humid Period, during which much of the Sahara was covered
in lakes and grasslands, the region around Giza was underwater. Over the next
few thousand years, as northern Africa dried out, the Khufu Branch retained
around 40 percent of its water. This made it a perfect asset for
pyramid-building, Sheisha said: The waterway remained deep enough to easily
navigate but not so high as to pose a major flooding risk.
This shortcut to
the pyramids was short-lived. As Egypt became even drier, the water level in
the Khufu branch dropped beyond usability, and pyramid construction ended. When
King Tutankhamen took the throne around 1350 BC, the river had experienced
centuries of gradual decline. By the time Alexander the Great conquered Egypt
in 332 BC, the area around the parched Khufu Branch had been converted to a
cemetery.
Although the
water is long gone, Sheisha believes that identifying how Giza’s natural
environment aided the pyramid builders could help to clear up some of the many
mysteries that still surround the construction of the ancient geometric
monuments. “Knowing more about the environment can solve part of the enigma of
the pyramids’ construction,” she said.
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