- The 40-mile-long river branch lay hidden beneath agriculture and desert for millennia.
- Archaeologists believed that the materials for the pyramids had to be moved by the ancient Egyptians via a nearby waterway.
- The existence of the river was proved by field surveys and sediment cores from the location.
Researchers may be able to answer the question of how the ancient Egyptians moved the enormous stone blocks needed to construct the monuments by locating a 40-mile-long branch of the Nile River that formerly ran alongside over 30 pyramids in Egypt.
The 40-mile-long river branch lay hidden beneath agriculture and desert for millennia, running by the Giza pyramid complex among other wonders. The reason the 31 pyramids were constructed in a row between 4,700 and 3,700 years ago in the Nile valley along a barren desert strip would have to do with the river’s existence.
Nile branch
For a long while, researchers thought that the massive building materials for the pyramids had to be transported by the ancient Egyptians via a nearby stream. Nobody knew for sure, though, where this enormous watercourse was located about the real pyramid site, let alone its exact dimensions.
The river branch, which the multinational team of academics named Ahramat (Arabic for “pyramids”), was mapped using radar satellite photography.
The existence of the river was proved by field surveys and sediment cores from the location. The once-dominant river was becoming more and more sand-covered; this may have begun during a significant drought around 4,200 years ago.
The finding serves as a reminder of the close relationship that exists between human behavior, geography, climate, and environment. It would have been far simpler to float the bulk of the heavy materials down the river rather than transfer them over land because they were from the south.
