Looking at the famous pyramids of Giza as they stand today, immovable and impregnable citadels surrounded by windswept sand and a sprawling city, it’s hard to imagine the day they were built. Built to honor the dead and guide them to the afterlife,
these stone labyrinths were erected some 4,500 years ago without modern technology and with amazing precision. But the Egyptians needed more than a few ancient ramps to push the huge stone blocks into place.
A new study suggests that favorable environmental conditions allowed the construction of the Pyramids of Giza, an ancient branch of the Nile River that serves as a waterway for the transport of goods. “However, ecological evidence on when, where and how these ancient landscapes developed is lacking.”
Archaeologists have long thought that the Egyptian pyramid builders may have created canals and ports by draining the Nile River’s waterways,
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using the annual floods to act as hydraulic lifts to transport building materials. The port complex, which archaeologists speculate served the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkore, is located more than 7 kilometers (or 4.3 miles) west of today’s Nile. These slats also had to be deep enough to float stone-laden barges.
Core drilling carried out during civil engineering works at present-day Giza has yielded stratigraphic evidence of rock layers corresponding to an ancient branch of the Nile extending towards the base of the pyramids. But questions remain about how the Egyptians built access to water at the Giza pyramids.
At the time they were built, northern Egypt was experiencing extreme weather changes, with flash floods repeatedly destroying the lost city of the pyramids, Hitt al-Ghraab, where weather workers lived.
In this study, the researchers turned to fossilized pollen grains to paint a more detailed picture of the river system as it might have flowed thousands of years ago. Pollen grains can be preserved in ancient sediments, and in other studies have been used to reconstruct past climates and vegetation landscapes that look very different today.
Extracting pollen grains from five cores drilled into the present-day Giza floodplain to the east of the pyramid complex, the team identified a large number of grass-like flowering plants that co-existed with the banks of the Nile and marsh plants that bordered the Nile. the lake. environments.
They say this indicates the presence of a permanent reservoir that overflowed thousands of years ago through the Giza floodplain. From there, they traced the rise and fall of water levels in the Khufu branch of the Nile spanning 8,000 years of Egyptian dynastic history, correlating their findings with other historical records.
“Our 8,000-year-old reconstruction of the surface of the Khafu Branch improves our understanding of the fluvial landscape at the time of the construction of the Giza pyramid complex,” write Shisha and his colleagues. “Khufu’s branch was kept at a higher water level…
during the reigns of Khufu, Khafre and Menkore, which made it easier to transport building materials to the pyramid complex at Giza.” But after the reign of King Tutankhamun, which lasted from about 1349 to 1338 B.C. C.,
the branch of Khufu of the Nile diminished gradually until it reached its lowest level documented in the last 8,000 years at the end of the Dynastic Period. This drop has been linked to chemical markers in the teeth and bones of Egyptian mummies which, along with other historical records, suggest a dry environment.
However, as with all archaeological studies, the boundaries of chronology (the reigns of the pharaohs and environmental changes) can vary widely, so we must take these findings with a grain of salt. But by combining ecological and historical data,
the study provides much more direct evidence than when archaeologists searched for the missing fractals, the wondrous, self-repeating patterns often found in nature. To conclude that the ancient Egyptians must have created river channels during the construction of the Great Pyramids. , further south of Giza.
