PARIS: Researchers have uncovered a long-buried Nile river branch that formerly ran alongside over thirty pyramids in Egypt. This finding may provide an explanation for how the ancient Egyptians moved the enormous stone blocks needed to construct the well-known structures.
According to a research that unveiled the discovery on Thursday, the 64-kilometer-long river branch, which passed by the famous Giza pyramid complex among other wonders, was long concealed beneath agriculture and desert for millennia.
The construction of the 31 pyramids in a sequence along a barren desert stretch in the Nile Valley between 4,700 and 3,700 years ago would make sense if the river had existed.
The Great Pyramid of Giza, the only remaining example of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the pyramids of Khafre, Cheops, and Mykerinos are located in the vicinity of Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt. For a considerable amount of time, archaeologists believed that the enormous building materials for the pyramids had to be moved by the ancient Egyptians via a nearby waterway.
The primary study author, Eman Ghoneim of the University of North Carolina Wilmington in the United States, stated, “But nobody was certain of the location, the shape, the size, or proximity of this mega waterway to the actual pyramids site.”
The river branch, which the multinational team of academics named Ahramat (Arabic for “pyramids”), was mapped using radar satellite photography. “Unique ability to penetrate the sand surface and produce images of hidden features including buried rivers and ancient structures” was what radar offered them, according to Ghoneim.
The study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment states that the existence of the river was verified by field surveys and sediment cores from the location.
