![]() ![]() The researchers used the data gleaned from the pollen grains to estimate past river levels and recreate Giza’s waterlogged past. ![]() Pollen from plants like cattails and papyrus attested to an aquatic, marsh-like environment, while pollen from drought-resistant plants like grasses helped to pinpoint “when the Nile was further away from the pyramids” during dry spells, said Dr. 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 millenniums, Christophe Morhange, a geomorphologist at Aix-Marseille University in France and an author of the new study, said. Sheisha and her colleagues sifted through the cores for pollen grains, tiny yet durable environmental clues that help researchers identify past plant life. Digging down more than 30 feet, they captured a sedimentary time-lapse of Giza across thousands of years.Īt a lab in France, Ms. 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. This obscured the route Merer and others had taken to reach Giza Harbor, the manufactured pyramid-building hub located more than four miles west of the Nile’s banks. 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. Sheisha said, “I was so interested because this confirms that the transport of the pyramid’s building materials were moved over water.”Īccording to Dr. Some of the scrolls date back 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. 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. “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. Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, propose that the Khufu Branch, which dried up completely around 600 B.C., played a critical role in the construction of the ancient wonders. ![]() 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. On Monday, however, a team of researchers 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. Scientists have long believed that utilizing a river or channel made the process possible, but today the Nile is miles away from the pyramids. Hauling these stones over land would have been grueling. Remarkably, ancient architects somehow transported 2.3 million limestone and granite blocks, each weighing an average of more than two tons, across miles of desert from the banks of the Nile to the pyramid site on the Giza Plateau. The Great Pyramid, built to commemorate the reign of Pharaoh Khufu, the second king of Egypt’s fourth dynasty, covers 13 acres and stood more than 480 feet upon its completion around 2560 B.C. For 4,500 years, the pyramids of Giza have loomed over the western bank of the Nile River as a geometric mountain chain. ![]()
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