Back in 2017, I reported on the discovery of the log book of Inspector Merer in the Wadi al-Jarf in Egypt. Merer was the captain of one of the boats that shipped stone to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu / Cheops at Giza.
In antiquity the Nile had seven branches which emptied into the sea in the Nile Delta. We can see from tomb paintings that in those days there were tropical animals such as crocodiles and hippopotamus in Egypt. But only two branches of the Nile delta remain today, and the crocodile has long since receded to the Sudan. The climate in the Near East grew dryer in late antiquity, causing the Sahara to invade the cornlands of north Africa, and affecting Syria also.
Today the Nile is four miles from the plateau on which the pyramids stand. But in antiquity the level of the Nile was higher, and there were many branches running to what are today isolated ancient Egyptian monuments.
In 2022, a study by H. Sheisha &c in PNAS (online here) revealed the existence of a lost watercourse close to the Giza plateau, which they call the Khufu branch of the Nile.1 Abstract:
The pyramids of Giza originally overlooked a now defunct arm of the Nile. This fluvial channel, the Khufu branch, enabled navigation to the Pyramid Harbor complex but its precise environmental history is unclear. To fill this knowledge gap, we use pollen-derived vegetation patterns to reconstruct 8,000 y of fluvial variations on the Giza floodplain. After a high-stand level concomitant with the African Humid Period, our results show that Giza’s waterscapes responded to a gradual insolation-driven aridification of East Africa, with the lowest Nile levels recorded at the end of the Dynastic Period. The Khufu branch remained at a high-water level (∼40% of its Holocene maximum) during the reigns of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, facilitating the transportation of construction materials to the Giza Pyramid Complex.
The article explains:
Core drillings and subterranean engineering works for Giza’s modern urban projects have yielded stratigraphic evidence consistent with a paleo-branch of the Nile. In particular, Old Kingdom structures unearthed during these interventions offer insights into the local cultural waterscape at the time of the pyramid builders. Furthermore, the Wadi el-Jarf Papyri, discovered at a Khufu-age port on the Red Sea coast (9, 12, 13), attest to the existence of such a harbor complex, called Ro-She Khufu (“Entrance to the Lake…” or “…Basin of Khufu”). The Journal of Merer, a large corpus of these papyri, describes the transport of limestone from Toura, ∼17 km from the Giza Plateau, to the construction site of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. A striking parallel exists between the names of the basins and waterways in the papyri and the spatial organization of Giza’s Fourth Dynasty waterscape, as reconstructed by archaeologists (5).
The fluvial-port-complex hypothesis postulates that pyramid builders cut through the western levee of the Khufu branch of the Nile and dredged basins down to river depth in order to harness the annual 7-m rise of the flood like a hydraulic lift, bringing the higher water levels to the base of the Giza plateau (5, 6).
Building upon this, a further article in 2024 by E. Ghoneim suggests that the lost branch of the Nile – which they call the Ahramat or “Pyramid” branch – was much more extensive than just the Giza area. They propose that it ran close to thirty-one pyramids. The Ghoneim article is published and open-access in Nature here.2
Abstract:
The largest pyramid field in Egypt is clustered along a narrow desert strip, yet no convincing explanation as to why these pyramids are concentrated in this specific locality has been given so far. Here we use radar satellite imagery, in conjunction with geophysical data and deep soil coring, to investigate the subsurface structure and sedimentology in the Nile Valley next to these pyramids. We identify segments of a major extinct Nile branch, which we name The Ahramat Branch, running at the foothills of the Western Desert Plateau, where the majority of the pyramids lie. Many of the pyramids, dating to the Old and Middle Kingdoms, have causeways that lead to the branch and terminate with Valley Temples which may have acted as river harbors along it in the past. We suggest that The Ahramat Branch played a role in the monuments’ construction and that it was simultaneously active and used as a transportation waterway for workmen and building materials to the pyramids’ sites.
They add:
The branch appears to have a surface channel depth between 2 and 8 m, a channel length of about 64 km and a channel width of 200–700 m, which is similar to the width of the contemporary neighboring Nile course. The size and longitudinal continuity of the Ahramat Branch and its proximity to all the pyramids in the study area implies a functional waterway of great significance.
Great significance indeed.
- H. Sheisha, D. Kaniewski, N. Marriner, M. Djamali, G. Younes, Z. Chen, G. El-Qady, A. Saleem, A. Véron, & C. Morhange, “Nile waterscapes facilitated the construction of the Giza pyramids during the 3rd millennium BCE,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 119 (37) e2202530119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2202530119, (2022).[↩]
- Ghoneim, E., Ralph, T.J., Onstine, S. et al. The Egyptian pyramid chain was built along the now abandoned Ahramat Nile Branch. Communications Earth & Environment 5, 233 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01379-7[↩]