When the pyramids were on the banks of the Nile

The Nile, Africa’s largest and most turbulent river, is known to have played a central role in the construction of the pyramids, transporting materials and workers. But a key question remains: Why were the largest pyramid complexes not located on the banks of the Nile, but a few kilometers away on the edge of the desert? But at the time the pyramids were built, there was no desert yet.

After a long period called the African Humid Period, the Nile had a much higher flow, and many branches and arms meandered across the floodplain. By discovering and tracing the path of one of these arms, now buried under the sand, Egyptian and American researchers have just shown in a study published in the journal Earth and Environment Communications, 4,000 years ago, the pyramids of Egypt were located on the riverbank on the bank of the Nile River, which has now disappeared.

It is called the Pyramid Arm, or the Pyramid Arm in Arabic, and for good reason. Along these 64 kilometers lie the largest pyramids in Egypt. From the most famous, Giza in the north, to Lekhet in the south, there are no less than 31 pyramids that have their feet in the water!

a waterway of great importance

You have to imagine a completely different scene that this international team has recreated. Thanks to satellite radar, geography and highly sophisticated drilling techniques, they have been able to begin to create an ancient hydrological map of the area, which shows in particular that this arm of the pyramids, the arm of the pyramids, was a very important waterway that traded to the west of the Nile, sometimes more than 10 kilometers from the present Nile, and that its gradual drying up is linked to declining rainfall, which also explains why the pyramids were built over time and in Egyptian times at lower levels in order to survive as close as possible to the water.

Other French researchers had previously, in a study published in 2022 in the journal procedures A team from the American Academy of Sciences has succeeded in reconstructing part of the disappeared river at the foot of the Giza pyramids. All this research on the remote areas of the Nile, and this new geographical and environmental approach, makes it possible to clarify some of the secrets of the pyramids, especially the giant pyramid complexes on the Giza plateau, at the foot of which are the causeways leading to the temples below. The temples that were located at that time on the edge of this disappeared arm of the Nile and which thus served as ports for the transport of men and materials.

How far can we trace the flow of time and the fluctuations of the Nile River along its banks on which the pyramids of Egypt were built?