Scientists map long-lost arm of the Nile that flowed past 31 pyramids

A now-extinct stretch of the Nile once flowed near Egypt’s Great Pyramid and likely played a key role in the construction of ancient monuments, according to new research.

Egypt’s Great Pyramid and other ancient monuments at Giza exist on an isolated strip of land at the edge of the Sahara Desert. The inhospitable location has long puzzled archaeologists, some of whom had found evidence that the Nile River once flowed near these pyramids in some capacity, facilitating the landmarks’ construction starting 4,700 years ago. Using satellite imaging and analysis of cores of sediment, a new study published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment has mapped a 64-kilometer (40-mile) long, dried-up, branch of the Nile, long buried beneath farmland and desert. “Even though many efforts to reconstruct the early Nile waterways have been conducted, they have largely been confined to soil sample collections from small sites, which has led to the mapping of only fragmented sections of the ancient Nile channel systems,” said lead study author Eman Ghoneim, a professor and director of the Space and Drone Remote Sensing Lab at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s department of Earth and ocean sciences. “This is the first study to provide the first map of the long-lost ancient branch of the Nile River.” Ghoneim and her colleagues refer to this extinct branch of the Nile river as Ahramat, which is Arabic for pyramids.