My Sediments Exactly

The Lost Nile Pathway Behind Egypt's Pyramid Clusters: An Interview with Joe Aslin, Deputy Editor, Communications Earth & Environment

• Medha Chaturvedi • Episode 2

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In this episode, we are speaking to Dr. Joe Aslin, Deputy Editor Communications Earth & Environment, an open access journal from the Nature Portfolio publishing high-quality research, reviews and commentary in all areas of the earth, environmental and planetary sciences. We are talking about a fascinating paper published in this journal discussing the discovery of an extinct branch of Nile which would explain the reasons for the location of the Pyramids as they stand. The paper is cited as: 

Ghoneim, E., Ralph, T.J., Onstine, S. et al. The Egyptian pyramid chain was built along the now abandoned Ahramat Nile Branch. Commun Earth Environ 5, 233 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01379-7

 Summary
A groundbreaking study uncovers the significance of an extinct Nile branch in the construction of ancient Egyptian pyramids. The discovery sheds light on transportation routes, environmental changes, and cultural heritage conservation. The research aligns with Sustainable Development Goal No. 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities, and demonstrates the use of modern technologies in preserving cultural heritage sites.

Keywords
ancient Egypt, pyramid construction, extinct Nile branch, transportation logistics, environmental changes, cultural heritage conservation, sustainable cities, modern technologies, ancient civilizations

Takeaways

  • The discovery of an extinct Nile branch provides insights into the transportation routes and environmental changes that shaped the construction of ancient Egyptian pyramids.
  • The research contributes to the conservation of cultural heritage sites and aligns with Sustainable Development Goal No. 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities.
  • Modern technologies, such as satellite radar imagery and ground-penetrating radar, have played a crucial role in uncovering the secrets of ancient landscapes and historical sites.

Check out the latest insights on Communications Earth and Environment here. 

My Sediments Exactly. Follow us at @SpringerGeo and Springer Environmental Sciences at @SpringerEnviro on X , formerly known as Twitter. We would love to hear from you. If you have questions, comments or would like to be featured on this podcast, please send your feedback to medha.chaturvedi@springernature.com

Medha Chaturvedi (00:00.046)
What did the Pharaoh say to the pyramid salesman?

Shut up and take my mummy.

Medha Chaturvedi (00:26.158)
Welcome to My Sediments Exactly, where we take nothing for granite. I'm your host Medha Chaturvedi and today we will be taking a trip down the old and middle Egyptian kingdom in search of some answers. The largest pyramid field in modern-day Egypt is clustered along a narrow desert strip near Lysht and Giza. But no one has Pharaoh-ciously explained why.

Using radar satellite imagery and some serious digging, a team of researchers led by Dr. Eman Ghonheim from the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of North Carolina, Wilmington has unearthed the secret. An extinct Nile branch. This extinct Nile branch is called the Ahramat branch and it runs at the foothills of the Western Desert Plateau, right where most pyramids are located at the moment. These ancient pyramids, mainly from the old and middle kingdoms, have causeways leading to this branch, ending at valley temples that might have served as ancient pyramid ports. The Ahramat branch likely played a key role in pyramid construction, serving as a Nile highway for ferrying workmen and materials.

This literally groundbreaking work maps the paleo -hydrological landscape revealing how environmental changes shaped human settlement and monumental architecture. This discovery not only sheds light on the transportation routes used for pyramid construction but also enhances our conservation efforts for Egypt's cultural heritage. This research was published in Communications Earth and Environment,

an open access journal from the Nature portfolio, publishing high quality research, reviews and commentary in all areas of the earth, environmental and planetary sciences. Today we have with us Dr. Joe Aslin, Deputy Editor of this journal, who directly handled this manuscript and found it fascinating for the discoveries that are bound to change the course of future research on this topic.

Medha Chaturvedi (02:51.502)
Joe himself has a PhD in structural geology from the University of Liverpool and has been instrumental in driving the most exciting research in these subjects throughout the Nature Portfolio journals.

with an impact factor of 7.9, Communications Earth and Environment publishes research that represents significant advances that bring new insights to a specialized area in earth science, planetary science, or environmental science. Welcome, Joe, and thank you for speaking to us today about this fascinating subject. 

Joe Aslin (03:31.00)
Hi, thank you for having me. 

Medha Chaturvedi
All right, so let's just get into this. This is an extremely exciting paper that you forwarded to us and we have been looking into. What is the significance of this previously thought of as extinct Ahramat branch, which is also known as the pyramids branch in the context of ancient Egyptian civilization? And what role did this play in the construction and transportation logistics of Egypt's pyramid complexes? 

Joe Aslin
Yeah, so the pyramids are, as everyone knows, a great symbol of ancient Egypt. They're the main thing you think about when you think of ancient Egypt, but we still don't really know how they were built. They're these huge, huge constructs built by people in the Bronze Age over 4 ,000 years ago. So it's one thing about how they built massive pyramids out of rocks and stones, but it's another thing entirely as to think about how they transported those enormous stones to the places where they were built and the workforces that they needed to construct them. So the scientists who constructed, who developed this study, they think they've answered that question by essentially finding a long lost branch of the Nile River, which they think ran alongside where most of these pyramids have been built. This is quite significant because we know that the cultural center of ancient Egypt was the Nile. That's where the economy and culture and all of the main center of ancient Egyptian civilization existed. So why then wouldn't you build your pyramids alongside the Nile? Well, the problem is you would. You'd try and build them where you have a perfect transportation network like a river. But the pyramids we find, the vast majority of them, are actually on the very edge of the Nile floodplain along the part of the Western Desert, on the edge, on the Western edge. This is several kilometers away from where the modern-day Nile River exists. So why did they choose, the ancient Egyptians, why did they choose to build these pyramids so far away from their main transportation network and the center of their culture. So it's been kind of thought for a while by various Egyptologists that there must have been some sort of water course there and part of that reason is because most of these pyramids have what's called a valley temple. So they're attached to a little smaller construct, a smaller little building that's connected to the pyramids by a causeway or a raised walkway.

And that is interesting because these small valley temples seem to have been used as docks, as boat docks or ports. And therefore you have to have a river course there basically or some sort of water body. But what we didn't know is where that course was. And this study basically has found the river channel, found the sediments that shows where this channel was, and they found that it runs right up alongside all these pyramids and most of these valley temples as well.

It looks like the channel was really significant too. It's not just a small canal or something that was built by the Egyptians. It's actually up to several hundred meters wide in places, up to eight meters deep. So this is a really significant other Nile, second Nile effectively. And the researchers think it probably ran actively at the same time as the other Nile, the main Nile that we think of today. So we've got a whole different hydrological landscape, if you will, in the ancient Egyptian times to what we have in the modern times, basically.

Medha Chaturvedi (07:02.158)
All right, thank you very much. That does sound really exciting because at the moment, the pyramids lie in a mainly arid area. And as you said, that it is quite far from the nearest water body. The discovery of this extinct river branch does help to explain the high pyramid density between Giza and Lisht, I would assume. So in the paper, it states that it was active and operational during the construction phase of pyramids, this water reservoir. What does that mean in terms of the logistics of the labor and carrying the heavy blocks that were required to construct these pyramids? 

Joe Aslin
Yeah, so that means that you could transport the heavy blocks and the labor down the river itself. So back in, you know, 4 ,000 years ago, whenever it was a bit older than that sometimes in some cases, it's very difficult to transport these blocks along land and it's much easier to transport them on a boat or a barge, up a river or a water course. So if you build your pyramid out in the edge of the desert where it looks like they're built now, the question is how do you get the blocks there? But if you have actually built your pyramid right up next to a river, we just can't see the river anymore, then that explains how ancient Egyptians would have transported these blocks and the people that they needed to help build the pyramids all the way up to the pyramids basically. And that's where these valley temples kind of reach down right to what we believe now is the bank of this extra Nile branch, the Ahramat branch. 

Medha Chaturvedi
Thank you very much. Now, my question now is that the lead author of the study, she has mentioned elsewhere that this was a study which was groundbreaking in the course that in the past there have been evidence of such a water body existing but none of that evidence has been conclusive but this is the first time that they have found conclusive evidence of this water body and also its course. What kind of technology and methods did the author group use to uncover the path and existence of this waterway?

Joe Aslin (09:15.374)
Yeah, so there's been some small scale studies. So as I said before, people have thought there must have been some sort of water course there. How else would they have built these pyramids? And previous studies have found in small places evidence of river channels in very small locations, but they've usually been quite localized, quite specific. But what the authors did here in this study, what they've now done is they've used satellite data, so satellite radar data predominantly, to look across quite a long stretch of the Nile along this entire strip of land where the pyramids are situated. So how that's powerful is you can look at, obviously from satellite you can look at a large area and you can see, therefore you can track out and map the entire course of this branch. So what radar allows you to do is see very high resolution information about the topography or the surface elevation of the land surface. It also lets you dig, well not dig, but peer a little bit under the subsurface, just a few 10s of centimetres in places where it's covered by sand to see what sort of sediments you have underneath. And that's important for doing this because essentially if you use a radar beam, it shows up very differently if you have a rough surface relative to a smooth surface. There's a lot more backscattering off a rough surface and a bit of a much more clearer reflection off a smooth surface. So you can tell the difference between smooth river deposits, what you'd find in an old river channel versus the rougher deposits and the rougher land surface around it. So with this, they basically could shine the radar light on the whole stretch of the Nile that they're interested in and map out where the course was. So that's using satellite data, but they also used a bit of more focused analysis. So once you've got the whole course, you can kind of work out roughly where you think it was. They did then go down into detail and use geophysics in specific areas. So they did more radar, but this time small scale ground penetrating radar, which goes much deeper and allows you to map out the structure under the surface. And they also used electromagnetic tomography, which again, basically allows you to see resistivity and various other things that shows the structure of the river channel. So this way they could crisscross along the river channel where they thought it was from the satellite data and verify, yep, it looks like the structures of a river channel are here. And then, of course, with all these nice technologies, you've also really got to get dirty and actually find the mud and the sediment itself and look at it. That's how you really manage to verify something. So they did soil coring and they drilled cores down into various parts of the riverbed of what they thought was riverbed and pulled out several meters worth of sediments in a long core, which they could then of course look through and identify, yeah, we thought this was going to be river sediments and it is here. And then further down here, where we thought the edge of the river bank would be, we cross into different sediments that tell us that we're now into the river bank. So it's really the reason they can be a lot more sure about this finding than previous ideas is basically because they've got this range of different techniques all the way from space satellite level reconnaissance mapping down to direct coring from the surface. And that also means that they've verified it in a few little places, but you get this much, much larger map from the satellite -based data that they can use to draw out essentially where the course was. 

Medha Chaturvedi
That really is something which is so exciting and interesting because this could open doors to further discovery of rituals practiced in ancient Egypt. As I understand that in many of these pyramids there is a causeway with a ceremonial raised walkway that runs perpendicular to the course of the Ahramat branch and it terminates directly onto its riverbank. So this could be the key to unlocking some of these ancient rituals that were practiced during the Middle Kingdom, I suppose. 

Joe Aslin
Yeah, it's really interesting these causeways because several of them have been shown just going into the desert or what seemed like going into the desert. But this satellite mapping that the authors have done, they've been able to show that actually what we think it looks like desert now was probably little coves in the river, which could have enabled people or visitors or important people to come and visit these places via the causeways and via the valley temples. Now the ancient waterway which has now been uncovered, could you make a little comparison with the contemporary Nile in terms of its size, the width, the depth of this ancient waterway? Is it comparable at all to the contemporary Nile or is it much smaller or much bigger?

Joe Aslin (14:01.358)
Yeah, I think one of the big findings was that it seemed to have been comparable at the time, probably a little bit smaller. It's still a branch, but the figures that they found is several, so 200 to 700 meters wide. The length of it, of the branch that they see is, I think about 60, 60 -odd kilometers and up to eight meters deep in places. So it's not just a little tiny branch or ephemeral channel, so something that dries up in the dry season and flows in the wet season. It's actually seems to be a full -sized river channel that could have been used by large vessels and could have formed a center for Egyptian culture, much like the main Nile branch as well. So it might not be bigger, but it's kind of comparable in size, it seems, from the data that they've gathered. 

Medha Chaturvedi
I see. And this discovery, does this also demonstrate the difference in terms of the geography of the region because at the moment it is desert conditions and extremely dry weather there. But could this discovery lead us to a clearer picture of what the Nile floodplain probably looked like at the time when the pyramids were built and how different it was to the current landscape? 

Joe Aslin
Yeah, this is one of the parts of the study I find really fascinating. And that is how this shows that environmental change has occurred in this part of the world as long as human civilization has been there really. So you have at the time of these two branches, one of the reasons that there might have been scope for two separate branches of the Nile is that there would have been much higher river flow at that time. So potentially wetter conditions or at least higher water flow. And one of the things that the authors discuss when they speculate and think about the reasons why it might have dried up, why it's no longer there, is that you had a change in environmental conditions that meant that there was much less flow as we moved from the time of the building of the Egyptian pyramids to the present day. So that could have been as a result or involving desertification. So that's growth of the Sahara, windblown sand from the Sahara covers several of the areas where they were finding river sediments. But it could also involve simply like changing climate and a reduced river flow. And if you have a reduced river flow going into the branch, then it's more likely to silt up, dry up and or migrate as well. So this kind of shows that the environments change on the scale of, well, on a human time scale and on the scale of civilizations as well. 

Medha Chaturvedi
Fascinating, really. And what does this discovery mean for modern Egypt, particularly in terms of cultural heritage, conservation, urban planning and tourism? And how does this align with the contributions to achieving SDG 11, which is related to sustainable cities and communities.

Joe Aslin
So everything we've spoken about now has been about interest and understanding ancient civilizations and really just fascinating stuff. But this is where it comes down to the importance of this study. Why is it important now? And that's, like you said, that that's basically related to conservation of future potential cultural heritage sites in Egypt. So the Egyptian economy relies massively on tourism and a lot of that tourism is a result of this kind of nice, very fascinating sites and Egyptian cultural artifacts and historical sites. We know there's loads that you can think of in Egypt at the moment, but there's undoubtedly countless more still hidden, buried that we don't know about throughout Egypt. And obviously archaeologists are spending careers trying to find these places and identify them. And then if you find them, you can protect them. And as we mentioned, most of Egyptian culture and society was really focused along the Nile. We know that from texts, but also from where we found places. So if you're looking for an important site of ancient Egypt, you're going to look along the Nile bank. But if you don't know where the Nile bank actually was at the time, then you might be looking in the wrong place. So identifying this stretch of the Nile, which is explained, or enables the explanation of the pyramids and where they are, it also allows you to think, well, what about these other stretches of this branch we didn't know existed? Could there be cultural sites? Could there be buildings, settlements along those other places? Maybe places that you're looking for and you don't know the site but you've heard about them or you've got evidence that they existed. Perhaps you're looking in the wrong place if you're looking at the modern -day Nile. So this new map and plotting of the course of the Ahramat branch enables archaeologists to refocus their investigations on a whole different area and whole different stretches of the Nile floodplain. If they can find some settlements, then they'll be able to ensure that they don't get damaged, they don't get destroyed, and they're retained from future civilizations. That's important for SDG 11 because sustainable cities need to grow and develop in a sustainable way. And if you grow and develop a city on top of a cultural heritage site, that's not particularly sustainable for cultural heritage for future generations. So the real present day value of this study is really about ensuring that archaeologists and Egyptologists can have a new database, a new map for thinking about where they're going to plot their new investigations and studies. 

Medha Chaturvedi
And to talk about these discoveries, do you think that these can be extrapolated to some other historical places? And to see what kind of landscape existed around these areas at a time where civilization was just building up. What do you think is the future of this research going forward and how can this be applied globally? 

Joe Aslin
Yeah, the techniques can certainly be applied to other places. There's not just places that are desert now, but just anywhere with a river course. They change on scales that we think of as really long -term in a human life scale lifetime. But when you're looking at ancient civilizations thousands of years ago, the geography, the landscape could have looked very different. And if you don't know what it looked like then, then it's harder to imagine or figure out where to focus your research. But I think one of the ways it could go forward, there's certainly scope to continue. So the authors, as I said, of this study, did a large scale satellite investigation, but then focused their detailed investigations in a couple of key areas. So a bit more focused investigation in a few more areas within Egypt, I think, is the immediate next step to this research. So figuring out there's a few areas along the course where it's uncertain at the moment, other areas where it's more certain, but really mapping out that course and getting on the ground with a bit more detailed research to find where the course was and then look for potential cultural sites around it would be a key way forward. On a more kind of broader scale, I think the interest of this piece is of this research is basically showing that, well, I think it's a really interesting example of how environmental change has impacted human societies since human societies existed. So we think of environmental change as a modern thing. Certainly at the moment, it seems to be driven by human interactions, but natural environmental change has impacted human societies. They've had to adapt and change because of them for as long as you can find evidence of humans. So many more studies could take a similar route to that and think, let's not just imagine that the landscape was the same back then as it is now. Let's actually investigate that and see if that can tell us more, not just about the climate, the environment and the landscape, but also about the people who lived there. 

Medha Chaturvedi
Fascinating. And one last question before we end today. For people like me who are always interested in finding that link between ancient civilizations and current times, do you think that any traces of this waterway still exist that can lead us to the point where we say, OK, it's small now, but it used to be quite a large waterway, but we can see where it started or where it ended? 

Joe Aslin
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. There are a few spots along the way where modern canals or more modern canals have been dug, and also a few kind of isolated little lakes or temporary lakes that dry up in the dry season and flood in the wet season. So there is a little bit of evidence of a final little piece of the Ahramat branch still existing, but I think generally it's all dried up now. So that's why it's taken so long to find it. It's not a clear course, but who knows? I mean, there is evidence in the paper that there's still underground flowing water along the course. That's something the authors suggest might be happening. So perhaps the movers just moved underground for now. But yeah, it would be interesting to see if these lakes or see if various parts of the Nile Plain could be connected to that. 

Medha Chaturvedi (23:32.998)
Thank you so much for joining us, Joe, and talking to us about this really fascinating piece of research. And I hope that we can see some follow up on this in the coming months and years to see that where does this research lead and how these modern technologies can be used in uncovering the secrets of the past in other cultural sites as well. Thank you again, Joe. 

Joe Aslin
Thank you very much. Nice speaking. 

Medha Chaturvedi
Well, there you have it. Pyramids did, after all, have a branch office all along, and there is no denial. With this extraordinary discovery, we are one step closer to the answer to the question, why construct the pyramids here? The Pharaohs were not running a pyramid scheme, but they certainly were able to use the then prevalent geographical conditions of the region for organizing the logistics of the construction of these massive monuments. This research contributes to the Sustainable Development Goal No. 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities. The use of modern technologies has aided our understanding and preservation of cultural heritage sites throughout the world. And the pyramids are of course no exception. Through this improved understanding of ancient landscapes, scientists and researchers continue making strides in connecting the present to the experience of the ancient systems. Understanding history is and will always be the crucial link in preparing for the future.

This conversation doesn't have to end here. For more insightful research and trends in Geo and Earth Sciences, follow my sediments exactly wherever you get your podcasts. Just like the pyramids, we build our comprehension about the latest Geo- and Earth Sciences from a broad base at the bottom to a fine focus on the top. This is your host Medha Chaturvedi signing off for now. Until next time, rock on!