At last, a 64-kilometer river branch of the Nile river in Egypt that had been long hidden has been discovered by a team of researchers. A research from the University of North Carolina Wilmington claims that it was concealed for millennia beneath farms and desert.
The river branch that once ran beside Egypt’s thirty-one pyramids was included in the study. It further said that enormous stone slabs were transported by the river. In a way, the most recent discovery has also provided an explanation for why pyramids were built in a chain between 4,700 and 3,700 years ago.
Researchers mapped the river branch used to transport the stones for building the pyramids in Egypt with the help of radar satellite images.
The radar provided them the “unique ability to penetrate the sand surface and produce images of hidden features including buried rivers and ancient structures,” according to Eman Ghoneim, a professor of earth and ocean sciences at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, who spoke with the news agency AFP.
The scientists also “discovered many of the pyramids had causeways that ended at the proposed riverbanks of the Ahramat branch, which they suggest is evidence the river was used for transporting construction materials,” according to a statement issued by the university.
“Many of us who are interested in ancient Egypt are aware that the Egyptians must have used a waterway to build their enormous monuments, like the pyramids and valley temples, but nobody was certain of the location, the shape, the size, or proximity of this mega waterway to the actual pyramids site,” Eman Ghoneim said in the study.
Our study connects Egypt’s major pyramid fields to the first large-scale map of one of the main ancient Nile branches.
