Two teams of archaeologists have made new discoveries at the Egyptian site, according to two studies published in May. An old branch of the river, now dried up, flowed alongside the monumental constructions, while analyzes revealed two cavities.
The pyramids of Giza have not finished revealing their secrets. Although specialists in ancient Egypt knew that a waterway had been used to build these monumental constructions, doubts remained as to its morphology and exact location. Since the publication, on May 16, of a study in the journal Earth & Environment Communicationswe now know with certainty that an ancient arm of the Nile, now dry, flowed alongside the pyramids, including those of Giza, and would have made it possible to transport the materials necessary for the construction of one of the Seven wonders of the world.
The same desert strip
“No one was sure of the location, shape and size of this mega waterway,” Egyptian geomorphologist Eman Ghoneim of the University of North Carolina in Wilmington (United States), main author of the study, told AFP. The branch of the Nile named Ahramat – meaning “pyramids” in Egyptian Arabic – flowed 64 km, with a width of between 200 and 700 meters, from the area of the Licht pyramids in the south to the famous necropolis of Giza, North. It played the role of a river highway, making it possible to transport workers but also blocks of stone, sometimes weighing up to several tons, and thus explaining why the 31 pyramids were all built along the same strip of desert. An additional discovery corroborates these results since traces of footbridges between the pyramids and the temples located lower in the valley – real river ports – have also been found.
To map the location of the ancient waterway, the team of researchers used satellite imagery, but also geophysical surveys and sampling of sediments present on the site. “Unlike aerial photos or optical satellite sensors that provide images of the ground surface, radar sensors have this unique ability to strip away the sand layer to reveal ancient structures or buried rivers,” explained Eman Ghoneim.
Two underground structures
Furthermore, another team of archaeologists, present over a similar period and on the same site, found themselves faced with a new enigma. After geophysical explorations via ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography, scientists discovered two underground structures. Located under the funerary complex of Giza, which houses among others the remains of Prince Hemiounou, known to be the architect of the great pyramid, these cavities are of two distinct sizes. One, shallow – between 0.5 and 2 meters below the surface of the desert – is L-shaped, covering an area of 10 by 15 meters. The other is buried 3.5 to 10 meters below the surface. of the ground, and extends over a square of 10 by 10 meters. According to initial analyses, the two underground passages communicate with each other and could, subsequently, reveal an important archaeological structure.
Perplexed by this discovery, the scientists of the study published in May in the journal Archaeological Prospecting – the result of a collaboration between Egyptian and Japanese researchers – have not found a convincing explanation to explain the difference in density between the soil and the interior of the cavities, which could be a mixture of sand and gravel presenting air gaps. For the moment, archaeologists are not talking about a new tomb but a simple “anomaly”. Future excavations will perhaps reveal more.
