Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the pyramids at Giza — a massive monument complex built some 4,500 years ago, and one of the seven wonders of the ancient world— is the way they rise from the surrounding landscape of barren desert. The logistics of building such an edifice would be staggering under any circumstances, but moving the five million blocks of limestone overland using ancient technologies truly beggars belief. A recent research paper proposes a different vision of how the pyramids came to be built — one that hypothesizes a branch of the Nile that flowed adjacent to the site, making the transfer of materials a less daunting proposition.
This is not the first theory to posit a disappeared branch of the Nile, but the paper, published in late August in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports this idea by analyzing core samples containing pollen. Five samples were taken from the Giza floodplain in 2019 to measure pollen levels over ancient times, thereby creating an “8,000-year fluvial history” of the region.
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