STORY – A Franco-Egyptian study has reconstructed the flow of the river at the foot of the pharaonic site.
More than 4,500 years ago, the Nile flowed very far from its current course and passed at the foot of the plateau of the Giza pyramids, explains a Franco-Egyptian study published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Archaeologists have believed for twenty years that this arm, now dry, of the great Egyptian river was essential for the construction of the pyramids, allowing the millions of tons of stones that constitute them to be transported by boat. Most of the stones, limestone, come from the Tourah quarry on the opposite bank of the Nile, about fifteen kilometers away. But some granite blocks were taken from Aswan, 700 km further south.
“The first to have described the passage of the Nile near Giza is the American archaeologist Mark Lehner. He had described an intricately contoured basin at the foot of the Giza Plateau, thanks to soundings taken during the construction of the Giza sewers and topographical surveys that showed…
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