The study of the evolution of pollens at the foot of the Gizeh plateau translates that of the water level in the river, confirming that it could, at the time of construction, help with routing of stone blocks.
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Culminating at almost 140 meters, the pyramid of Khéops, Egypt, was for several millennia the highest monument in the world. Its construction and that of its two neighbors required millions of blocks of stone, part of them coming from careers very far from the Giza plateau. How, more than four thousand years ago, did the Egyptian people come across them?
For the past twenty years, a scientific consensus has been formed around a hypothesis: along an arm of the Nile today dried up, an artificial basin would have been dug to allow boats to deliver Their cargo at the foot of the sites. Retranging the region’s hydrographic past over the last eight millennia, a new Franco-Egyptian study adds elements to this already solid theory. Results published Monday August 29 in the Revue Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“A very complicated puzzle”
The team of Christophe Morhange, professor at the European Center for Research and Teaching of Environmental Geosciences (CEREGE) in Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône) and director of the study, has produced cores in different places in the area where this old arm of the Nile is supposed to have found.
“In these samples, we have identified grains of pollens from sixty plants thanks to which it is possible to follow the changes in vegetation that the region has known in the past,” explains Hadeer Sheisha, the first author of the study, which carries out his doctorate on the subject.
Each plant being adapted to environmental conditions – and above all hydrological – specific, this paleopalynologist has retraced the evolution of the water level in the region. The results confirm the existence of an arm of the Nile which would have dried up over the centuries, but whose level, at the time of the construction of the pyramids, would have been adapted to an exploitation by the Egyptians.
This work “brings an original light on the evolution of the Nile, as well as a new piece to a very complicated puzzle”, comments Cécile Blanchet, paleoclimatologist at the Center for Research of the Earth Sciences of Potsdam (Germany).
Local geography has changed 2>
“In 1970, first carottages had been made on the occasion of the installation of a sewer network, traces Pierre Tallet, director of the Egyptological Research Center of the Sorbonne. Their analysis by the American archaeologist Mark Lehner, a pioneer on the subject, already indicated the existence of a series of artificial basins dug by the Egyptians to promote access to the plateau for barges. “The excavation of an old port by Lehner, then discovery , by the French Egyptologist, of Papyrus describing the topography of river facilities then credited this hypothesis.
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