Egypt's pyramids may have been built on a long-lost branch of the Nile

[empath-nirvana]

It makes a lot of sense because obviously having a river there makes the transport of materials a lot easier, but i do wonder how nobody noticed this before.

[marshallward]

> “The pyramids seem like pretty monumental work”

You don't say...

[hackthemack]

I found another article that I found more lightweight and accessible. Has some pictures of the people involved.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/egypt-pyr...

[cydonian_monk]

That article is paywalled and locked to National Geographic subscribers only. I'm not sure we have the same definition of accessible.

[tamimio]

Or maybe that branch was man-made, for one to help builders to transport the materials, and also to build the pyramid itself after controlling the water level there with some man-made dams.

[ethbr1]

Martians are well known for their proficiency building canals. [0]

[0] History Channel

[duxup]

I wonder would the proposed harbor locations have left any structure to indicate that they were in fact harbor temples rather than just temples?

I also wonder how much the river moves within that flood plain. I lived in a flood plain at one point and the river even season to season seemed to "move" a noticeable amount.

[beeandapenguin]

At Wadi al-Jarf[1], one of the oldest harbors in the world (~2600 BCE), they discovered numerous stone anchors, a stone jetty, and storage galleries carved into limestone that contained several boats, sail fragments, oars, and rope. They also found jars that have been discovered at another site across the Red Sea, indicating they may have been used for trade.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi_al-Jarf

[bluGill]

I would expect that harbors were mostly made of wood. Stone is too heavy and would sink into the bottom, and they didn't have access to enough metals to think about bronze (much less iron). Wood of course rots - while the climate in Egypt is the most conductive to wood not rotting, if it was a harbor structure I'd expect (read I'm not sure here!) that the area remained as a swamp for a while thus rotting away anything left behind before to fully dried up.

[chucke1992]

Considering that we can even see in the real time the disappearance of rivers, I wonder how many rivers and branches have been lost in history.

[noman-land]

This may support one of my favorite theories of how the pyramids were built. With water!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0ePuF8

[Daz1]

This has been throughly debunked

[once_inc]

I've recently been looking into the natron theory, which I also like. Instead of chiselling out big granite blocks and moving them long distances, you use a bucket of powder and a lot of wood ash to chemically form rocks.

[cchi_co]

Since childhood, I have been fascinated by Egyptian history. It's mesmerizing

[Ductapemaster]

Myself as well. I recently listened to an episode on Egyptian history from this podcast and really enjoyed it — consider checking it out!

https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/

[brunoarueira]

Me too, I would like to visit the Egypt one day :)

[nashashmi]

And the conspiracy theories that surround them?

[danking00]

There’s also a lighter weight Nature News article about it https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01449-y

[dang]

Thanks! I've changed the URL above to that from https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01379-7 (the paper). Those who are interested can read both, of course.

[wander1]

Try this for an easier read:

https://theconversation.com/we-mapped-a-lost-branch-of-the-n...

[tiffanyh]

It might be related, there's a hypotheses that the Sphinx had massive water erosion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_water_erosion_hypothesi...

[wnevets]

> , attributing their creation to Plato's lost civilization of Atlantis over 11,500 years ago

what is with the obsession that ancient egyptians were incapable of building these monuments?

[primer42]

> Egyptologists, geologists and others have rejected the water erosion hypothesis and the idea of an older Sphinx, pointing to archaeological, climatological and geological evidence to the contrary.

[lodovic]

That was debunked, the same erosion was found in the rock at the quarry site where the stones for the Sphinx were originally taken from.

[tootie]

That theory is espoused by the same people who think it was built by aliens. It's not plausible. Per this study, by the time the Sphinx is built rainfall has already decreased substantially. The rain erosion theory requires the Sphinx be thousands of years older than records indicate and predate the first pharaoh by several millennia.

[baq]

and the pyramids too, for that matter - nobody stole the white limestone covering, it just melted away.

it has some implications on when exactly these things were really built if it would be true. the height of the water which did that would be quite preposterous, too.

[dudeinjapan]

Why would the pyramids not have been built on the water? Why would they pick a random site in the middle of the sand dunes?

[Daz1]

Because (the Giza pyramid at least) was built at the site of a massive limestone quarry and a substantial (~20%) proportion of the internal volume of the pyramid is composed of natural rock formation they didn't need to fill in with sandstone.

[DiabloD3]

I thought they sorta kinda knew this already?

One of the most batshit theories I've heard is it was actually a sort of water well on demand, the weight of the pyramid pushing down on an underground aquifer fed by a then-unknown branch of the Nile, forcing water up through a man-made well.

I wonder if they started looking for the missing tributary because of this theory.

[kuprel]

So maybe the pyramids are older than we thought?

[jjallen]

Isn't getting the stones to the site the easier, much less interesting part of this? By far more interesting is how they actually constructed the things.

[jwueller]

If anyone is curious, here is an amazing and scientific YouTube channel mostly focused on the pyramids: https://youtube.com/@historyforgranite

[pests]

Seconded, I've tried posting videos here before. His explanation of the great pyramid being a public/private devotion place, not a secret grave, makes the most sense to me. It would be like Lenin's Mausoleum. Everyone knows where its at, who is there, and you can go see him and leave offerings.

Previous tombs were robbed and looted because the king was buried and forgotten and no one cared anymore. Probably helped their followers maintain power after their death too.

(purposefully not using any names, I am skeptical on the official story of who built what for who)

[nwhnwh]

If you want something that is more mysterious than the pyramids, google "Serapeum of Saqqara"

[ck2]

The "fact" about the pyramids I simply cannot believe is the insistence of many historians that slaves weren't used

If true now THAT is amazing, personally I think the people in power in ancient Egypt simply rewrote their records.

Virtually no other ancient culture and its world-level marvels can make that claim

Great-Wall-of-China they basically used to throw slaves into the filler after they became too old or injured, people today are basically walking and taking photos on top of a mass-grave of horrors

[jcranmer]

Corvée labor systems are unbelievable to you? Especially in an environment where (because of the annual Nile floods) the homelands of people are uninhabitable for a few months each year?

> Virtually no other ancient culture and its world-level marvels can make that claim

That is a bold claim. My recollection of lots of historical instances of slavery is that slaves tended to be used in jobs that no one wanted to do, such as mining. Monumental buildings tend to involve a lot of skilled artisanal crafts--stonemasons are not something you'd be likely to trust to slave labor. There are also monuments that are constructed by cultures not known to have practiced slavery, such as Stonehenge or Norte Chico.

[wudangmonk]

They must have had great foresight to know that 4,500 years later using slave labor would become historically inconvenient.

[MattGaiser]

My understanding is that the claim is slaves weren’t used for the pyramids, not that Egypt didn’t have slaves.

I can think of many reasons slaves wouldn’t be used for the pyramids even if they existed. Politics, availability, even worse jobs to be done, etc.

[cco]

You might find documents like this interesting: https://mymodernmet.com/ancient-egyptians-attendance-record/

But I think others here have pointed out the larger issue at hand, "slavery" isn't a monolith. The spectrum of forced labor is pretty wide and to our modern colloquial use of the word, the builders of the pyramids weren't "slaves" in the same way that those who built the Great Wall or worked in Rome's silver mines were.

[isk517]

I can believe it. Wasn't ancient Egypt ridiculously fertile for growing grain due to the yearly Nile flooding. An abundance of food would mean excess labour to work on other projects.

[bpodgursky]

Chattel slavery was sort of the extreme historical endpoint of a spectrum of forced labor and is maybe not a good model for discussion.

Is it slavery if the pharaoh demands each family provide 1 male for labor each year? Or each person has to spend a month on the pyramid. Or there's a famine and the only way for your family to get grain is to work on the pyramid?

Doesn't really feel like an interesting point to fixate on tbh. There was undoubtedly a huge amount of coercion since Egypt funneled a ton of resources into a useless project, and the pharaoh had to pay for it somehow. Whether it was heavy taxation that forced people into labor or starve, or explicit forced labor, eh.

[atombender]

We have evidence in the form of writing, e.g. accounting books and the journals of Merer [1], who describes the supervision of the construction and of the workers. The logbooks describe worker strikes (they complain about not being given enough beer) and how they're divided into teams of skilled laborers that compete against each other. These logbooks coincidentally describe canals used to bring supplies close to the pyramids.

[1] https://www.history.com/news/egypts-oldest-papyri-detail-gre...

[nashashmi]

My alt theory is the pyramids were started from the core first with the blocks and then built out from there. And the stone was right there beneath the pyramid being carved out. But how did they get the blocks to the top? Using a crane system! At the apex there would be a lever balance and ropes would lever the stones into place.

[schmidt_fifty]

> The "fact" about the pyramids I simply cannot believe is the insistence of many historians that slaves weren't used

I can't speak to evidence that slaves weren't used but we have records of wages paid to laborers and engineers.

[duxup]

Why would it seem that slaves would have had to be used?

[imjonse]

Is there new evidence for this? It has been the main hypothesis for why the pyramids are far from the river, I thought it was generally accepted.

[itronitron]

Regardless, it makes sense they would want to have easy access to fresh water. Maybe instead they rerouted the river afterwards so that others would have less use of the spaceport.