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Egypt's pyramids may have been built on a long-lost branch of the Nile
The pyramids of the Western desert in Egypt were built alongside a now extinct branch of the Nile River named as the Ahramat Branch and identified using a combination of radar satellite imagery, geophysical data and deep soil coring.
In the Early Holocene (~12,000 years before present), the Sahara of North Africa transformed from a hyper-arid desert to a savannah-like environment, with large river systems and lake basins 3, 4 due to an increase in global sea level at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Our finding has filled a much-needed knowledge gap related to the dominant waterscape in ancient Egypt, which could help inform and educate a wide array of global audiences about how earlier inhabitants were living and in what ways shifts in their landscape drove human activity in such an iconic region. Lastly, all the pyramids and causeways in the study site, along with ancient harbors and valley temples, as indicators of preexisting river channels, were digitized from satellite data and available archeological resources and overlaid onto the delineated Ahramat Branch for geospatial analysis.
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