Egypt’s Great Pyramid and other ancient monuments at Giza exist on an isolated strip of land at the edge of the Sahara Desert. The inhospitable location has long puzzled archaeologists, some of whom had found evidence that the Nile River once flowed near these pyramids in some capacity, facilitating the landmarks’ construction starting 4,700 years ago. Using satellite imaging and analysis of cores of sediment, a new study published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment has mapped a 64-kilometer (40-mile) long, dried-up, branch of the Nile, long buried beneath farmland and desert. “Even though many efforts to reconstruct the early Nile waterways have been conducted, they have largely been confined to soil sample collections from small sites, which has led to the mapping of only fragmented sections of the ancient Nile channel systems,” said lead study author Eman Ghoneim, a professor and director of the Space and Drone…
