The latest breakthrough in pyramid research did not begin in the desert but in orbit, where radar images from space have traced a lost branch of the Nile that once flowed beside Egypt’s most famous monuments. That discovery has sharpened a long running debate over how the Great Pyramid of Giza and its neighbors were supplied, revealing that water, not just ramps and brute force, was central to their construction. Rather than a single eureka moment, the new work slots into a growing body of evidence that the ancient Egyptians combined sophisticated engineering, clever use of the landscape and, crucially, a river that no longer exists.
Seen together with fresh theories about internal lifting systems and hidden voids inside Khufu’s monument, the space based river map suggests the pyramids were the product of a flexible toolkit of methods, adapted over centuries. I see the emerging picture as less about one definitive “how” and more about a layered construction playbook, in which water transport, counterweights and carefully planned internal corridors all played a part.
The buried river that rewrites the building site
The most striking new clue comes from orbiting radar, which can pierce dry sand to reveal the ghost of ancient landscapes. Using this technology, researchers mapped a long buried branch of the Nile that once ran along the western desert margin, directly past the pyramid fields. Their work, described in a study in PLOS ONE, argues that this waterway was deliberately stabilized with embankments and basins to serve as a construction harbor, allowing heavy stone to be floated close to the plateau instead of dragged for kilometers over land.
The lead author, French civil engineer Xavier Landreau, and his team reconstructed nearby watersheds and concluded that the branch was engineered to trap and sediment floodwaters, effectively turning seasonal inundation into a stable transport corridor. In parallel, another group working with satellite radar and field surveys has traced what they call the Ahramat Branch, a roughly 64 kilometer, or 40 mile, ancient channel that lined up with multiple pyramid sites, a finding summarized in Nature Communications Earth & Environment. Scientists argue that this Ahramat Branch, whose name uses the Arabic word for pyramids, would have allowed stone laden boats to dock almost at the foot of the construction ramps.
From space radar to ground truth at Giza
The river discovery did not come out of nowhere. Earlier work by Dr. El Baz had already shown that radar images from space can penetrate today’s sand cover to reveal buried valleys and former channels around the pyramids and the Sphinx. Building on that approach, Ghonheim and her colleagues, described in one technical summary as Ghonheim and her team, used radar satellite images and ground cores to locate the 40 mile ancient branch of the Nile that had been suspected but never mapped in detail.
Speaking in follow up coverage, Speaking to IFLScience, Ghoneim said the length of this branch was “really, really long” and that the width in some areas was “huge”, reinforcing the idea that it could have accommodated substantial boat traffic. When I match that image of a broad working river against the logistics of hauling more than two million limestone blocks, each weighing several tons, for the Great Pyramid of, the case for waterborne supply becomes hard to ignore.
Inside the Great Pyramid, new voids and old questions
While satellites redraw the landscape outside, particle physics is transforming what we know about the interior of Khufu’s monument. Using muon radiography, a technique that tracks cosmic ray particles as they pass through stone, researchers with the Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute’s ScanPyramids project have identified a large hidden void above the Grand Gallery of the Great Pyramid, as well as a smaller corridor like cavity near the entrance. The project, operating under the authority of the Heritage Innovation Preservation and Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities, has been scanning the pyramids since 2015 without setting foot inside, relying on detectors placed around the base.
One recent synthesis of the work on Khufu’s monument, framed under the heading Unveiling the Mystery, explains how muon radiography can reveal density differences without damaging the structure, preserving their integrity for future study. Combined with earlier mapping of internal chambers and relieving spaces, these voids suggest that the Great Pyramid’s internal architecture may have doubled as a system of ramps, counterweight shafts or staging areas, a possibility that feeds directly into new mechanical theories of construction.
Counterweights, pulleys and the race to build Khufu’s tomb
Those mechanical theories have gained momentum with a cluster of studies arguing that the Great Pyramid’s speed of construction is hard to explain with simple straight ramps alone. One recent analysis, led by Scheuring and summarized in a report on a bold new theory, proposes that the Great Pyramid used pulley and counterweight systems anchored inside the structure to lift blocks more efficiently. A companion account notes that Now the same research, published in Nature, points to internal counterweight like mechanisms hidden inside the structure of the Pyramid of Khufu, potentially using water filled shafts or sliding stones to lift even the heaviest blocks.
Another summary of the work, framed around how Scientists think Egyptians used a pulley system to build the Great Pyramid so fast, emphasizes that such internal devices could have allowed workers to raise a block roughly every minute. When I set that claim against the sheer volume of stone involved, it becomes clear why counterweights and pulleys are attractive: they offer a way to reconcile the monument’s scale with a human workforce operating within a few decades, without resorting to speculative lost technologies.
Hydraulic lifts at Saqqara and what they mean for Giza
Separate from Khufu’s pyramid, a different line of research has focused on Egypt’s first pyramid, the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, as a test bed for more experimental lifting systems. A study highlighted in coverage of a hydraulic lift theory argues that this earlier monument may have used an internal network of shafts and water filled chambers to operate technique such as toggle lifts and hoists. The authors describe a complex water treatment system beneath the pyramid that could have fed these devices, but they are explicit that their model applies to Djoser’s monument at Saqqara, not to the Giza complex.
Another account of the same work, framed around Aug coverage, notes that the techniques involved could include ramps, cranes, winches and pivots, either alone or in combination, again anchored in the internal architecture of the Step Pyramid. A separate discussion of hydraulic lifting, which credits Ancient Egyptians with using an innovative hydraulic lifting system to build at Giza 4,700 years ago, goes further, but that claim is not directly tied to the PLOS ONE study led by Xavier Landreau and remains unverified based on available sources for the Great Pyramid itself. I read the Saqqara work instead as a proof of concept that Egyptians experimented with water powered devices, which could have informed later, more mechanically focused systems at Giza without proving that the same hydraulic lifts were used there.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
