Nature remains one of humanity’s most important relationships.
To understand what environmental issues lie ahead for our warming planet, geographers often look back to the past for answers. A newdetails how the landscape of ancient Egypt allowed them to create the pyramids of Giza—one of the most iconic human-made phenomenons in the world.
“Good [Nile] levels promised stability [to] the ancient Egyptian society,” Hader says. “By contrast, the drought as a result of low Nile levels would be catastrophic and a reason for social unrest and sometimes, civil wars.” In May 2019, Hader and the team studied pollen grains taken after drilling the land next to where the Khufu branch of the Nile once stood. Two of the study sites were in the supposed Khufu basin. About 109 samples dating between the Predynastic and Early Dynastic-Old Kingdom periods were collected for analysis and divided into different groups based on seven vegetation patterns.
An artist’s reconstruction of the now defunct Khufu branch of the Nile River, which once enabled transportation of construction materials to the Giza Pyramid complex.Hader says she wasn’t as much surprised but rather in awe of the “clever old kingdom’s engineers who could thoroughly harness their environment and the Nile dynamics for turning the impossible into reality.
Manning says that finding natural river features frames how humans interacted and took advantage of their environment, creating not-so-simple projects like the pyramids. However, one concern he points out in the study is how the researchers analyzed the data on volcanic eruptions during that time period. Their findings suggest volcanic eruptions played a major role in fluctuations in the Khufu branch, which in this case, led to a decrease in Nile summer flooding.
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