Article Review: “The Egyptian pyramid chain was built along the now abandoned Ahramat Nile Branch”

Dr. Zahi Hawass & Dr. Mark Lehner announce the following:

Review of: Eman Ghoneim, Timothy J. Ralph, Suzanne Onstine, Raghda El-Behaedi, Gad El-Qady, Amr S. Fahil, Mahfooz Hafez, Magdy Atya, Mohamed Ebrahim , Ashraf Khozym & Mohamed S. Fathy,  “The Egyptian pyramid chain was built along the now abandoned Ahramat Nile Branch” Communications Earth & Environment (2024)5: 233.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01379-7

            In response to many requests for our opinion on Ghoniem et al. 2024 we state that the bulk of this article repeats understandings and conclusions that have been expressed before.

1.     It is not true that, as the authors state,“…no convincing explanation as to why these pyramids are concentrated in this specific locality has been given so far.” Any beginner Egyptology student knows that the Old and Middle Kingdom pyramids belong to cemeteries west of Memphis Egypt’s traditional capital, and that west was the direction of the Dead.

2.     Egyptologists have suggested for more than a century that a western Nile branch or canal along the course of the Libeini channel gave access to the Pyramids. Fifty-three years ago, French Egyptologist George Goyon developed the idea of a western Nile branch or canal connecting pyramids and their valley temples, and he identified this branch with the Bahr el-Libeini (Goyon 1971).

3.     For more than a century, Egyptologists have investigated the hypothesis that harbors existed at the end of pyramid causeways, in front of valley temples, in natural bays, such as the Abusir embayment, and in wadi mouths, such as the Khentkawes basin in the mouth of the central wadi at Giza, or even farther west, like the basin up into the southern wadi at Dahshur.  For more than a century Egyptologists have discussed the idea that these basins could have received Nile water, at least during inundation.

4.     At Giza, for years. we have investigated the subject of a western Nile branch along the course of the Libeini, and how it fed harbors of the Giza Pyramids. We have found and published boundaries and benchmarks on the harbors of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. Our publications are entirely missing in Ghoneim et al. 2024.

5.     Ghoneim et al. 2024 ignore the discovery in 2013 of the Wadi el-Jarf Papyri that include, among other documents, the journal of a man named Merer who led a team making deliveries of limestone by boat from the eastern quarries at Tura to Giza for building Khufu’s Pyramid. The discoverer, Pierre Tallet, pointed to the Libeini as marking a western Nile branch, and the southern routes that Merer and his men took to Giza. Ghoneim at al. 2024 miss completely this critical new information.

6.     In 1995 we worked with National Geographic Magazine to reconstruct a western Nile branch on the course of the Libeini by digitizing 1:5,000 contour maps produced by the Egyptian Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction (MHR 1977). We produced a reconstructed color view of the western Nile branch that is practically the same as Ghoneim et. al 2024 fig. 7. We also produced a scale model of the deep trough marking a relic western Nile channel along the Libeini. The major finding of Ghoneim et al. 2024 was already published in National Geographic twenty-nine years ago (January 1995, page 22).

The authors are either ignorant of the full published discussion and research on their topic, or they ignore the extent to which their proposal has been litigated in scholarly works so that they can present their findings as a new discovery.  We find nothing new in Ghoneim et al. 2024.

Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner