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The road to Giza - world's oldest known paved road near Egyptian Pyramids of Giza

Discover, August, 1994

THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA WERE built of limestone and granite. But in one of the adjoining mortuary temples, where the bodies of the pharaohs were prepared for entombment, the ancient Egyptian architects paved the floor with black basalt. The basalt came from quarries that lie 40 miles southwest of Giza. The Egyptians did not attempt to drag three-ton blocks of basalt across 40 miles of desert, says geologist Thomas Bown of the U.S. Geological Survey. Instead they dragged the blocks to a lake connected to the Nile, loaded them on barges, and floated them down to Giza--a circuitous journey of more than 100 miles, but one that saved a lot of dragging. The road to the lake, which Bown and his colleague James Harrell discovered recently along with the quarries, was only seven and a half miles long. Built some 4,600 years ago, it is the world's oldest known paved road.

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A few segments of the road had been noticed by other geologists as early as 1905, but it was thought to be much younger and its significance remained unappreciated. In 1987, while working on a completely unrelated project, Bown visited the area. "I got up on top of a cliff," he recalls, "and--bingo!--saw all these road segments that nobody had ever reported before." On that same trip Bown also discovered what looked to him like a small basalt quarry.

Last year he returned to the site with Harrell, a geologist at the University of Toledo, Ohio, who is an authority on ancient Egyptian quarrying techniques. Bown and Harrell discovered another, larger quarry, more road segments, and a camp used to house the quarry workers. Pottery fragments found in the camp and quarries helped date the road to Egypt's Old Kingdom, sometime between 2575 and 2134 B.C. A microscopic analysis of the basalt at Giza and at the nearby necropolis of Saqqara showed that both came from Bown and Harrell's quarries.

The construction of the quarry road is somewhat less impressive than that of the pyramids. "They didn't bother to make a roadbed," says Bown. "There were no signs of leveling of the road in any place." The pavement consists of sandstone, limestone, basalt, and, in one section, petrified wood. The road builders took whatever rock was at hand, picked out the largest straight-edged pieces to form the borders of the road, and filled the middle with smaller pieces. In one respect, though, they displayed some of the precision that went into the pyramids: in sections that haven't eroded, the road is exactly four ancient Egyptian cubits wide (just under seven feet).

Today the road leads nowhere, beginning at the quarries and ending at an ancient quay--a quay that now stands high and dry, about six miles from the banks of a lake called Birket Qarun. When the quay was built, however, it stood on the shore of Lake Moeris, a much larger body of water that was connected to the Nile during the annual summer flood. The road to the quay included uphill segments--which may explain why it is the only paved road known from ancient Egypt: the routes from other Egyptian quarries, Bown says, led downhill or over flat terrain. Egyptians didn't start using draft animals or wagons until about 100 B.C., and to drag blocks of basalt uphill on sleds, they may have required the technological breakthrough of pavement. "The combination of the incline plus the very soft sand they'd have to be dragging the blocks through was just too much," Bown says. "They needed a harder surface."

The road to Giza - world's oldest known paved road near Egyptian Pyramids of Giza

Discover, August, 1994

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