The Nile's Predecessor: A Grand Canyon in Egypt

The Nile we see today is a shadow of what once flowed through Egypt. Six million years ago, the Valley of the Nile was carved as a grand canyon, reaching depths of 2.5 kilometers, over 8,000 feet, one and a half miles down into the bedrock. That kind of erosion doesn't happen quietly. It requires immense volumes of water moving with catastrophic force over geologic time. What's remarkable is that this ancient canyon sits directly adjacent to the Giza Plateau, meaning the landscape we associate with the pyramids was shaped by rivers far more powerful than anything we see in the historical record. Gigantic rivers came and went, filling and refilling that canyon long before the Nile we know settled into its current course. The scale of these predecessor rivers challenges our sense of stability in the region and raises questions about what the environment looked like when ancient construction may have begun.