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Octavian (later Emperor Augustus), following his victorious battles of Illyricum and Actium, announced he would give 400 sesterces to adult male citizens. Will we see the US president wearing an emperor’s purple and gold toga soon (Trump promise of $5,000 for US citizens after midterms decried as ‘bribery’, 10 September)?
David Shannon
Ashton under Hill, Worcestershire

• Can we assume that the donations to Reform UK from the billionaires Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo (Report, 12 September) will be followed by some sort of cash offer for every adult in the UK should Mr Farage win the next election?
Phil Thomas
Frodsham, Cheshire

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© Photograph: Alamy/Allstar

© Photograph: Alamy/Allstar

© Photograph: Alamy/Allstar

More than 4,000 years ago, an Egyptian official named Sekhentiu-Ptah held a collection of titles that placed him remarkably close to royal power. He oversaw the king’s works and documents, supervised scribes, and even served as the “Keeper of the Secrets of Royal Commands.”

Now, archaeologists have found his tomb. An Egyptian archaeological mission excavating the Saqqara necropolis in Giza has uncovered the Old Kingdom tomb of Sekhentiu-Ptah, including its funerary chapel, an intact false door, and a complete collection of alabaster ritual objects still positioned where they were left thousands of years ago.

Nearby, researchers discovered an interconnected network of burial shafts containing human remains, more than 100 funerary figurines, and three stone sarcophagi that were still sealed when archaeologists found them.

Speaking with The Jerusalem Post, Mohamed Abdel-Badie, head of Egypt’s Antiquities Sector, said finding a complete set of funerary objects still in their original position was “an important discovery, offering valuable information about funerary rituals and practices during the Old Kingdom.”

The discovery was made during the Egyptian mission’s first excavation season in Sector A, west of the Bubasteion at Saqqara, roughly 20 miles south of Cairo. Saqqara served as a major burial ground for ancient Memphis and contains monuments and tombs spanning thousands of years of Egyptian history.

Sekhentiu-Ptah’s tomb dates to the Old Kingdom, the era roughly spanning the third millennium BCE that witnessed the construction of Egypt’s great pyramids.

Inside the remains of his funerary chapel, archaeologists encountered a false door still standing in its original location. Such doors were symbolic thresholds associated with the deceased and the offerings made to sustain them in the afterlife.

Directly in front of the false door was a complete group of alabaster ritual objects that had apparently remained together in their archaeological context. The assemblage includes an offering table and offering disk, purification basin, jug, and another basin.

Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the false door and funerary objects revealed not only Sekhentiu-Ptah’s name but an extraordinary résumé.

He was identified as Royal Chamberlain, Overseer of All the King’s Works, Overseer of Royal Documents, Keeper of the Secrets of Royal Commands, Priest of the goddess Maat, and Overseer of the Scribes. Together, the titles indicate that Sekhentiu-Ptah occupied a prominent position within Egypt’s royal administration.

Archaeologists also uncovered a system of interconnected burial shafts filled with human burials and large quantities of painted funerary cartonnage, a material commonly made from layers of linen or papyrus and plaster and used in funerary coverings.

Archaeologists recovered more than 100 faience ushabti figurines. These small figures were placed in Egyptian tombs to perform work for the deceased in the afterlife symbolically. Archaeologists also found a wooden falcon statue, pottery, and three stone sarcophagi that were kept sealed in their original condition.

The collection is particularly interesting because it captures different chapters in Saqqara’s history. While Sekhentiu-Ptah’s tomb belongs to the Old Kingdom, material from the surrounding shafts provides evidence for funerary practices during the much later Late Period. In essence, the site became a cemetery layered on top of a cemetery, repeatedly returned to and repurposed across Egyptian history.

Not everything survived undisturbed. Archaeologists found openings cut between some burial chambers, evidence that ancient tomb robbers had already penetrated portions of the complex. Even so, enough remained intact to allow researchers to reconstruct how the necropolis changed over time.

The surviving artifacts retain “great archaeological and scientific value, contributing to understanding the site’s internal layout and the development of its architecture through its successive historical phases,” excavation director Dr. Amr El-Tayebi explained.

For now, the discovery is a work in progress. The Egyptian team is continuing to document and compare the artifacts with material recovered elsewhere in Egypt, with plans to publish the results in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Archaeologists also believe Sector A could contain additional structures and artifacts still waiting beneath the sands of Saqqara.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

Nine centuries ago, people gathered at what is today recognized as the Etowah Indian Mounds site, located roughly 40 miles northwest of Atlanta, Georgia, for enormous community feasts. They ate, drank, and eventually discarded broken pottery into pits that would become part of the foundations of the ancient city’s first monumental mound.

Now, traces hidden inside two pieces of that discarded pottery have revealed something archaeologists never expected to find so far from the tropics: ancient cacao DNA.

Researchers say the discovery provides the first direct evidence that cacao, the plant used to make chocolate, reached the Mississippian civilization of the eastern United States roughly 800 to 900 years ago.

Because cacao cannot grow naturally in Georgia, its presence also points to surprisingly extensive networks capable of moving exotic goods across long stretches of pre-Columbian North America. The findings were published in PLOS One.

“This study presents the first evidence that cacao consumption was part of the Mississippian world at roughly the same time as it appeared at Chaco,” researchers write. “This discovery at Etowah asks us to broaden our understanding of the networks that distributed cacao throughout the Americas before European colonization.”

Chocolate has a deep history in the Americas. Archaeological evidence indicates cacao was being consumed in South America at least 5,000 years ago and later became culturally important throughout Central America.

More surprising was a 2009 discovery indicating that people at Chaco Canyon in modern New Mexico drank cacao between roughly 1050 and 1350 CE. Since cacao only grows in tropical climates, the finding meant long-distance exchange networks had carried the plant hundreds of miles northward.

Whether cacao traveled even farther into what is now the eastern United States remained unclear.

However, Etowah offered an intriguing place to look. Located in modern Georgia, the Indigenous city eventually became one of the most important centers of Mississippian civilization. The pottery examined in the new study came from feasting deposits dating to the 11th and 12th centuries, early in Etowah’s history.

Researchers had previously analyzed residues from 31 Etowah pottery fragments. Twenty-one contained at least two chemical compounds associated with caffeinated beverages, while three contained all four compounds the scientists examined.

Yaupon holly, a native plant used to produce the caffeinated beverage historically known as Black Drink, contains several of the same chemical biomarkers as cacao. Researchers, therefore, concluded that the Etowah vessels most likely contained yaupon rather than cacao.

However, this time, scientists went looking for cacao itself.

Researchers subjected samples from three pottery fragments to ancient DNA analysis, producing more than 502 million useful paired sequences before using successive filters to identify genetic material specific to Theobroma cacao.

Two pottery samples cleared the researchers’ threshold for identifying cacao.

Importantly, the genetic material also displayed telltale characteristics of ancient DNA. The fragments averaged only 84 base pairs long, consistent with the degradation expected after centuries of decay. The researchers also employed strict contamination controls and bioinformatic filtering to distinguish cacao from other organisms present in the samples.

The evidence does not establish exactly how cacao reached Georgia. Preliminary genetic comparisons linked one sample most closely to Amelonado cacao and another to Curaray, both of which also showed similarities to Marañon cacao. Those lineages originated in the Amazon basin, including parts of modern Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil, but also spread into Central America long before cacao appeared at Etowah.

Cacao may have traveled from Central America through long-distance exchange networks or passed indirectly through communities in the American Southwest before reaching the Eastern Woodlands. However, too few genetic markers survived to pinpoint its immediate source, and researchers say no direct archaeological evidence currently establishes either route.

Perhaps more intriguing is where researchers found the cacao.

The pottery came from pits packed with animal bones, ceramics, and organic material interpreted as the remains of communal feasting associated with the construction of Etowah’s first platform mound. Researchers suggest cacao was more than an exotic luxury and could have played a role in ceremonies intended to reinforce social bonds during the city’s formative period.

The discovery also raises the possibility that previously detected chemical residues at other Mississippian sites, including Cahokia, could contain cacao that was mistaken for locally available yaupon. Confirming that possibility will require additional ancient DNA testing.

“These results ask us to reopen lines of research long closed, especially regarding contacts between the impressive civilizations of Central and South America and the great Mississippian civilization of the Eastern Woodlands,” researchers write. “More broadly, our results suggest that it is time to explore the possibility that cacao was distributed more widely in the precontact Americas than we have understood.”

Study: King, A., Powis, T.G., Argout, X., Vignes, H., Utge, J., Rhoné, B., et al. “Cacao in the Mississippian World: Archaeogenomic evidence for T. cacao consumption at the Etowah Site, Georgia.” PLOS One 21(8):(2026). 

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

The silvery fur of the hamadryas baboon is, under a spectrometer, nearly the exact color of moonlight, which may explain why ancient Egyptians made a monkey the face of their moon god, according to a new study in Time and Mind.

The work, from biological anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy of Dartmouth College and primatologist Catherine Hobaiter of the University of St Andrews, takes an old Egyptological question and points an instrument at it. Thoth, god of the moon, writing, and magic, had two sacred animals: the ibis and the baboon. The ibis makes sense. A curved beak echoing a crescent, white plumage the same color as the moon’s glow.

The baboon, however, has long “defied explanation,” as one Egyptologist put it; the key problem being that baboons didn’t live in Egypt.

Egypt’s pantheon features many local creatures, from the jackals that haunted its cemeteries to the cow that stood in for the mother goddess Hathor. But no wild baboon has ever been found in Holocene Egypt. The hundreds recovered from tombs and temples were all imports, carried in by ship from somewhere down the Red Sea coast. Of all the animal gods, the baboon is the only foreigner.

“Why would two such different animals be used to represent one deity? Most other Egyptian deities are represented by just one type of animal. Ancient Egyptians were familiar with at least three species of ibis, but they chose the white one for embodying Thoth. They were also familiar with two species of baboon, along with vervet monkeys and patas monkeys, but again they chose the silver-white species,” explained lead author Professor Catherine Hobaiter in a press statement.

According to the study, the Egyptians were picky. They knew two species of baboon and three of ibis, and each time they deified only one of each.

“Sacred ibises and hamadryas baboons are different in many ways, but one thing that unites them is their moon-like colour,” Hobaiter said.

To test whether color was the thread, the team recorded reflectance spectra from the hair of 12 baboon specimens at the American Museum of Natural History and lined them up against the measured spectrum of moonlight. The olive baboon came back green, peaking around 525 to 650 nanometers (which is precisely why it is called the olive baboon). The hamadryas came back silver-gray, roughly 65 percent brighter, with a curve the authors call “indistinguishable from moonlight.”

 

According to the study and historical records, the living emblem of Thoth is not just the hamadryas but the mature male, with his heavy silver shoulder mantle and white cheek ruffs. This head of hair is so reflective the authors clock it as brighter than a golden lion tamarin, a monkey practically famous for glowing. The Germans noticed too. Their name for the animal is Silberpavian, the silver baboon.

There is a stranger layer beneath the color. Egyptians kept baboons in their temples partly to watch them, because the animals seemed to answer to the moon. There are historical records which indicate that male baboons in Egypt, during a fifth-century solar eclipse, fell into a state of “grief” and, according to the ancient writer, entered a sort of trance of reverence. 

Modern ethologists watching zoo baboons during the 2017 total eclipse logged something uncomfortably close: activity falling away, the animals going quiet and huddling together. The Egyptians, in effect, may have kept a small colony of living eclipse detectors and read their unease as devotion.

History being what it is, and not an exact science, the authors are careful not to pretend that their findings are direct evidence as to why Ancient Egyptians made gods of baboons. A spectrometer can confirm that a baboon is the color of moonlight. It cannot confirm that the color is why anyone bowed to it. The argument rests on a 2024 etymology tracing Thoth’s name to a word meaning roughly “bright-thing.”

There is also an irony the study mostly steps around. The male’s silver mantle did not evolve to look like the moon; it evolved as a sexual signal, a way for dominant males to advertise themselves to other baboons. The Egyptians took a mating ornament and read it as a message from the sky.

That may be the most human thing in the whole account. The Egyptians were meticulous observers who noticed that one animal, in one sex, at one particular brightness, resembled the thing they worshiped, and decided the resemblance meant something.

One of those baboons even has a name. Harnufi was brought to Egypt in the sixth year of Ptolemy V and entombed 31 years later, on September 6, 168 BC. Someone counted out his life in years, mummified him, and laid him down as a small gray piece of the moon.

For more than two millennia, astronomers have puzzled over a stellar mystery recorded by some of history’s greatest skywatchers. Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi—all separated by more than 1,000 years—each described Theta Eridani as one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Yet today, the previously celebrated star barely ranks among the more noticeable stars visible to the naked eye.

A new astronomical study published on arXiv suggests that those ancient observers may have unknowingly recorded an extraordinarily rare stellar event. The star system remained dramatically brighter than normal for roughly a millennium before fading back to its present appearance sometime between the 10th and 16th centuries.

If confirmed, the finding would be among the longest-lived stellar transients ever proposed, fusing modern astrophysics with historical astronomy to reconstruct an event spanning centuries rather than days or months.

The study combines historical star catalogs with state-of-the-art observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), high-definition spectroscopy, and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

Together, those observations allowed the researchers to reconstruct the architecture and evolutionary state of the Theta Eridani system and to propose a physical mechanism that could explain its mysterious ancient brilliance.

“The remarkable combination of orbital and stellar parameters hints that the historical brightening of Theta Eridani was due to a millenary transient phase,” researchers write. “This strengthens the case that the apparent brightening was real and not due to an error by three different ancient observers, as has been commonly claimed in the past.”

Today, Theta Eridani, also known by its traditional name Acamar, shines at approximately magnitude 2.9, making it a respectable but hardly spectacular star marking the end of the constellation Eridanus. Yet ancient records tell a very different story.

Hipparchus described it as an exceptionally bright star around 129 BC. Roughly 250 years later, Ptolemy ranked it among only fifteen first-magnitude stars in the Almagest, effectively placing it among the thirteen brightest stars visible in the night sky.

More than 800 years afterward, the Persian astronomer al-Sufi independently retained that same first-magnitude classification while revising the brightness estimates of many other stars toward values that closely match modern observations.

The sharp contrast between the historical accounts and Theta Eridani’s modest appearance today has made the star one of astronomy’s most enduring and compelling mysteries.

Researchers examined long-standing alternative explanations, including simple observational mistakes, copyist errors in ancient manuscripts, confusion with the much brighter star Achernar farther south, and even errors caused by atmospheric extinction near the horizon. One by one, they argue the evidence weighs against those explanations.

Theta Eridani would not even have been visible to the Greek and Arab astronomers because of Earth’s changing orientation over time. Likewise, statistical analyses of nearly 1,000 stars contained in the Almagest show that Theta Eridani represents the single largest discrepancy between ancient and modern brightness estimates, rather than part of a wider systematic mistake.

The historical trail eventually changes around the dawn of the Age of Exploration. By the late 1500s and early 1600s, after European navigators began mapping the southern skies, star catalogs consistently described Theta Eridani as only a third-magnitude star—essentially the same brightness observed today.

That suggests the bright phase had already ended.

To investigate whether Theta Eridani itself could plausibly have undergone such a transformation, the team turned to modern astronomical observations.

Rather than a single star, Theta Eridani consists of three stars. The primary component itself is a remarkably tight binary whose two stars orbit one another every 4.1077 days at a separation of just 0.083 astronomical units—roughly one-fifth the distance between Mercury and the Sun.

Using interferometric measurements from the VLTI, together with spectroscopy and precision photometry from TESS, the researchers determined that the two stars each contain just over twice the Sun’s mass and have swollen to approximately 4.3 and 4.0 solar radii.

Those enlarged sizes are significant because both stars have expanded to nearly 80 percent of the volume where gravity from one star begins pulling material toward the other, a region around a star in a binary system known as the Roche lobes. The close gravitational interaction also produces measurable ellipsoidal distortions that TESS detects as subtle, rhythmic brightness variations every orbit.

Researchers’ evolutionary modeling further revealed that the primary star occupies an unusually brief stage within stellar evolution, having only recently exhausted hydrogen in its core and begun transitioning into a subgiant. That evolutionary timing may be critical.

According to the researchers, Theta Eridani may once have possessed a much more elongated orbit. As the primary expanded, it could have begun overflowing its Roche lobe during each close approach, transferring material toward its companion and possibly generating an extended common envelope surrounding both stars.

Unlike the violent stellar explosions astronomers typically classify as transients, this proposed event would have evolved extraordinarily slowly. Instead of lasting weeks or years, the researchers suggest the envelope may have persisted for roughly a thousand years while gradually extracting orbital energy from the binary.

Because the surrounding envelope would have remained optically thick, it could have radiated from an area far larger than either star individually, making the entire system appear nearly ten times brighter than it does today.

Researchers’ calculations suggest that such an envelope could have reached roughly 20 times the Sun’s radius while needing only a tiny amount of encircling material, because that material would be continually replenished and slowly ejected over hundreds of thousands of orbits.

Importantly, researchers stress that this is still a proposed physical explanation rather than a demonstrated one. Modeling the detailed hydrodynamics of eccentric mass transfer and long-lived common envelopes remains beyond the scope of the current work.

Nevertheless, they argue that the unusual combination of orbital geometry, stellar evolution, and historical observations makes the scenario physically plausible.

The study of Theta Eridani also raises wider implications for time-based astronomy.

Modern astronomical surveys are exceptionally good at finding dramatic events that unfold over minutes, days, or years. A stellar brightening lasting centuries, or even a millennium, would be almost impossible to recognize within a human lifetime. Researchers suggest there may be other long-duration stellar transients hidden among ordinary-looking stars whose histories have been forgotten.

If their interpretation proves correct, some of humanity’s earliest astronomers may have unknowingly documented one of the most unusual stellar phenomena ever proposed—not an exploding star, but a binary system trapped in an exceptionally slow evolutionary episode which lit up the night sky for generations before quietly receding into obscurity.

“Although modern photometric surveys have had an observational coverage of a few years to a few decades rather than two millennia like Theta Eridani, they are sensitive to objects up to 14 magnitudes fainter than the naked eye limit,” researchers write. “Therefore, there could be unexplored or unexplained Theta Eridani-like transients that either brightened or faded in current data.”

The team’s new study, The Forgotten Bright Star: Theta Eridani as a Millenary Stellar Transient Observed by Hipparchus, Ptolemy and al-Sufi, is currently available on the arXiv.org preprint server.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

For more than a century, two enormous structures cutting across the desert southwest of Egypt’s famous Red Pyramid have been assumed to be ancient transport features—perhaps roads or ramps used to haul limestone blocks during pyramid construction. However,  a new study argues that archaeologists may have been looking at the wrong answer all along.

Instead of transportation infrastructure, researchers now suggest the mysterious earthworks could represent a nearly 4,600-year-old sophisticated hydraulic engineering system, with two giant dams built to capture, regulate, and redirect water through the desert landscape.

If confirmed, the discovery would dramatically revise our understanding of how the builders of Egypt’s pyramids engineered not only stone, but water itself.

The new research, published in Nature Heritage Science, combines satellite imagery, historical maps, digital elevation modeling, watershed analysis, and paleoclimate data to reexamine the little-studied features at Dahshur, the royal necropolis where Pharaoh Snefru built both the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid.

While no excavation has yet confirmed the interpretation, researchers argue that the structures display multiple characteristics far more consistent with dams than with construction ramps.

“This study presents, for the first time, evidence of two ancient, giant dams built across Wadi Dahshur, Egypt, along with a water diversion channel west of the Red Pyramid,” researchers write. “Satellite imagery and watershed mapping show that the two long structures, previously interpreted as stone transport ramps, exhibit the technical signature of dams, each extending 600–700 m and anchored to the valley flanks.”

The findings add a fascinating new chapter to one of archaeology’s enduring mysteries. How did ancient Egyptians organize the enormous logistical operation required to construct the pyramids during the Fourth Dynasty?

The Red Pyramid, completed around 2600 BCE during Snefru’s reign, is widely recognized as Egypt’s first successful “true” pyramid. Scientists have spent decades studying the monument itself. However, much less attention has been devoted to the surrounding landscape and the engineering systems that may have supported its construction.

According to researchers, the wider landscape may have been far more technologically sophisticated than previously appreciated.

The two massive structures stretch approximately 2,000 to 2,300 feet (600 to 700 meters) across Wadi Dahshur. Earlier researchers interpreted one as a transport route leading from nearby quarries while considering the other a natural rise in the terrain. However, the new analysis points to several features that appear difficult to reconcile with those interpretations.

Rather than following the valley, both structures run directly across it, anchoring into the surrounding hillsides much like embankment dams. One also contains a distinctive zigzag geometry that the researchers argue resembles a duckbill spillway—a specialized overflow design still used in modern hydraulic engineering because it can safely release significantly larger volumes of water than a straight spillway of the same width.

No securely identified duckbill-style spillway has previously been documented from ancient Egypt. So if that interpretation is correct, it would mean that the Dahshur structure is one of the earliest known examples of this type of hydraulic design anywhere in the world.

Researchers believe the two structures may have functioned together as a multi-stage flood-control system.

In their proposed scenario, one dam traps sediment carried by flash floods while allowing cleaner water to pass into a second reservoir. From there, water could have been diverted through an artificial channel running remarkably close to the western side of the Red Pyramid before reconnecting with the surrounding drainage network.

That canal is especially intriguing because it raises the possibility that water may have played a more direct role in pyramid construction than traditionally assumed.

Researchers have long known that the ancient Egyptians exploited waterways for transporting heavy stone. Previous discoveries at Giza revealed harbor basins and canals associated with pyramid construction, while papyrus records from Wadi el-Jarf describe crews transporting limestone by boat during Khufu’s reign.

The newly proposed Dahshur canal could represent another piece of that larger hydraulic network.

If maintained at a stable water level, it could have assisted in transporting heavy materials on barges or water-assisted sleds over relatively flat ground. Even beyond transportation, the water could have supported workers, supplied construction areas, mixed mortar, reduced dust, and later been adapted for irrigation or ceremonial uses.

The hypothesis also depends on a very different view of Egypt’s climate nearly 4,600 years ago.

Today, the Dahshur plateau lies within an extremely arid landscape, making the idea of dams initially seem ridiculous. However, paleoclimate evidence reviewed by the researchers suggests northern Egypt during the Old Kingdom was considerably wetter than it is today.

Although the Sahara was already drying following the end of the African Humid Period, seasonal rainfall appears to have remained substantially higher than modern levels. Even infrequent storms could have produced powerful flash floods racing through normally dry wadis.

The study estimates that while average annual rainfall may have ranged between roughly 2 to 6 inches (50 to 150 millimeters), individual storm events could generate enough runoff to create destructive floodwaters requiring engineered control systems. Rather than depending solely on the annual Nile inundation, Egyptian engineers may also have exploited seasonal runoff flowing through desert valleys.

That broader perspective fits with growing evidence that water management extended well beyond the Nile floodplain itself.

Other nearby examples showing evidence of water management well beyond the Nile floodplain include the famous Sadd el-Kafara dam, located less than 12 miles (20 kilometers) east of Dahshur, which is generally regarded as one of the world’s oldest large dams.

Additional archaeological sites around Saqqara and Giza likewise show increasing evidence of canals, flood-control structures, and carefully engineered landscapes associated with pyramid construction.

Even so, the researchers stress that their interpretation is still a hypothesis awaiting archaeological confirmation.

The structures themselves have never been excavated. Much of the area lies within a military zone, limiting direct access, while centuries of windblown sand have buried much of the earliest construction. Modern roads, pipelines, and other infrastructure have also altered parts of the site, making efforts to reconstruct its original appearance more difficult.

Future excavations will therefore be critical. Researchers hope sediment studies could determine whether deposits behind the structures resulted from flowing water rather than drifting desert sand.

Excavations may also reveal construction techniques, protective stonework, spillway features, and datable material capable of establishing whether the structures truly belong to Snefru’s era.

If those investigations support the new interpretation, they would suggest that Old Kingdom engineers possessed a much wider understanding of landscape-scale hydraulic engineering than previously identified.

More intriguing, the study hints that similar forgotten infrastructure could still lie covered beneath Egypt’s deserts, disguised as ordinary landscape features or misidentified for generations.

“Nevertheless, the convergence of geomorphological evidence, watershed connectivity, hydraulic plausibility, and regional cultural context supports the interpretation of the Dahshur structures as intentional large-scale hydraulic installations rather than incidental landscape features,” researchers write. “Other hydraulic structures are most probably lost in the desert, waiting to be identified as such.”

The recent study, “Two possible ancient dams near the Red Pyramid on the Dashur Plateau, Egypt,” by Xavier Landreau, Guillaume Piton, and Sayed Hemeda, appeared in npj Heritage Science. 

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

More than 2,200 years Hannibal launched one of recorded history’s most daring military campaigns, leading roughly 46,000 soldiers and 37 war elephants across the towering Alps between modern-day France and Italy to invade the Roman Republic. Now, researchers believe they may have uncovered a surprising clue to one of antiquity’s greatest military mysteries.

For generations, historians have debated exactly which Alpine pass Hannibal used during his legendary crossing in 218 BC before descending into Italy and launching a campaign that brought Rome to the brink of defeat during the Second Punic War.

Any equally enduring mystery has been why the legendary Carthaginian general would burden his army with 37 war elephants, each weighing roughly three tons (about 6,600 pounds), while attempting one of the most difficult mountain crossings in military history?

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests those two mysteries may actually be connected.

Rather than relying entirely on ancient accounts, particularly those of the Greek historian Polybius, or on geology and topography, researchers analyzed the energy required for Hannibal’s soldiers, horses, and elephants to traverse four leading candidate routes through the Alps.

Their findings show that the notoriously difficult Col de la Traversette was actually the most energy-efficient crossing—and that the elephants, far from being a crippling liability, may have been better suited for the journey as opposed to either the soldiers or the horses accompanying them.

The discovery provides a new perspective on one of history’s greatest military feats, suggesting that the biological limits of both humans and animals may help explain not only where Hannibal crossed the Alps, but why he believed his extraordinary gamble could succeed.

“Our analysis of the energy landscape challenging the army suggests that the Col de la Traversette would have been the shortest and energetically most efficient route,” researchers write. “In which case, driven by the aim to minimize the energy costs of the crossing, he would have chosen the Traversette route.”

Hannibal’s campaign remains one of history’s most astonishing logistical achievements. After marching roughly 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from Spain, his force reached the Alps with approximately 46,000 soldiers and 37 war elephants.

The crossing reportedly took just 15 days despite hostile tribes, steep mountain passes, early winter conditions, and severe supply challenges. Only about half of the army survived the journey, although enough elephants reached Italy to participate in the Battle of the Trebia shortly afterward.

Researchers examined four leading candidate routes through the Alps by estimating the total energy required for each member of Hannibal’s expedition, including the soldiers, horses, and elephants accompanying them.

Rather than asking which mountain pass best matches ancient historical accounts, the researchers examined four leading candidate routes through the Alps, calculating the energy required for every member of Hannibal’s expedition—including his soldiers, horses, and war elephants.

Using models that consider elevation changes and the metabolic costs of climbing and descending, they calculated the total energy expenditure for men, horses, and elephants across each candidate route. The results consistently favored the Col de la Traversette.

The researchers estimate the entire army would have expended approximately 5.42 terajoules of energy along that route. By comparison, taking the Col du Clapier—long considered by many historians to be the strongest candidate—would have required roughly 16% more energy.

Even the second-best alternative would have demanded 11% more. A chart in the paper compares the cumulative energy costs of each route, showing the Traversette path retaining the lowest overall expenditure despite its dramatic elevation profile.

Although Hannibal obviously lacked modern mathematical models, the researchers suggest he likely had an instinctive insight into terrain developed through years of campaigning.

“Although Hannibal would not have had such accurate estimates, he may have had a qualitative understanding of the ranking of the possible routes,” researchers note.  

Perhaps the study’s most fascinating insights concern the elephants themselves.

Modern elephants require enormous quantities of food simply to maintain their body weight. Wild African elephants typically spend around 14 hours each day feeding, while a three-ton adult may consume roughly 440 pounds (200 kilos) of forage daily. Those requirements become even more daunting in mountainous terrain, where every climb increases energy demands.

The researchers estimate that each elephant would have expended an additional 1.53 gigajoules of energy simply from traversing the Col de la Traversette beyond its normal metabolic requirements. Replacing that energy through feeding alone would have required roughly five to six extra hours of foraging every day during the crossing.

That simply was not realistic.

Instead, the team concludes that Hannibal’s elephants almost certainly survived by drawing heavily on stored body fat rather than replacing the calories they were burning. Even then, the elephants appear to have been surprisingly well-suited for the journey.

According to the analysis, each elephant would have lost only about 4% of its body fat reserves during the Traversee crossing. Horses, by contrast, were estimated to lose around 11%, while surviving soldiers may have lost approximately 19% of their stored fat. Even on less efficient routes, the additional burden fell disproportionately on the men and horses rather than the elephants.

That finding helps explain an apparent historical paradox.

For generations, historians have wondered why Hannibal would risk bringing massive elephants across one of Europe’s most formidable mountain ranges. This new study argues that, biologically, elephants may actually have handled the journey better than many of the humans accompanying them.

Modern biomechanical research has shown that elephants move like a four-wheel-drive vehicle, enabling them to navigate difficult terrain more effectively than many might expect. Their large fat reserves also provided an energy buffer unavailable to exhausted soldiers.

“We may assume that Hannibal knew, after having traveled with elephants and their handlers through Spain and Southern France, that his elephants would struggle less than his men to make the crossing,” researchers note.

Researchers argue that the greatest challenge facing Carthage’s war elephants came after they crossed the Alps, not during the journey itself.

Once in Italy, Hannibal found himself deep inside enemy territory with no secure supply lines, making it extraordinarily difficult to replenish the elephants’ depleted energy reserves. Historical evidence suggests his army was forced to raid the surrounding countryside extensively to feed both its soldiers and animals.

Although the elephants survived the Alpine crossing, researchers say the enormous logistical burden of keeping them fed may have ultimately sealed their fate.

“The fact that all but one elephant died in the following winter might be indicative of Hannibal’s decision to stop attending to the energy needs of such costly pieces of military equipment when already under severe energetic constraints,” the researchers write.

The researchers suggest the elephants’ greatest value may have reached beyond their battlefield role. Simply bringing dozens of war elephants across the Alps would have delivered a powerful psychological advantage, both by surprising Roman forces and by demonstrating the extraordinary reach of Hannibal’s army.

But that advantage may have been short-lived. Once the initial shock passed, the enormous cost of feeding and upkeep of the animals deep inside enemy territory may have exceeded their military usefulness.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that the same biological realities that influenced Hannibal’s choice of route may also have determined the fate of his most famous weapons.

“Perhaps he counted on the elephants to provide an important, tactical element of surprise in the first battles against the Romans,” the researchers write. “In addition, he may have expected that his war elephants would awe and help recruit to his side the Celts of Northern Italy, who were known to be hostile to Rome.”

“After these first encounters, the elephants might have lost their military value,” the team adds.  

The paper, “Energy costs of Hannibal’s alpine crossing,” by Emilio Bertia and Fritz Vollrath, appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

Göbekli Tepe sits on a limestone ridge near Şanlıurfa, in the Upper Mesopotamian zone where some of the world’s earliest farming communities would later emerge. Its oldest monumental structures were built between roughly 9600 and 8200 BCE, by hunter-gatherer groups working centuries before pottery and long before cities, metal, or the wheel. The first shock […]

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