The research combines three complementary techniques, each filling in a different layer of the story. Sediment coring provided vertical slices through the landscape, revealing the sequence of natural and human-made deposits beneath the site. Electrical resistivity tomography and direct-current resistivity soundings mapped subsurface structures horizontally, tracing buried features without breaking the surface. Finally, phytolith analysis, the study of microscopic silica bodies formed within plant tissues, allowed the researchers to reconstruct which plants grew around the city and how vegetation changed as urbanization took hold. Together, these methods produced a picture of Bubastis that no single approach could deliver: a city whose growth, layout, and even its religious geography were dictated by the shape of the land beneath it.

The most consequential discovery concerns a set of Pleistocene sand mounds known as Geziras. These are relict landforms, remnants of ancient sandy deposits that rise subtly above the surrounding floodplain and, crucially, stay dry during the Nile’s annual inundation. Garbe’s surveys identified several of these mounds across the Bubastis area, and their positions are anything but random. The Temple of Pepi I in the western part of the city stands on one. The palace and the cemetery area in the north occupy others. Residential zones in eastern Bubastis cluster on still more. Even a lost monument may now have a location: an additional mound in the southeastern part of the site can plausibly be linked to the Temple of Hermes, a structure known from ancient writings whose whereabouts had been uncertain. The new evidence supports those textual clues about where the temple once stood.

This pattern reveals a deliberate urban logic. Rather than spreading indiscriminately across the floodplain, the builders of Bubastis selected flood-safe Geziras for their most important and most permanent structures, while leaving the low-lying ground between them for uses that could tolerate, or even benefit from, seasonal flooding. The geomorphology of the Delta was not an obstacle to be overcome but a framework to be exploited. In a landscape where the Nile’s branches shifted course and flood levels fluctuated over the centuries, choosing the right piece of ground was a matter of survival, and the people of Bubastis appear to have understood that from the city’s earliest days.

The coring program also quantified just how intensively different parts of the city were used. In settlement area S1, the researchers documented anthropogenic deposits reaching a thickness of up to 9.5 meters, an extraordinary accumulation of debris, building material, and occupation layers that identifies S1 as the primary living quarter of the city. The thickest deposits date particularly to the Ptolemaic period, from about 332 to 30 BCE, and the Roman period, from about 30 BCE to 200 CE, showing that these late phases of Bubastis’s history were also among its most densely built. By contrast, the surrounding low-lying floodplain areas, especially area S2, show only sparse settlement evidence. These marginal zones were likely given over to agriculture, and they had a distinct advantage for it: a nearby Nile branch, flowing to the north and northeast of the city, regularly deposited nutrient-rich sediments across the floodplain, keeping the fields naturally fertilized.

The phytolith record adds a biological dimension to this reconstruction, tracking vegetation from the end of the last ice age through the city’s decline. During the transition from the Late Pleistocene to the Early Holocene, long before Bubastis existed, the landscape was dominated by grasses, shrubs, and trees, a natural Delta environment shaped by river processes rather than human hands. That changed with the arrival of settlement. From the Old Kingdom onward, spanning roughly 2850 to 2180 BCE, the onset of occupation coincided with a marked increase in cereal-type phytoliths. Crucially, these cereal signatures appear in the nutrient-rich floodplain sediments, providing the earliest evidence for localized cereal cultivation at Bubastis during the Early Old Kingdom. The fields, in other words, were already feeding the city in its formative centuries.

Inside the settlement itself, the phytolith data tell a different story. Elevated proportions of cereal-type phytoliths in anthropogenic deposits across the urban area, and particularly in the main residential zone S1, point to intensive cereal processing and storage taking place within the city walls. Grain was not only grown nearby but handled, threshed, milled, and stockpiled in the residential quarters, a pattern that speaks to the scale of Bubastis’s population and the logistical sophistication required to sustain it. The city was, in a very real sense, an agricultural machine as much as a religious and administrative center, with its food economy woven directly into the fabric of its neighborhoods.

Over time, that arrangement shifted. From the Late Period, beginning around 664 BCE, through Roman times, cultivation practices increasingly moved toward the settlement periphery. As Bubastis expanded and its builders consumed more land, the natural vegetation around the city diminished, and farming was pushed outward to the edges of the urban footprint. This trajectory, from cultivation embedded within and immediately around the early settlement to agriculture relegated to the periphery of a sprawling city, mirrors patterns familiar from urban growth in other ancient and modern contexts, but here it is documented with unusual precision through a combination of sediment chemistry, landform mapping, and plant microfossils.

The broader significance of the work lies in what it says about human adaptability in unstable environments. The Holocene Nile Delta was shaped by a constant interplay of river avulsions, sedimentation, and seasonal flooding, conditions that created fertile opportunities for early civilization while simultaneously driving settlement instability and frequent relocation. Bubastis’s longevity was not an accident of geography but the product of choices: siting temples and palaces on high ground, farming the fertile lows, and adjusting land use as the city and its environment co-evolved. Different geomorphological settings were deliberately selected for specific functions and phases of occupation, a dynamic interplay between nature and human decision-making that unfolded over three thousand years.

The study also refines interpretations of Bubastis’s emergence as a center of religious and administrative power, a status reflected in its extensive temple and palace areas, including the famous Temple of Bastet with its man-made sacred canals identified in earlier geoarchaeological work. Until now, knowledge of the site’s environmental conditions rested on a handful of historical texts and preliminary studies. By delivering the first area-wide reconstruction, the new research demonstrates how strongly the development of an ancient Egyptian urban center depended on regional environmental conditions, and it showcases the value of geoarchaeological methods for reconstructing human-environment interactions across the Delta, where so many settlements rose and fell with the shifting waters of the Nile. For Bubastis, the ground beneath the city was never just a foundation. It was a partner in the city’s survival, and reading that partnership from the sediments is what finally explains how one Delta town outlasted them all.

Subject of Research: Holocene landscape evolution and long-term settlement development at the ancient Egyptian city of Bubastis in the southeastern Nile Delta

Article Title: Holocene landscape evolution and settlement development in the surroundings of the ancient Egyptian city of Bubastis (“Tell Basta”), southeastern Nile Delta

Article References: Garbe, P. (2026). Holocene landscape evolution and settlement development in the surroundings of the ancient Egyptian city of Bubastis (“Tell Basta”), southeastern Nile Delta. E&G Quaternary Science Journal, 75(2), 169-171. https://doi.org/10.5194/egqsj-75-169-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/egqsj-75-169-2026

Keywords: Bubastis, Tell Basta, Nile Delta, geoarchaeology, Holocene, Geziras, phytoliths, sediment coring, electrical resistivity tomography, ancient Egypt, urban development, Nile flooding