From Ancient Legends to Pixels: Reconstructing Ancient Esna Landscape with GIS and Remote Sensing

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract. This paper develops a text-driven reconstruction of the ritual landscape associated with the Festival of Seizing the Staff at Esna, Upper Egypt. Temple inscriptions are treated as relational evidence encoding sequence, adjacency, orientation, thresholds, and ritual function rather than as surveyed maps. Three historical hypotheses are tested: the Upper Place formed a nested elevated setting; Red Lake and Lake of Rebel’s Fragment belonged to a connected northern hydroscape; and the inscriptions preserve relational rather than metric topography. The analysis integrates a 30 m Copernicus DEM GLO-30, five cloud-screened Sentinel-2 Level-2A dates, JRC Global Surface Water, and 32 Landsat Collection 2 Level-2 scenes grouped into six epochs from 1984–2025. A reproducible workflow derives slope, multi-scale topographic position, D8 drainage, Topographic Wetness Index, Height Above Nearest Drainage, MNDWI, hydrogeomorphic concordance, terrain profiles, landscape-class persistence, and Nile transect change. The corridor is predominantly low gradient: 69.5% of valid cells are at or below 2°, and 36.9% lie within 5 m of modelled drainage elevation under the primary network. Across the six Landsat epochs, mean landscape-class persistence is 0.943 and 90.0% of valid pixels have persistence of at least 0.8. At 13 measurable Nile transects, the endpoint-period median Jaccard overlap is 0.944 and median absolute centre shift is 15 m, with a local exception of 570 m. These results describe modern surface and river-planform persistence only; they do not demonstrate unchanged elevation, ancient geomorphic stability, or archaeological-site preservation.