The world's oldest cobblestone street.

Built approximately 4,600 years ago, the Moeris quarry-road is the world's oldest paved road, used for transporting volcanic rock.

The quarry road - Lake Moeris in Egypt. Photo: IFL Science

In 1994, while mapping the quarries of ancient Egypt, geologists discovered a 12-kilometer-long road paved with limestone and sandstone, leading from a basalt quarry to Lake Moeris. There, they found pottery, likely left behind by quarry workers, and an ancient camp for the workers. Based on this, the research team determined that the road dated back to approximately 2600-2200 BC, making it the oldest paved road in the world, surpassing the previous record by 500 years.

The road was used to transport volcanic basalt from the quarry to Lake Moeris, an ancient lake that connected to the Nile River seasonally, allowing workers to transport the stone to Giza by boat. The ancient Egyptians used this stone to pave the interiors of funerary temples and to make royal sarcophagi.

The work of transporting basalt stones led to the need to build a road using limestone and sandstone. Egyptologists believe that the ancients transported these stones on sleds, and the sleds were placed on wooden planks laid along the road, as the stone surface showed no grooves or wear marks from contact with the sleds.

Not only is it the oldest cobblestone road in the world, it's also the only one of its kind built by the ancient Egyptians. It's not the best-built road, as it's likely the workers simply used whatever stones were convenient. In some sections, they tried to fit the stones together neatly, but in others, they are arranged more haphazardly.

"The road may not be on par with the pyramids in terms of engineering marvels, but it is still a great achievement. Not only is it older than we previously thought, but we didn't even know they (the ancient Egyptians) built it," said geologist James Harrell of the University of Toledo at the time of the discovery of the ancient structure.

The world has older roads, but none of them are paved with stone. The Sweet Track, a wooden walkway in Somerset, England, even dates back to 3806 BC, during the Neolithic period. Scientists determined the age of the structure using phylogenetic dating, or dating based on tree rings.

Thu Thao (According to IFL Science )

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