I did not even know that this
program was on, but it is certainly welcome to see new data.
Beyond that I have difficulty
associating the word tunnel with a passage that is twenty centimeters square
and the word door with an end block. It
has fed speculation from the beginning.
I have come to the conclusion
that the great pyramid needs to be taken down block by block and then
reassembled block by block and then fully restored with casing stones. It would take about ten years and around a
couple of billion dollars, but is well within our capabilities. If that works out well, we can finish the
rest of the complex.
Once done, we will have all the
knowledge that is possible to winkle out and it will be a rather profitable tourist
attraction for the next 5000 years.
At present we have reason to
believe that this complex went up in the Early Bronze age a millennia before
Khufu and represented the culmination of a civilization that dominated the Nile
Delta and the Mediterranean littoral we know as Libya
Critically, it had a deep
mathematical and astronomical tradition.
The Great Pyramid was the culmination of that tradition and I suspect
that all these odd structures represent the physical expression of key
relationships. Suddenly a twenty
centimeter square shaft is no longer strange.
First images from Great Pyramid's chamber of secrets
25 May 2011 by Rowan Hooper
THEY might be ancient graffiti tags left by a worker or symbols of
religious significance. A robot has sent back the first images of markings
on the wall of a tiny chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt
that have not been seen for 4500 years. It has also helped settle the
controversy about the only metal known to exist in the pyramid, and shows a
"door" that could lead to another hidden chamber.
The pyramid is thought to have been built as a tomb for the pharaoh
Khufu, and is the last of the seven wonders of the ancient world still
standing. It contains three main chambers: the Queen's Chamber, the Grand
Gallery and the King's Chamber, which has two air shafts connecting it with the
outside world. Strangely, though, there are two tunnels, about 20 centimetres
by 20 centimetres, that extend from the north and south walls of the Queen's
Chamber and stop at stone doors before they reach the outside of the pyramid (see
diagram).
The function of these tunnels and doors is unknown, but some believe
that one or both could lead to a secret chamber. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's
Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, describes the doors as the last
great mystery of the pyramid.
Several attempts have been made to explore the tunnels using robots. In
1993, a robot crawled some 63 metres up the tunnel in the south wall and
discovered what appeared to be a small stone door set with metal pins. Metal is
not part of any other known structure in the pyramid, and the discovery ignited
speculation that the pins were door handles, keys or even parts of a power
supply constructed by aliens.
Then in 2002 another
robot drilled through the stone block and filmed a small chamber
backed by a large blocking stone, but little else. Now a robot designed by
engineer Rob Richardson from the University of Leeds, UK, and
colleagues, and named Djedi after the magician that Khufu consulted when he
planned his tomb, has crawled up the tunnel carrying a bendy "micro
snake" camera that can see around corners.
Images sent back by the camera have revealed hieroglyphs
written in red paint and lines in the stone that could be marks left
by stone masons when the chamber was being carved (Annales Du Service des
Antiquités De L'Égypte, vol 84, ISBN: 978-977-704-184-3). "If these
hieroglyphs could be deciphered they could help Egyptologists work out why
these mysterious shafts were built," says Richardson
"Red-painted numbers and graffiti are very common around Giza ," says Peter Der Manuelian, an Egyptologist at Harvard University
and director of the Giza Archives at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
As the camera can see around corners, the back
of the stone door has been observed for the first time, scotching the
more fanciful theories about the metal pins, says camera-designer Shaun
Whitehead of the exploration company Scoutek, based in Melton Mowbray, UK. "Our new
pictures from behind the pins show that they end in small, beautifully made
loops, indicating that they were more likely ornamental rather than electrical
connections."
Whitehead, who worked in collaboration with Dassault Systèmes in
Vélizy-Villacoublay, France, adds: "Also, the back of the 'door' is
polished so it must have been important. It doesn't look like it was a rough
piece of stone used to stop debris getting into the shaft."
Kate
Spence, an Egyptologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved
in the study, suspects that since the narrow tunnels can serve no practical
purpose, they are almost certainly symbolic. "The metal pins look like
symbolic door handles, and the shafts from the Queen's Chamber are oriented
north-south, not east-west, so I strongly suspect that their function is
symbolic and relates to the stars, not the sun," she says.
While the King's Chamber originally contained Khufu's sarcophagus and
possibly his mummy, the Queen's Chamber probably didn't contain the remains of
a queen: Khufu's wives were interred in three smaller pyramids of their own.
Instead, Spence speculates that the Queen's Chamber may have contained a
"ka" statue of the pharaoh. In this interpretation the shafts were
built to allow Khufu's ka, or spirit, to cross to the afterlife.
As for the second "door" at the rear of the chamber, which is
rough and unfinished, Spence thinks it is simply the end of the shaft.
"It's most likely to be a backing stone - there won't be another chamber
behind it, it makes no sense," she says. "However, it's fascinating
from a symbolic point of view, and this sort of work will allow us to get at
the intention behind the construction of the pyramid."
Hawass, director of the Djedi project, says that no other pyramid is
known to have a tunnel and doorway like this, which, he says, suggests there
could be a hidden room. "The King's Chamber may have been a dummy room,
since the most important thing in the mind of the ancient Egyptians was to hide
the burial chamber," he says. "We have a story that the magician
Djedi met Khufu, who was searching for the god Thoth so he could find the
secret of hiding his pyramid. Based on that maybe there is something hidden in
the pyramid."
