By Simon Cherner
Posted 6 hours ago, updated 44 minutes ago
ARCHEOLOGY – The ScanPyramids mission filmed the mysterious corridor above the main entrance, which it identified in 2016, in February.
Something new lies behind the thick, four-thousand-year-old blocks of King Cheops’ tomb. Seven years after scientists from the international ScanPyramids project discovered the existence of unknown cavities hidden in the depths of the Great Pyramid of Giza across from Cairo, they provide a first glimpse of one of these so fantasized spaces. The corridor in question, located behind the entrance to the north wall of the monument, did not hide anything unexpected. bare walls. No mummy in ambush or unexpected treasures. In the eyes of professionals, it’s still fabulous.
This two meter wide space under rafters stretches almost nine meters. It was inspected on February 24 thanks to a tiny opening detected by radar in the joint of the entrance’s rafters. Since no head passed there, the researchers used a five-millimeter-diameter endoscope passed through a copper tube to get an overview of this space, which had been hidden since the memorial was built.
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What was the use of this blind corridor laid out at the north end of the vast tomb of Cheops? When the route of a dump room designed to disperse the mass above the pyramid’s main entrance is pushed forward by Egyptian authorities, the scientists behind the ScanPyramids project, they are wary of a decision. Their interest lies elsewhere: the proven existence of this space proves what their instruments had discovered in 2016 thanks to the principle of muon radiography. “These images confirm the presence of this cavity, which we already suspected is 99.99% existent. They also complete the demonstration of the effectiveness of our non-destructive and non-invasive methods,” emphasizes Mehdi Tayoubi, co-director of the ScanPyramids mission.
Interior view of the cavity in the Great Pyramid of Giza discovered in 2016. ScanPyramids
The muography, adapted to the context of the pyramid by the University of Nagoya and the Commissariat of Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies (CEA), consists of capturing elementary particles sensitive to the bodies that pass through them. This technique has made it possible since 2016 to identify two previously unknown rooms inside the Great Pyramid: the North Face Corridor (NFC), located near the entrance, and a “large cavity” (nicknamed SP-BV) with a At least a hundred feet in diameter and which would be about ten feet above the great gallery.
View of the north facade of the Pyramid of Cheops, at the base of the monument, in November 2022. The corridor inspected by the ScanPyramids mission is above the rafters of the main entrance, which today serves as a tourist access point. Amir MAKAR, AFP
The Last Mysteries of the Pyramid
According to the images of the endoscope, the inspected corridor does not seem to be connected to the “great void”. “A smaller corridor, less than a meter, between these two structures cannot be completely ruled out from these measurements,” note the 36 researchers involved in the ScanPyramids mission, however, in an article published Thursday in the science journal Nature Communication. Mehdi Tayoubi notes that traces of a filled corridor cannot be ruled out either. The charismatic Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass already dreams of finding “the real burial chamber of King Cheops”. The work is definitely not nearing completion. “We will continue our scanning campaign,” confirmed the head of the Supreme Antiquities Council, Mostafa Waziri, at the base of the pyramids on Thursday.
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Launched in 2015 under the auspices of Egypt’s Ministry of National Antiquities, the ScanPyramids scientific mission links Cairo University with the French institute HIP. The association, supported by Dassault Systèmes, coordinates the range of actors involved in the project and is managed on the Egyptian side by a scientific committee headed by Zahi Hawass. As one of the most recent partners in the adventure, the Technical University of Munich conducted additional radar surveys on the north face of the pyramid between 2020 and 2022 to refine the contours of the cavity.
Zahi Hawass, Egyptian archaeologist and former Minister of Antiquities, in front of the Great Sphinx of Giza, in Giza, Egypt November 20, 2019. Khaled DESOUKI / AFP
Finally, the identification and study of these new rooms of the Great Pyramid could allow a better understanding of the final mysteries of its construction. Several competing hypotheses exist on this architectural problem, which could have been solved by external or internal ramp systems, or even a mixture of both. The monument, built around 2560 B.C. Erected during the time of the ancient Egyptian Empire, it remained the tallest human structure ever built for several millennia. And the unsolved mysteries of this wonder of the world continue to fascinate today.
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