Mystery Passage In Great Pyramid Found

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French Archaeologists Find

Mystery Passage In Great Pyramid

By Laura Spinney in Paris

The Guardian

9-3-4

 

 

It is one of the seven wonders of the world, but the precious objects

the Great Pyramid was built to shelter for all eternity - the

mummified remains of King Cheops or Khufu - have never been found, and

are presumed to have been stolen by tomb robbers. Now, 4,500 years

after it was completed, this semi-mythical structure may be about to

reveal its greatest secret: the true resting place of the pharaoh.

 

Using architectural analysis and ground-penetrating radar, two amateur

French Egyptologists claim to have discovered a previously unknown

corridor inside the pyramid. They believe it leads directly to Khufu's

burial chamber, a room which - if it exists - is unlikely ever to have

been violated, and probably still contains the king's remains.

 

But Gilles Dormion, an architect, and Jean-Yves Verd'hurt, a retired

property agent, have so far been refused permission by the Egyptian

Supreme Council of Antiquities to follow up their findings and, they

hope, prove the room's existence.

 

"To do so, one would simply have to pass a fibre optic cable down

through existing holes in the stone, to see if there are portcullis

blocks in the corridor below," said Mr Verd'hurt. "Then it will be

necessary to enter the front part of the corridor and penetrate the

room, taking all precautions to ensure that it is not contaminated."

 

The portcullis blocks were large granite slabs that the ancient

Egyptians lowered into the corridor leading to the king's funeral

chamber, via a system of cords descending from above, to seal it after

his burial.

 

 

 

Until these procedures have been carried out, the two are at pains to

stress that the room has not been discovered. However, they have been

working in the pyramids for 20 years, and their radar analyses in

another pyramid, at Meidum, led in 2000 to the discovery of two

previously undetected rooms.

 

One respected Egyptologist, Jean-Pierre Corteggiani, of the French

Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, was impressed by their

work from the start. What first struck him, he said, was that the

georadar images were collected and interpreted by a non-Egyptologist,

Jean-Pierre Baron, of Safege, a French company that specialises in

georadar.

 

"This specialist works for a company, one of whose main projects is to

lay out the future TGV [express train] route from Paris to

Strasbourg," said Mr Corteggiani. "If he says it is safe to lay the

rails here, because there is no cavity under the ground here, he'd

better be right. If not, the death toll will be very high."

 

Symbolic

 

Mr Corteggiani was also intrigued by the location of the proposed room

- under the so-called queen's chamber, but further west - which would

place it "at the cross-section of the diagonals and the absolute heart

of the pyramid", a possibly symbolic resting place for Khufu.

 

Mr Corteggiani brought Mr Dormion and Mr Verd'hurt's ideas to the

attention of Nicolas Grimal, who holds the chair in Egyptology at the

Collège de France. Mr Grimal was sufficiently impressed to write in

his preface to Mr Dormion's book, La Chambre de Chéops, which will be

published in France on Wednesday, that if the findings are confirmed,

they represent "without doubt, one of the greatest discoveries in

Egyptology".

 

However, when the two present their conclusions to an international

congress of Egyptologists in Grenoble in a week's time, they are

likely to meet with more scepticism.

 

"The idea that Khufu's burial chamber is still to be found in the

pyramid I find unbelievable," said Aidan Dodson, an expert in Egyptian

funerary archaeology at the University of Bristol. "Architecturally

there is no reason why there should be a corridor underneath the

queen's room. The burial chamber has always been known."

 

The two Frenchmen have come up with a hypothesis that challenges one

of the most popular theories about the Great Pyramid: that its

internal structure was conceived in advance and built as planned.

 

The pyramid contains three known chambers: a subterranean cavity,

which was clearly never used, the confusingly named queen's chamber,

which was never intended as a burial chamber for the queen, but

possibly to hold the king's funeral gifts, and higher up, the king's

chamber, which contains an empty granite sarcophagus. This sarcophagus

is conventionally thought to have contained Khufu's mummy.

 

But Mr Dormion and Mr Verd'hurt argue that the pyramid evolved by

trial and error, as the architects saw that rooms initially conceived

as burial chambers would not take the weight placed on top of them,

and went back to the drawing-board.

 

Above the king's chamber, whose roof is reinforced with granite beams

weighing 50 tonnes each, they built in an ingenious system of

relieving chambers or cavities.

 

"The idea was to deflect the weight of the masonry over the core of

the pyramid away from those roofing beams and out to the sides," said

Jeffrey Spencer, deputy keeper of the British Museum's department of

ancient Egypt and Sudan.

 

But the granite beams are cracked - faults that Mr Spencer said had

traditionally been put down to earthquake activity long after the

pyramid was completed. Mr Dormion argues instead that "this accident

occurred during the building of the pyramid, in the sight and to the

knowledge of the builders".

 

He points to traces of 4,500-year-old plaster in the cracks -

evidence, he believes, of attempts to shore up the roof.

 

"At the end of the day," Mr Dormion writes, "the entire problem of the

Great Pyramid can be summed up by this theory: Khufu had three funeral

chambers built for himself. The first remained unfinished, the second

was available and the third cracked. Khufu was therefore interred in

the second."

 

Or rather beneath the second, because the queen's chamber itself was

not equipped to receive a dead king - lacking, most notably, an

entrance wide enough to accommodate the stone sarcophagus Khufu

ordered for himself.

 

Whether Mr Dormion is right remains to be seen. Mr Verd'hurt describes

his "absolute frustration" at the Supreme Council of Antiquities'

refusal to authorise further investigations, for which they have

offered him no explanation. No one from the council was prepared to

comment. But the pyramids are a sensitive issue in Egypt, and similar

requests have been refused in the past.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1293377,00.html