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The precious object the Great Pyramid was built
to shelter for all eternity - the mummified remains
of King Khufu - have never been found and are
presumed to have been stolen. Now 4,500 years
later, 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 to directly to Khufu's burial chamber,
a room which is unlikely to have been violated
and contains the king's remains. But Giles Dormion
and Jean-Yves Verd'hurt have so far been refused
permission by the Egyptian Supreme Council of
Antiquities to prove the room's existence. "To
do so, one would simply have to pass a fiber optic
cable down the through the existing hole in the
stone, to see if there are portcullis blocks in
the corridor below", says 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 ancient Egyptians
lowered into the corridor leading to the king's
funeral chamber, via a system of cords 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, their radar analysis
in another pyramid at Meidum lead to the discovery
of two previously undetected rooms. The location
of the proposed rooms places it "at the cross-section
of the diagonals and at the absolute heart of
the pyramid", a possibly symbolic resting place
for Khufu.
There are plenty of skeptics. Says Aidan Dodson,
Egyptian funerary archeology expert 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 argue the pyramid evolved by
trial and error, as the architects saw that the
rooms conceived as the 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. But the granite beams are cracked.
Dormion argues "this accident occurred during
the building of the pyramid, in the sight and
to the knowledge of the builders." He points to
the traces of 4,500-year-old plaster in the cracks
- evidence, he believes, of attempts to shore
up the roof. Says Dormion, "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 wasn't equipped to
receive a dead king. It lacked an entrance wide
enough to accommodate the stone sarcophagus Khufu
ordered for himself.
The two therefore challenge one of the most popular
theories about the Great Pyramid: that its internal
structure was built according to a plan. Verd'hurt
describes his "absolute frustration" at the Supreme
Council of Antiquities' refusal to authorize more
investigations. No one from the Council agreed
to comment. But the pyramids are a sensitive issue
in Egypt.
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