Great Pyramid's secret may be revealed
National Geographic Archives and Guardian News Service

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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