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Scientists exploring the Great Pyramid in Egypt
sent a robot into the northern shaft in the past
few days, discovering another blocking stone.
The "door" appears to be identical to the one
in the southern shaft that was already known.
The doors are equidistant (65 meters/208 feet)
from the queen's chamber. It is the third such
block discovered within the shafts of the pyramid.
The announcement of the discovery was made Monday
by Farouk Hosni, Egypt's minister of culture,
and Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's
Supreme Council of Antiquities and a National
Geographic explorer-in-residence.
A specially developed combination of robotics,
camera, and lighting technology developed by iRobot
of Boston, yielded the new information. Until
this discovery, no one knew that the northern
shaft extended to the north as far as the southern
shaft goes to the south.
Prior explorations of the northern shaft have
failed because, unlike the southern shaft, the
northern shaft has a number of bends and sharp
corners. Hawass suggested that the layout of the
northern shaft may have been designed to avoid
intersection with the pyramid's grand gallery.
"This find in the northern shaft, coupled with
last week's discovery of a second 'door' behind
the blocking stone in the southern shaft, represents
the first major new information about the Great
Pyramid in more than a century. We will now carefully
study the data and plan out further investigation
of the two shafts in order to accurately map and
interpret the find," Hawass said.
The newly discovered northern shaft door appears
to be very similar to the one in the southern
shaft, including the presence of a pair of copper
"pins" or "handles." The southern shaft "door"
was discovered in a 1993 investigation conducted
under the auspices of the German Archaeological
Institute.
On September 17, 2002, a National Geographic robot,
specially designed to traverse the southern shaft
to the blocking stone, inserted a miniature fiber-optic
camera into a three-quarters-of-an-inch hole to
reveal the rough-hewn blocking stone lying seven
inches beyond the original southern shaft door.
That earlier portion of the expedition was broadcast
live in an international television event carried
on National Geographic Channel and on Fox in the
U.S.
"The mystery of the Great Pyramid becomes all
the more compelling with each new discovery coming
from the queen's chamber and the Supreme Council
of Antiquities/National Geographic expedition,"
Terry Garcia, executive vice president of mission
programs at the National Geographic Society said.
"This continuation of our century-long involvement
in archaeological breakthroughs in Egypt is an
exciting extension of the National Geographic
mission."
Portions of the northern shaft have been previously
explored. In 1872 Waynman Dixon found a small
bronze hook and granite ball. In the 1920s a pyramid
enthusiast, Morton Edgar, attempted to learn more
about the queen's chamber shafts by using flexible
metal rods. In the southern shaft he was stopped,
presumably by the blocking door. In the northern
shaft, which appears to bend and curve around
the grand gallery, Edgar's flexible rods broke
and remain there to this day. The SCA/NG robot
"rover" had to navigate around the metal rods
to reach the end of the northern shaft.
In the course of the German Archaeological Institute's
1993 investigation, Rudolf Gantenbrink's robot
traversed part of the shaft but only succeeded
in covering 19 meters (63.3 feet).
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