The interior of the Great Pyramid of Giza is full of rooms. And to reach the abandoned underground chamber, the queen's chamber, the great central gallery or the Pharaoh's chamber, it is necessary to cross long and narrow corridors open between the millions of pieces of limestone that make up the imposing structure, the last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that remains standing.
An international group of researchers has discovered a new secret passageway to move inside the building, a nine meter long passage that starts near the main entrance.
As the archaeologists explain in an article published in the journal Nature Communications, this finding came thanks to the Scan Pyramids project, which since 2015 has been using non-invasive technology that includes infrared thermography, 3D simulations, and cosmic rays (muons) to observe the interior of the piramid.
Experts point out that this corridor could contribute to the knowledge about the construction of the pyramid 4,500 years ago, during the reign of Pharaoh Cheops (or Khufu), son of King Snefru, and the purpose of a gabled limestone structure that was It is in front of the corridor.
The Great Pyramid was built as a monumental tomb around 2560 BC. The building, which reached 146 meters in height before its external cladding was removed during the Middle Ages, today stands at 139 meters and 230 meters in width. The Great Pyramid was the tallest human-made structure for centuries until the Eiffel Tower was erected in Paris in 1889.
The newly discovered passageway, which is unfinished, was probably created to redistribute the weight of the construction around the main entrance now used by tourists, located about seven meters away, explained Mostafa Waziri, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt.
"We are going to continue our scans to see what we can find, to find out what we can find below, or simply at the end of this corridor," he said in statements to reporters and collected by Reuters in front of the pyramid.
Waziri recalled that the researchers believe that five rooms were built over the pharaoh's burial chamber, in the center of the structure, to redistribute the weight of the enormous construction. "It is even possible that Cheops had more than one burial chamber," he added.
The experts detected the secret corridor through x-rays of muons (an elementary particle that does not decay and is only found in cosmic rays and in the laboratory). Then they introduced a 6-millimeter-thick endoscope from Nagoya University that was passed through the small openings between the large 1-2-meter stones.
In 2017, Scan Pyramids researchers already announced the discovery of a void at least 30 meters long inside the Great Pyramid, the first major internal structure found since the 19th century.
