We’re going to continue our scanning so we will see what we can do… to figure out what we can find out beneath it, or just by the end of this corridor, said Mostafa Waziri, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
There is a special charge to that pledge of further exploration at Giza since the last known certified area within the Great Pyramid of Khufu was not accessed by breaking a door. It was arrived at by reading that monument like an engineer reads a bridge: like a volume with stresses, densities, and allowances some of which are familiar and some which are unknown.
The sealed corridor has just been confirmed to be quite 9 meters in length and approximately 2.1 meters in width and was established approximately 7 meters above the main entrance behind the chevron-shaped masonry of the pyramid. It is in a place that has always been thought to be rock, and can never be externally approached. The original information came with muography, the movement of muons or high-energy particles formed when the cosmic rays collide with the atmosphere, through or into dense material. Practically, it gives a density portrait and not a photograph: more density in an area indicates less density, indicating a void. Finish and function is what muography does not necessarily give. The hollow may be a building hole, an airway, a passage, or the start of a larger hole.
Checking thus became a process of bare eye seeing. In 2015, the ScanPyramids project was initiated and has incorporated non-invasive methods of non-infrared thermography, ultrasound, and 3D simulations plus cosmic-ray radiography. Those layers became smaller where any examination could be made with the least disruption. The only way out was by passing a 6-millimeter endoscope, thinner than a pencil, through a small crevice between the stones in the chevron. The film showed a hollowed-out trail and made up by coarse hewn blocks and a vaulted roof, which seem untouched as the hall was covered up. The location of the corridor is controversial in engineering terms, as are its existence.
It has been characterized by Egyptian experts as possibly structural, an empty zone designed to redistribute loads around an opening or cushion weight beyond a critical point. This reading is in line with what the chevrons themselves promote to the outside: a conscious method of controlling the pathways of pressure. The corridor, however, also enlarges the long-standing tradition of the pyramid not to provide easy solutions. According to Zahi Hawass, it was a great find, and related its meaning to the fact that the question of the burial destination of Khufu remains unanswered, a key difference in a monument where the most recognizable of the chambers are not identical with a verified royal tomb.
The meaning of the corridor is also realized when it is put in the context of other non-destructive signs. Earlier ScanPyramids located a bigger, earlier, “Big Void” over the Grand Gallery, which supports the fact that huge interior volumes still have to be described. Technical reports of the muon work indicate that a variety of detector strategies can triangulate the size of a void with a high level of certainty; one of the studies noted a muon-excess significance in the full 10s in the case of the corridor-shaped scenario. That is, the corridor is not merely a conjecture of one instrument but a convergent finding which passes tests of cross-checks and models.
Constructed during the period of about 2600 BC and originally having a height of 146 meters, the Great Pyramid is something that has always been regarded as a victory of bulk. The passage over its entrance is a change of focus to something more subtle: the cleverness of concealed space a construction choice which can be tracked with more and more accuracy in response to modern sensors despite the fact that the intent behind the construction is still unknown behind the stone.
