According to Mostafa Waziri, head of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, they would keep on scanning this to discover what they can do… to know what they can discover under it, or simply at the end of this corridor.
The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the place on the Earth that is hardly unexplored: measured, schemed, visited over the generations. However, a perspective taken through a small camera lens of only 6 millimeters has reopened the monument as a moving engineering riddle to show a closed tunnel hanging over the original entrance of the pyramid, in an area previously thought to be reachable only by solid rock.
The newly established space is approximately 7 meters above the entrance and is cowered behind the chevron-shaped masonry at the north face. It is approximately 9 meters long, and 2.1 meters wide, the interior of which looks unoccupied: the walls are composed of rough-hewn blocks and solid overhead is vaulted. The tunnel can not be entered externally; the initial human inspection into it was performed as scientists used an endoscope that passed through a small cut between the rocks.
That shot was not the start of a long chain of evidence, it was its final one. The first suggestion was through muography which is the way in which muons or particles that are produced when cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere travel through a solid substance. Ideally, the detectors placed on or close to a huge structure will record the arrival of muons with greater ease and paint out a shadow map of the density variations. The strength of this approach lies precisely in the fact that it does not involve opening up stone heritage, but it also portrays in possibilities: a “void” may be a line, an empty place created by the decisions of the construction, or a complex volume with indistinct edges. In the case of Khufu north face anomaly, the crew refocused the image using ground-penetrating radar and ultrasound and reduced the difference where a least invasive survey could have been made without disrupting the chevrons over the entrance. The discovery of the sharp object by the endoscope made the debate in physics sharper to architecture.
Egyptian experts have referred to the passageway as possibly structural, a type of artificial buffer which may re-distribute load concerning the entry area. Others makes it a purposeful aspect that relates to internal planning decisions that remain resistant to one and accepted reading. Zahi Hawass described it as a significant finding, attributing the significance to a much bigger issue that has never been resolved conclusively: the most known chambers of the Great Pyramid do not, on their own, prove where the burial of Khufu was finally deposited.
The corridor is also a part of a longer technical narrative which has been developing over the last ten years. The mission of ScanPyramids (which started in 2015) was based on an interdisciplinary toolkit, with the infrared thermography, muon tomography, and 3D reconstruction, to learn more about how the Old Kingdom pyramids had been constructed without going back to the intrusive techniques of the previous centuries. Inside the pyramid of Khufu, this program had earlier noted a larger than normal “Big Void” over the Grand Gallery, an amount which is at least 30 meters in length, and which has been detected at various angles through the use of various muon measure instruments. These results collectively maintain a strict line: these are not interpretations of detection, but a ruler, nor a complete classification but a calculated state of “void.”
The pyramid of Khufu has extended beyond the pyramid to Giza. In the Menkaure Pyramid, non-destructive testing and image-fusion analysis were used to determine that behind an abnormally smooth granite area on the eastern facade, there are two air-filled cavities that indicate that even the smallest of the three pyramids might still hold some deliberate design choices even on areas previously regarded as secondary. This yields a new form of fieldwork, in which ancient masonry is interpreted as a system of strains, concessions, and concealed volumes, and in which even the tiniest tool, a pencil-thin camera, can transform the interrogatives that one poses of the biggest stone monument in the world.
