Credit: The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities
A new corridor measuring about 30 feet was discovered recently in the biggest of the three Giza Pyramids, the Pyramid of Khufu.
Images and videos were released to the public after the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities investigated the tunnel using an endoscopic camera.
Despite the nearly unlimited intrigue and mystery surrounding Ancient Egypt’s most remarkable engineering accomplishments, the tunnel has been quickly labeled as a method to disperse the weight of the sandstone blocks above.
One of the most iconic tourist attractions in the world, it seems mad to think there are still 30 feet or 9 meters of hidden passageway that were to be found inside, but it’s actually the second recently-discovered hidden passageway in Khufu’s pyramid, with an even longer 98-feet-long corridor being discovered in 2017.
Part of the reason why we’re enjoying these new insights is the work of an international team of researchers at the ScanPyramids project , which uses non-damaging, non-invasive thermography and cosmic-ray muon radiography to scan the pyramids for hidden secrets.
Near to the main entrance used by tourists today, the corridor’s whole purpose is not entirely known, in part because it seems to be unfinished.
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“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,” Mostafa Waziri, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities told reporters after a press conference in front of the pyramid.
Built in the year 2,560 BCE, the pyramids were long thought to be tombs. Additional research mostly by archaeologists and archaeo-astronomers that tend to be unfavored by Egyptian authorities, suggests there would have been a much broader array of purposes, including as a measuring stick for Earth’s mass and a calculatory instrument for the movement of the stars and planets.
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The latter theory is dismissed as sensational, but the pyramids are nothing if not sensational, and a lot of the geometry of Khufu’s pyramid corresponds to astronomical phenomena important to the Ancient Egyptians, who in any case made tombs in several other styles far more often than pyramidal.
Scan Pyramids has announced they are going to continue their work on the new passage as well as trying to find other ones.
WATCH the ScanPyramid presentation below…
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