EA few meters above today’s entrance to the Pyramid of Cheops, something strange can be seen: in a notch in the sloped facade of the world-famous limestone body in Giza, outside the gates of Cairo, there are two corners made of four smooth-hewn blocks of stone, each about two meters wide. The tips of these so-called chevrons point upwards like a gable, and the passage through which the sarcophagus containing the mummy of Pharaoh Cheops, aka Khufu, was once pushed into the interior of the mighty building in the middle of the 26th century BC actually begins below them. The cave-like tunnel ten stone layers below, through which tourists enter the pyramid today, was only built around the year 820 AD in the time of the Abbasid caliph al Ma’mun. By then the pharaoh’s burial chamber had probably been plundered long ago.
This so-called King’s Chamber, made up of enormous blocks of the most beautiful rose granite and protected from the full weight of the stone masses above by a system of relief chambers, is only one of three rooms inside the pyramid, which also contains a number of passages and shafts. Below is the amazing “Great Gallery” through which one enters the King’s Chamber. For a long time, the question was whether there were other cavities. Still, the other two great pyramids at Giza, those of Chephren and Menkaure, are – apart from the access corridors – solid bodies throughout; their burial chambers lie below ground level in the bedrock. But actually: The Cheops pyramid still contains at least one previously untrodden cavity – just above the original entrance, behind those chevrons. And researchers from the Technical University of Munich were even able to take a look inside.
Previously, the existence of the chamber had to be confirmed by measurements made by scientists from France, Japan and Egypt now published in Nature Communications have. However, they had not entered the new chamber to do so. Rather, the researchers saw them when they illuminated this part of the Cheops pyramid, so to speak. However, not with X-rays but with muons. These unstable elementary particles, heavier variants of electrons, are formed in the Earth’s atmosphere when high-energy particles from space shatter atomic nuclei in the molecules of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Cosmic muons illuminate the tomb
On average, around a hundred muons hit every square meter of earth’s surface every second. Many of them are energetic enough to penetrate thick layers of rock. If one compares the muon streams in the open air with those in an underground passage, the density of the material in between can be determined. By determining the direction from which the muons hit the detectors positioned underground, it is also possible to determine more precisely where the rock that has been screened in this way is denser than usual – or where there are cavities in it, for example. By the end of the 1960s, Luiz Alvarez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, had already concluded by means of muon detectors set up in Chephren’s burial chamber that his pyramid probably contained no further chambers.
Of course, this has long been tried out for the Cheops pyramid. In 2013, researchers from the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA) in Paris joined forces with those from Egypt and from Nagoya University in Japan for the “Scan Pyramids Mission”. And they did see something: In 2016, their measurements corroborated earlier evidence from infrared measurements that the pyramid behind the chevrons may be hollow. In 2017, the Scan Pyramids team attracted a great deal of attention with a Publication in “Nature” with evidence of a Big Void above the Great Gallery. However, the muon measurements were too inaccurate to determine the shape and location of these hidden chambers – and whether they really are real volumes deliberately left hollow by the builders and not just areas in the structure where the limestone blocks that make up the pyramid exists, were only set a little more loosely than usual.
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