Robot Images from Great Pyramid

I did not even know that thisprogram was on, but it is certainly welcome to see new data.

Beyond that I have difficultyassociating the word tunnel with a passage that is twenty centimeters squareand the word door with an end block.  Ithas fed speculation from the beginning.

I have come to the conclusionthat the great pyramid needs to be taken down block by block and thenreassembled block by block and then fully restored with casing stones.  It would take about ten years and around acouple of billion dollars, but is well within our capabilities.  If that works out well, we can finish therest of the complex.

Once done, we will have all theknowledge that is possible to winkle out and it will be a rather profitable touristattraction for the next 5000 years.

At present we have reason tobelieve that this complex went up in the Early Bronze age a millennia beforeKhufu and represented the culmination of a civilization that dominated the NileDelta and the Mediterranean littoral we know as Libya.  That civilization succumbed in 1159 BC, butwe now know that it extended in time intro the deep past.

Critically, it had a deepmathematical and astronomical tradition. The Great Pyramid was the culmination of that tradition and I suspectthat all these odd structures represent the physical expression of keyrelationships.  Suddenly a twentycentimeter square shaft is no longer strange.

First images from Great Pyramid's chamber of secrets

25 May 2011 by Rowan Hooper

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028144.500-first-images-from-great-pyramids-chamber-of-secrets.html

THEY might be ancient graffiti tags left by a worker or symbols ofreligious significance. A robot has sent back the first images of markingson the wall of a tiny chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egyptthat have not been seen for 4500 years. It has also helped settle thecontroversy about the only metal known to exist in the pyramid, and shows a"door" that could lead to another hidden chamber.

The pyramid is thought to have been built as a tomb for the pharaohKhufu, and is the last of the seven wonders of the ancient world stillstanding. It contains three main chambers: the Queen's Chamber, the GrandGallery and the King's Chamber, which has two air shafts connecting it with theoutside world. Strangely, though, there are two tunnels, about 20 centimetresby 20 centimetres, that extend from the north and south walls of the Queen'sChamber and stop at stone doors before they reach the outside of the pyramid (seediagram).

The function of these tunnels and doors is unknown, but some believethat one or both could lead to a secret chamber. Zahi Hawass, Egypt'sMinister of State for Antiquities Affairs, describes the doors as the lastgreat mystery of the pyramid.

Several attempts have been made to explore the tunnels using robots. In1993, a robot crawled some 63 metres up the tunnel in the south wall anddiscovered what appeared to be a small stone door set with metal pins. Metal isnot part of any other known structure in the pyramid, and the discovery ignitedspeculation that the pins were door handles, keys or even parts of a powersupply constructed by aliens.

Then in 2002 anotherrobot drilled through the stone block and filmed a small chamberbacked by a large blocking stone, but little else. Now a robot designed byengineer Rob Richardson from the University of Leeds, UK, andcolleagues, and named Djedi after the magician that Khufu consulted when heplanned his tomb, has crawled up the tunnel carrying a bendy "microsnake" camera that can see around corners.

Images sent back by the camera have revealed hieroglyphswritten in red paint and lines in the stone that could be marks leftby stone masons when the chamber was being carved (Annales Du Service desAntiquités De L'Égypte, vol 84, ISBN: 978-977-704-184-3). "If thesehieroglyphs could be deciphered they could help Egyptologists work out whythese mysterious shafts were built," says Richardson.

"Red-painted numbers and graffiti are very common around Giza," says Peter Der Manuelian, an Egyptologist at Harvard Universityand director of the Giza Archives at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "They are often masons' orwork-gangs' marks, denoting numbers, dates or even the names of thegangs."

As the camera can see around corners, the backof the stone door has been observed for the first time, scotching themore fanciful theories about the metal pins, says camera-designer ShaunWhitehead of the exploration company Scoutek, based in Melton Mowbray, UK. "Our newpictures from behind the pins show that they end in small, beautifully madeloops, indicating that they were more likely ornamental rather than electricalconnections."

Whitehead, who worked in collaboration with Dassault Systèmes inVélizy-Villacoublay, France, adds: "Also, the back of the 'door' ispolished so it must have been important. It doesn't look like it was a roughpiece of stone used to stop debris getting into the shaft."

KateSpence, an Egyptologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involvedin the study, suspects that since the narrow tunnels can serve no practicalpurpose, they are almost certainly symbolic. "The metal pins look likesymbolic door handles, and the shafts from the Queen's Chamber are orientednorth-south, not east-west, so I strongly suspect that their function issymbolic and relates to the stars, not the sun," she says.

While the King's Chamber originally contained Khufu's sarcophagus andpossibly his mummy, the Queen's Chamber probably didn't contain the remains ofa queen: Khufu's wives were interred in three smaller pyramids of their own.Instead, Spence speculates that the Queen's Chamber may have contained a"ka" statue of the pharaoh. In this interpretation the shafts werebuilt to allow Khufu's ka, or spirit, to cross to the afterlife.

As for the second "door" at the rear of the chamber, which isrough and unfinished, Spence thinks it is simply the end of the shaft."It's most likely to be a backing stone - there won't be another chamberbehind it, it makes no sense," she says. "However, it's fascinatingfrom a symbolic point of view, and this sort of work will allow us to get atthe intention behind the construction of the pyramid."

Hawass, director of the Djedi project, says that no other pyramid isknown to have a tunnel and doorway like this, which, he says, suggests therecould be a hidden room. "The King's Chamber may have been a dummy room,since the most important thing in the mind of the ancient Egyptians was to hidethe burial chamber," he says. "We have a story that the magicianDjedi met Khufu, who was searching for the god Thoth so he could find thesecret of hiding his pyramid. Based on that maybe there is something hidden inthe pyramid."