Egypt says tunnel in Great Pyramid could lead to Khufu’s lost tomb
Cairo, Mar 2 (EFE).- Egyptian antiquities authorities on Thursday said they had detected a corridor inside the Great Pyramid of Giza that might lead to the funeral chamber of the pharaoh Khufu, which to this day has never been found.
The minister for tourism and antiquities Ahmed Issa told a press conference that scientists from the ScanPyramids project had located a tunnel extending nine meters deep and measuring 2 by 2 meters in width and height emanating from the wall of the north face of the structure from a structure known as a chevron.
Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said his theory was that the tunnel was constructed to alleviate the pressure created from another passageway.
“We hope to find treasure from the pharaoh Khufu, given that we have found treasures from all the pharaohs apart from Khufu.”
Renowned Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, head of the scientific committee in charge of the ScanPyramids team, said the discovery could be the “most important of the century.”
The whereabouts of Khufu’s funeral chamber and treasure, believed to be somewhere inside the Great Pyramid, has eluded experts thus far.
The pharaoh, also referred to as Cheops, ruled around 4,500 years ago, during the Fourth Dynasty, in the second half of what is sometimes called the Age of the Pyramids.
Khufu commissioned the Great Pyramid, the largest of the three in Giza and the only of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that still stands to this day.
Mohamed Mohi, assistant coordinator for multinational ScanPyramids initiative, told Efe that he would leave it to the Egyptologists to come up with theories about the tunnel.
In a Nature article published Thursday, the ScanPyramids team described how they used cosmic-ray muons to paint an accurate picture of the void inside of the Great Pyramid, although fell short of speculating on where it led to.
The latest announcement from Egypt’s antiquities ministry comes amid a campaign to claw back tourism levels amid an economic crisis fueled by the effects of Covid-19 and the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.EFE
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