The Great Pyramid of Cheops, one of the largest stone structures in the world and one of the most iconic archaeological monuments on the planet, still holds many mysteries and continues to amaze the public with new discoveries, 4,500 years after it was built on the plateau. from the Giza necropolis in Egypt.
On Thursday, in the last of these advances to better understand its innards, a mission of researchers from several countries announced that it has been able to successfully trace for the first time the position and dimensions of a mysterious nine-meter corridor initially detected in 2016 that was hides on the north face, and whose function is unknown for now.
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Particles from space reveal a 'great void' inside the Cheops pyramid
According to the researchers who have led the mission, and who have published their study in the journal
Nature
this week, their contribution could be "decisive" to understand the role of large stone slabs arranged in the shape of a chevron, or inverted V, and used for the first time in history in the pyramid of Cheops to cover internal structures and prevent them from collapsing, since the mysterious corridor makes its way just behind.
In addition, they consider that any advance in the knowledge of previously unknown internal structures of the pyramid helps to better understand its construction process.
The main hypothesis that the researchers are considering for now is that the function of the corridor and the stone slabs was to relieve the pressure and weight of some structure located below, as explained during a press conference by the General Secretary of the Superior Council of Antiquities of Egypt, Mostafa Waziri, who advanced that in the coming months they will focus on studying the space around the corridor to determine it.
Image of the corridor found inside the Cheops pyramid, on Thursday.
- (AFP)
The Cheops pyramid, today 139 meters high and 230 meters wide, is believed to be composed of several million pieces of limestone between one and two meters high.
Inside this monumental body, the study explains, lie some large structures connected by narrow corridors: an abandoned underground chamber, the queen's chamber, the great gallery, and the king's chamber.
In the Middle Ages, a passage was excavated, used today as an entrance for tourists, which extends from the point of the pyramid where tradition located the original entrance to an intersection where an ascending corridor and a descending corridor intersect, connecting the previous cameras.
The inverted V-shaped slabs, as indicated by the study, are found in the upper part of the entrance that connects with the descending corridor, and it is believed that they were originally hidden behind the surface of the north face of the pyramid.
Since 2015, an interdisciplinary mission of Egyptian and international researchers, called ScanPyramids, has been combining non-invasive techniques to better understand the structure of the Cheops pyramid and its construction process.
One of the techniques used for this is based on x-rays of particles called muons from which they can draw density maps that reveal internal structures.
Shortly after starting work, the team discovered a void above the pyramid's descending corridor, which they named the North Face Corridor.
And since 2016 they have been studying it to better understand its shape and location.
Now, the researchers have been able to determine with great precision the characteristics of this last corridor, which has a length of about nine meters and a width and height of about two meters.
As detailed in the study, the lower plane of the corridor is about 20 meters from ground level, and the corridor stops after nine meters without any structure of more than one square meter afterwards, so it is not known where she drives.
It also stands less than a meter from the north face of the inverted V-shaped slabs, and is about the same thickness as its limestone blocks.
In this case, the team was also able to visualize the corridor with a very small camera.
Despite their findings, the researchers acknowledge that some questions remain.
For example, they point out that the data they have obtained is not incompatible with the fact that the corridor has a shape other than a parallelepiped, which is what they consider most likely because it is the simplest.
And they also note that, with the information they have, they cannot completely rule out that the corridor actually continues with a smaller section, although if this is the case, it should be less than one square meter.