The Egyptian government has revealed the discovery of a concealed 9-metre-long and 2.10-metre-wide passage behind the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza, known as Khufu Pyramid, which “will lead to more finds”.
Addressing a press conference on Thursday, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Ahmed Issa said that “the discovery is a result of the international ‘ScanPyramids’ project that was launched in 2015 by the Ministry of Antiquities to study the structure of the pyramids without using harmful drilling methods”, reports Xinhua news agency.
“It will lead to further findings,” he added.
He stated that an international team of scientists from Egypt, France, Germany, Canada, and Japan has been working on researching a hole behind the pyramid’s north face that was found in 2016.
Muons radiography, a non-invasive and non-destructive surveying technology, was applied by the scientists.
At the same press conference, Mostafa Waziri, the head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, stated that the unfinished corridor was most likely built to redistribute the pyramid’s weight around either the main entrance now used by tourists, which is nearly seven meters away, or around another as-yet-undiscovered chamber or space.
“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,” he added.
Five rooms atop the king’s burial chamber in another area of the pyramid are also likely to have been erected to spread the colossal structure’s weight, he added, adding that the pharaoh may have had more than one burial chamber.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is the last of the Ancient World’s Seven Wonders that still stands today.
It was built as a massive tomb approximately 2560 BC during the time of Pharaoh Khufu, also known as Cheops.
Constructed to a height of 146 meters (479 feet), it is presently 139 meters tall and was the highest human-made building until the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1889.
