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With the newly released images of the ScanPyramids North Face Corridor in the Great Pyramid,
there is much excitement about further exploration within this magnificent structure.
Since we now have proof the ScanPyramids muography models empty space within pyramids accurately,
there is no reasonable doubt the Big Void above the Grand Gallery is a real phenomenon.
But getting a look inside the Big Void is not a small challenge, and unlike the North
Face Corridor, some drilling would be required if it does not contain an undiscovered access
point near the bottom.
The most recent ScanPyramids data about the Big Void published in 2019 refined its position
to between 10 and 15 meters directly above the Grand Gallery.
If one was to drill towards it, I think the second-highest space above the King’s Chamber
named ‘Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber’ is the most favorable location to drill from.
One could potentially reach the Big Void drilling horizontally in the North Wall of this chamber
for a distance of about 7 meters.
The point of entry would be somewhere close to the floor of the Big Void near the southern
wall.
I would choose Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber instead of the larger and higher Campbell’s
Chamber because when drilling you would hope to avoid penetrating the chevrons that protect
all of the empty spaces below them, including the King’s Chamber.
It’s unknown exactly how the ceiling chevrons in Campbell’s Chamber are seated upon the
north and south walls of that space.
It’s probable the chevrons extend further than what is visible, and thus if you drilled
through the wall below them you might quickly end up hitting a chevron extending in that
direction.
Seeking access from Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber gives a smaller margin of error for drilling
at the right elevation, however if the Big Void angles downwards it just means needing
to drill slightly farther to penetrate through its floor.
Also, accessing the floor of a hidden space is ideal for sending in endoscopes or robots
to conduct further exploration.
You wouldn’t want to probe for access to the Big Void from Nelson’s Chamber or below,
because those spaces use granite instead of limestone for their walls.
It would also reduce your probability of finding the shortest access point.
And lastly, great care would still be needed in Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber, because it
contains original builder’s marks on many sections of its walls that must be preserved.
But let’s not fool ourselves, the Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism isn’t going to
be drilling for the Big Void any time soon.
So perhaps this is a good opportunity to reevaluate the last time the Great Pyramid received an
invasive drilling in September of 1986.
This exploration occurred in the western wall of the horizontal corridor leading to the
Queen’s Chamber.
The drilling was overseen by researchers Gilles Dormion and Jean-Patrice Goidin and they published
a book about it in 1987 titled “The New Mysteries of the Great Pyramid”.
Unfortunately, this book was only published in French over 35 years ago, and so many of
its lessons are easily forgotten.
The only thing people remember it is the three drill cores found nothing of interest, except
the final and deepest drill hit a pocket of sand.
Notably the sand extended for at least 40 centimeters at the end of the drilling depth
of 2.65 meters.
Dormion writes due to a lack of time, drilling did not find how deep the sand cavity extended.
It is quite remarkable the sand within this cavity is a large-grained pure quartz variety
not native to the Giza Plateau.
Since nobody in Egyptology has attempted to explain this anomaly, I will give you my solution
in a future video.
Dormion and Goidin anticipated finding sealed storerooms in the masonry where they drilled,
modeled after early dynastic tombs including the unfinished pyramid of Sekhemkhet.
In my opinion this was never a likely outcome, based on the previous pyramids of Snefru containing
no such features.
The discovery of sand by comparison was considered a failure, and Zahi Hawass who became Director
General of the Giza monuments in 1987 denied Gilles Dormion permission to investigate other
areas of the Great Pyramid in the decades to follow.
But while this infamous sand was a dead-end in 1986, advancements in robotics from the
past few years bring enormous opportunity to this mysterious cavity.
The Hawkes Lab Department of Mechanical Engineering
at UC Santa Barbara has made huge advancements in soft-bodied robots
that can tunnel through sand and squeeze through small spaces.
These ingenious robots are powered by compressed air, and mimic the bio-mechanical properties
of living creatures.
Thus, the resistive forces of sand are reduced instead of acted against.
The advantages to this approach are almost unbelievable.
Because the robot grows from the tip, there is no friction between the sides of the robot
and its environment, no matter the length or shape of its path.
Another principle the robot uses is air fluidization of the sand.
The air blowing from the tip of the robot excavates the sand in front of it, and also
locally fluidizes sand which further reduces resistance.
The robot is steerable, using a combination of pull tendons and multiple air streams.
This steering control works both vertically and horizontally.
A small wireless camera can be mounted on the tip, using the internal pressurized frame
of the robot body.
Just add a light source and now you’ve got the ability to completely investigate a sand-filled
cavity of the Great Pyramid.
This technology has already proven itself for archaeological use.
An ancient temple in the mountains of Peru contains small underground shafts which were
easily explored using this type of robot.
It might seem obvious to use this robot within the North Face Corridor, and I agree that
is a favorable idea.
But perhaps the horizontal corridor is a better place to start, because absolutely no damage
to the pyramid is required to begin this work.
The Ministry of Antiquities seemed very proud the North Face Corridor was viewed without
excavation, and this could be an opportunity for a similar achievement.
And no matter what the sand-filled cavity might reveal, this would be a great story
for Egypt.
Taking what was once considered a failure and turning it into an opportunity to show
the world that the Great Pyramid still contains fascinating mysteries.
Lastly, the cost of this technology is almost negligible.
Egypt could easily end up spending more money on a press event announcing the findings than
the amount spent on the mission itself.
Now, let’s talk about why the North Face Corridor makes investigating this space even
more promising than before.
The reason Dormion chose this location in 1986 was microgravimetry scans indicated a
significantly lower density in an area just west of the Horizontal Corridor.
But as I’ve mentioned in other videos, microgravimetry isn’t ideal for scanning pyramids because
the density of the pyramid is inconsistent.
The horizontal corridor leading to the Queen’s Chamber has non-staggered joints, the only
example of this design used within an Old Kingdom Pyramid.
That anomaly combined with the microgravimetry data available in 1986 led Dormion to believe
it was the most likely place to find an undiscovered structure.
Shortly after Dormion’s mission ended, a Japanese team from Waseda University led by
Sakuji Yoshimura used ground penetrating radar to further investigate many structures at
Giza.
Their findings published in 1988 state electromagnetic waves were strongly reflected 4 and 5 meters
west of the horizontal corridor.
These reflections started one meter beyond the Queen’s Chamber wall and ended approximately
30 meters due north, forming a short passage parallel to the horizontal corridor.
At the time Dormion was relieved to gain additional data validating his decision to drill, but
in his 2004 book ‘The Chamber of Cheops’ he abandons that location as a potential point
of interest.
Dormion writes that another georadar survery was conducted in the year 2000 by Jean-Pierre
Baron, and that no structural variation was revealed with those tests.
I’ve never found any documentation for Baron’s radar survey, so if anyone watching has information,
please do share so we can better evaluate this mystery of the Great Pyramid.
Given that Dormion conclusively found sand in the area of a hypothetical passage, there’s
clearly something interesting going on there.
We shouldn’t dismiss the potential for discovery because one geophysicist couldn’t detect
anything 23 years ago.
Architect Jean-Pierre Houdin interpreted this potential empty space as a 2nd access point
to the Queen’s Chamber, originating from the newly discovered North Face Corridor above
the pyramid entrance.
While I don’t share Houdin’s interpretation for the purpose of those empty spaces, they
are clearly converging on each other at a level 40 meters above the base of the Great
Pyramid.
Gilles Dormion formed a revised hypothesis in 2004 that a hidden chamber exists below
the Queen’s Chamber, and he spent a great deal of effort scanning the chamber floor
to support that idea.
But ScanPyramids has not detected any voids in that location, so I don’t consider it
a serious possibility.
One observation Dormion made that I have always struggled with is the layout of floor blocks
in the horizontal corridor.
In the northern half of this passage, the floor stones are conspicuously narrow, as
if the corridor was originally twice as wide.
The only other 2-meter-wide passage in any pyramid is the Grand Gallery, which sits directly
above it.
However, the North Face Corridor is also two meters wide and so now we have another interesting
connection between all of these spaces.
It’s safe to say the potential for making a huge discovery about the Great Pyramid is
increasing with each new piece of information that connects these areas.
All the more reason to send in non-destructive robots that might get us close to a real solution.
Circling back to the Big Void, there are a few lessons from Dormion’s drilling that
need to be emphasized.
The main reason Dormion had so much difficulty with his drills is that they were required
to not use water, which greatly reduces heat and friction.
This may have also required larger drill cores than would be ideal.
The reason for this decision was if drilling penetrated an empty space, a bit of water
might foul up hidden treasures or papyrus scrolls.
But with the casing stones of the pyramid now removed, rainwater has been seeping through
the joints of the Great Pyramid for many hundreds of years.
The water stains on the ceiling of the Grand Gallery are a testament that such precautions
are not warranted when probing the Big Void above.
For those of you expecting a hidden space in the Great Pyramid to be completely protected,
I’m sorry that such a scenario is unlikely.
But it may be that large chevron blocks are quite effective at diverting rainwater away
from the space underneath them, just as they do with the pressure from above.
This makes me think the Big Void is less likely to have a gabled ceiling, and therefore probably
similar to the corbelled design of the Grand Gallery.
You can’t call that design a weight-relieving chamber, unless you think there are Grand
Galleries all the way down.
It’s now time for Egypt to start taking the Big Void seriously.
The void is not a noise echo nor a masonry gap, it’s a critical feature of humanity’s
greatest ancient construction.
I totally understand a reluctance to attack the problem head-on, as the pyramid is precious
and worthy of the utmost care.
So, if 7 meters of drilling is considered too risky, there are alternative methods of
investigation to determine if a better course of action is available.
There’s potentially 30 meters of a sand-filled cavity waiting for us to look inside, and
not even a fleck of stone need be damaged to probe this area.
Maybe we’ll get really lucky and it will find a path closer to the North Face Corridor
or even the Big Void.
What a great story for Egypt, showing that apparent failure can be transformed into enormous
success.
At the press event for the North Face Corridor, I noticed messaging from the Ministry of Antiquities
and Tourism was a bit old-fashioned.
Floating the idea of discovering Khufu’s hidden burial sets up future investigations
for failure, and is also ignorant about what kind of stories attract public interest.
A hidden burial in-of-itself is not that interesting.
This is why the more extravagant burial find of pharaoh Psusennes I remains mostly obscure
in compared to Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun.
It was the story of Carter’s perseverance and struggle to find the tomb that made it
a memorable tale.
There’s something so captivating about knowing what you’re looking for and just barely
managing to reach that goal.
While Carter did sneak a peek through this wall before the official opening, the public
was able to participate in the experience with extensive press coverage at all stages
of the expedition.
The lesson here is that the journey towards discovery can be far more important than the
destination.
In that context, Egypt should seize upon the opportunity to make exploring the Great Pyramid
a story of overcoming adversity rather than validating anyone’s personal theories about
the structure.
This way everyone gets to participate in the thrill of the chase, and Egypt will have another
amazing story which will attract more tourism than any museum exhibit.
We can all relate to the excitement of looking at little farther than anyone else has ever
before.
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