Saturday, January 13, 2018

Is there an Iron Throne in a newly discovered void in the Great Pyramid of Khufu?

In early November 2017, Nature published the results of the Scan Pyramids project, led by Mehdi Tayoubi (Hip Institute, Paris) and Kunihiro Morishima (University of Nagoya, Japan): there is a "huge void", at least 30 meters long, within the Pyramid of Cheops.

"Cheop's Pyramid, built around 2550 BC, is one of the largest and most complex monuments in the history of architecture. Its internal rooms are accessible through narrow tunnels, one of which, before arriving at the funerary chamber, widens and rises suddenly forming the so-called Great Gallery.

 The newly discovered room is over this gallery, but does not have a practical function of "relieving weight " from it, because the roof of the gallery itself was already built with a corbelled technique for this very reason."


Within the Pyramid there are four narrow shafts, the size of a handkerchief, directed to the stars. The pharaoh's afterlife was in fact, according to the Texts, in the sky, and in particular among the stars of the north, like the Big Dipper and Draco. Two of the four channels open onto the facades of the monument, while the other two run into small doors. One of the two doors, the south one, has been explored several times without results, while the north one is still sealed.
These doors are with all probabilities representative of the " gates of the sky " and the north one could well come into the newly discovered room. The room may contain, at its upper end and exactly under the apex of the great pyramid, an object needed by Cheops after crossing the doors: the "iron throne" mentioned in the Pyramid Texts.
We can get an idea of how this object could be, looking at the throne of Cheop's mother, Queen Hetepheres, which has been found in pieces and reconstructed by Harward University. It is a low chair of cedar wood covered with sheets of gold and faience. Cheops' could be similar, but coated with thin iron sheets. Of course it would not be melted iron, but meteoritic iron, that is, fallen from the sky in the form of Iron meteorites (distinguishable due to the high percentage of Nichel) and again cited in the Texts. It is certain that the Egyptians knew this material since many centuries before Cheops, and continued to use it for special items designed for the Pharaohs during millennia: just think of the famous Tutankamon dagger.
Not like this, I suppose:

The scientists have “seen” the void using three different muon detectors in three independent experiments, which makes their finding very robust, says Lee Thompson, an expert in particle physics at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the work. But the cavity’s detailed structure remains unclear: It might be one or many adjacent compartments, and could be horizontal or slanted.
So what's stopping them?  Get to archeoliging!  Dig!

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