2 The Riddle of the Pyramids, p. 54.
3 Ibid., p. 55.
4 George Hart, Pharaohs and Pyramids, Guild Publishing, London, 1991, p. 91.
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believed to have died in 2528 BC.5 Moreover it was assumed by Professor
I.E.S Edwards, a leading authority on these matters, that the burial
treasure had been removed from the famous inner sanctum now known
as the King’s Chamber and that the empty ‘granite sarcophagus’ which
stood at the western end of that sanctum had ‘once contained the King’s
body, probably enclosed within an inner coffin made of wood’.6
All this is orthodox, mainstream, modern scholarship, which is
unquestioningly accepted as historical fact and taught as such at
universities everywhere.7
But suppose it isn’t fact.
The cupboard was bare
The mystery of the missing mummy of Khufu begins with the records of
Caliph Al-Ma’mun, a Muslim governor of Cairo in the ninth century AD. He
had engaged a team of quarriers to tunnel their way into the pyramid’s
northern face, urging them on with promises that they would discover
treasure. Through a series of lucky accidents ‘Ma’mun’s Hole’, as
archaeologists now refer to it, had joined up with one of the monument’s
several internal passageways, the ‘descending corridor’ leading
downwards from the original concealed doorway in the northern face (the
location of which, though known in classical times, had been forgotten by
Ma’mun’s day). By a further lucky accident the vibrations that the Arabs
had caused with their battering rams and drills dislodged a block of
limestone from the ceiling of the descending corridor. When the socket
from which it had fallen was examined it was found to conceal the
opening to another corridor, this time ascending into the heart of the
pyramid.
There was a problem, however. The opening was blocked by a series of
enormous plugs of solid granite, clearly contemporaneous with the
construction of the monument, which were held in place by a narrowing
of the lower end of the corridor.8 The quarriers were unable either to
break or to cut through the plugs. They therefore tunnelled into the
slightly softer limestone surrounding them and, after several weeks of
backbreaking toil, rejoined the ascending corridor higher up— having
bypassed a formidable obstacle never before breached.
The implications were obvious. Since no previous treasure-seekers had
penetrated this far, the interior of the pyramid must still be virgin
territory. The diggers must have licked their lips with anticipation at the
5 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.
6 The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 94-5.
7 The Pyramids of Egypt by Professor I. E. S. Edwards is the standard text on the
pyramids.
8 W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (New and Revised Edition),
Histories and Mysteries of Man Ltd., London, 1990, p. 21.
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immense quantities of gold and jewels they could now expect to find.
Similarly—though perhaps for different reasons, Ma’mun must have been
impatient to be the first into any chambers that lay ahead. It was reported
that his primary motive in initiating this investigation had not been an
ambition to increase his vast personal wealth but a desire to gain access
to a storehouse of ancient wisdom and technology which he believed to
lie buried within the monument. In this repository, according to age-old
tradition, the pyramid builders had placed ‘instruments of iron and arms
which rust not, and glasse which might be bended and yet not broken,
and strange spells ...’9
9 John Greaves, Pyramidographia, cited in Serpent in the Sky, p. 230.
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The Great Pyramid: entrance and plugging blocks in the ascending
corridor.
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The Great Pyramid: detail of corridors, shafts and chambers.
But Ma’mun and his men found nothing, not even any down-to-earth
treasure—and certainly not any high-tech, anachronistic plastic or
instruments of iron or rustproof weapons ... or strange spells either.
The erroneously named ‘Queen’s Chamber’ (which lay at the end a long
horizontal passageway that branched off from the ascending corridor)
turned out to be completely empty—just a severe, geometrical room.10
More disappointing still, the King’s Chamber (which the Arabs reached
after climbing the imposing Grand Gallery) also offered little of interest.
Its only furniture was a granite coffer just big enough to contain the body
of a man. Later identified, on no very good grounds, as a ‘sarcophagus’,
this undecorated stone box was approached with trepidation by Ma’mun
and his team, who found it to be lidless and as empty as everything else
in the pyramid.11
Why, how and when exactly had the Great Pyramid been emptied of its
contents? Had it been 500 years after Khufu’s death, as the Egyptologists
suggested? Or was it not more likely, as the evidence was beginning to
suggest, that the inner chambers of the pyramid had been empty all
along, from the very beginning, that is, from the day that the monument
had originally been sealed? Nobody, after all, had reached the upper part
of the ascending corridor before Ma’mun and his men. And it was certain,
too, that nobody had cut through the granite plugs blocking the entrance
to that corridor.
Commonsense ruled out the possibility of any earlier incursion—unless
there was another way in.
10 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 11.
11 The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 120.
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Bottlenecks in the well-shaft
There was another way in.
Farther down the descending corridor, more than 200 feet beyond the
point where the plugged end of the ascending corridor had been found,
lies the concealed entrance to another secret passageway, deep within
the subterranean bedrock of the Giza plateau. If Ma’mun had discovered
this passageway, he could have saved himself a great deal of trouble,
since it provided a readymade route around the plugs blocking the
ascending corridor. His attention, however, had been distracted by the
challenge of tunnelling past those plugs, and he made no effort to
investigate the lower reaches of the descending corridor (which he ended
up using as a dump for the tons of stone his diggers removed from the
core of the pyramid).12
The full extent of the descending corridor was, however, well-known
and explored in classical times. The Graeco-Roman geographer Strabo
left quite a clear description of the large subterranean chamber it
debouched into (at a depth of almost 600 feet below the apex of the
pyramid).13 Graffiti from the period of the Roman occupation of Egypt was
also found inside this underground chamber, confirming that it h
ad once
been regularly visited. Yet, because it had been so cunningly hidden in
the beginning, the secret doorway leading off to one side about twothirds of the way down the western wall of the descending corridor,
remained sealed and undiscovered until the nineteenth century.14
What the doorway led to was a narrow well-shaft, about 160 feet in
extent, which rose almost vertically through the bedrock and then
through more than twenty complete courses of the Great Pyramid’s
limestone core blocks, until it joined up with the main internal corridor
system at the base of the Grand Gallery. There is no evidence to indicate
what the purpose of this strange architectural feature might have been
(although several scholars have hazarded guesses).15 Indeed the only
thing that is clear is that it was engineered at the time of the construction
of the pyramid and was not the result of an intrusion by tunnelling tombrobbers.16 The question remains open, however, as to whether tombrobbers might have discovered the hidden entrance to the shaft, and
made use of it to siphon off the treasures from the King’s and Queen’s
Chambers.
Such a possibility cannot be ruled out. Nevertheless, a review of the
12 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 58.
13 The Geography of Strabo, (trans. H. L. Jones), Wm. Heinemann, London, 1982, volume
VIII, pp. 91-3.
14 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 58.
15 In general, it is assumed to have been used as an escape route by workers sealed
within the pyramid above the plugging blocks in the ascending passage.
16 Because, over a distance of several hundred feet through solid masonry, it joins two
narrow corridors. This could not have been achieved by accident.
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historical record indicates little in its favour.
For example, the upper end of the well-shaft was entered off the Grand
Gallery by the Oxford astronomer John Greaves in 1638. He managed to
descend to a depth of about sixty feet. In 1765 another Briton, Nathaniel
Davison, penetrated to a depth of about 150 feet but found his way
blocked by an impenetrable mass of sand and stones. Later, in the 1830s,
Captain G.B. Caviglia, an Italian adventurer, reached the same depth and
encountered the same obstacle. More enterprising than his predecessors,
he hired Arab workers to start excavating the rubble in the hope that
there might be something of interest beneath it. Several days of digging
in claustrophobic conditions followed before the connection with the
descending corridor was discovered.17
Is it likely that such a cramped, blocked-up shaft could have been a
viable conduit for the treasures of Khufu, supposedly the greatest
pharaoh of the magnificent Fourth Dynasty?
Even if it hadn’t been choked with debris and sealed at the lower end, it
could not have been used to bring out more than a tiny fraction of the
treasures of a typical royal tomb. This is because the well-shaft is only
three feet in diameter and incorporates several tricky vertical sections.
At the very least, therefore, when Ma’mun and his men battered their
way into the King’s Chamber around the year AD 820, one would have
expected some of the bigger and heavier pieces from the original burial
to be still in place—like the statues and shrines that bulked so large in
Tutankhamen’s much later and presumably inferior tomb.18 But nothing
was found inside Khufu’s Pyramid, making this and the alleged looting of
Khafre’s monument the only tomb robberies in the history of Egypt which
achieved a clean sweep, leaving not a single trace behind—not a torn
cloth, not a shard of broken pottery, not an unwanted figurine, not an
overlooked piece of jewellery—just the bare floors and walls and the
gaping mouths of empty sarcophagi.
Not like other tombs
It was now after six in the morning and the rising sun had bathed the
summits of Khufu’s and Khafre’s Pyramids with a fleeting blush of pastelpink light. Menkaure’s Pyramid, being some 200 feet lower than the other
two, was still in shadow as Santha and I skirted its north-western corner
and continued our walk into the rolling sand dunes of the surrounding
desert.
I still had the tomb robbery theory on my mind. As far as I could see the
only real ‘evidence’ in favour of it was the absence of grave goods and
mummies that it had been invented to explain in the first place. All the
17 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 56-8.
18 See Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun, Thames & Hudson, London, 1990.
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other facts, particularly where the Great Pyramid was concerned, seemed
to speak persuasively against any robbery having occurred. It was not just
a matter of the narrowness and unsuitability of the well-shaft as an
escape route for bulky treasures. The other remarkable feature of Khufu’s
Pyramid was the absence of inscriptions or decorations anywhere within
its immense network of galleries, corridors, passageways and chambers,
and the same was true of Khafre’s and Menkaure’s Pyramids. In none of
these amazing monuments had a single word been written in praise of
the pharaohs whose bodies they were supposed to house.
This was exceptional. No other proven burial place of any Egyptian
monarch had ever been found undecorated. The fashion throughout
Egyptian history had been for the tombs of the pharaohs to be extensively
decorated, beautifully painted from top to bottom (as in the Valley of the
and invocations required to assist the deceased on his journey towards
eternal life (as in the Fifth Dynasty pyramids at Saqqara, just twenty miles
to the south of Giza.)19
Why had Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure done things so differently? Had
they not built their monuments to serve as tombs at all, but for another
and more subtle purpose? Or was it possible, as certain Arab and esoteric
traditions maintained, that the Giza pyramids had been erected long
before the Fourth Dynasty by the architects of some earlier and more
advanced civilization?
Neither hypothesis was popular with Egyptologists for reasons that
were easy to understand. Moreover, while conceding that the Second and
Third Pyramids were completely devoid of internal inscriptions, lacking
even the names of Khafre and Menkaure, the scholars were able to cite
certain hieroglyphic ‘quarry marks’ (graffiti daubed on stone blocks
before they left the quarry) found inside the Great Pyramid, which did
seem to bear the name of Khufu.
A certain smell ...
The discoverer of the quarry marks was Colonel Howard Vyse, during the
destructive excavations he undertook at Giza in 1837. Extending an
existing crawlway, he cut a tunnel into the series of narrow cavities,
called ‘relieving chambers’, which lay directly above the King’s Chamber.
The quarry marks were found on the walls and ceilings of the top four of
these cavities and said things like this:
THE CRAFTSME
N-GANG,
HOW POWERFUL IS THE WHITE CROWN OF KHNUM—
19 See Valley of the Kings; for Saqqara (Fifth and Sixth Dynasties) see Traveller’s Key to
Ancient Egypt, pp. 163-7.
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KHUFU
KHUFU
KHNUM-KHUFU
YEAR SEVENTEEN20
It was all very convenient. Right at the end of a costly and otherwise
fruitless digging season, just when a major archaeological discovery was
needed to legitimize the expenses he had run up, Vyse had stumbled
upon the find of the decade—the first incontrovertible proof that Khufu
had indeed been the builder of the hitherto anonymous Great Pyramid.
One would have thought that a discovery of this nature would have
settled conclusively any lingering doubts over the ownership and purpose
of that enigmatic monument. But the doubts remained, largely because,
from the beginning, ‘a certain smell’ hung over Vyse’s evidence:
1 It was odd that the marks were the only signs of the name Khufu ever
found anywhere inside the Great Pyramid.21
2 It was odd that they had been found in such an obscure, out-of-theway corner of that immense building.
3 It was odd that they had been found at all in a monument otherwise
devoid of inscriptions of any kind.
4 And it was extremely odd that they had been found only in the top
four of the five relieving chambers. Inevitably, suspicious minds began
to wonder whether ‘quarry marks’ might also have appeared in the
lowest of these five chambers had that chamber, too, been discovered
by Vyse (rather than by Nathaniel Davison seventy years earlier).22
5 Last but not least it was odd that several of the hieroglyphs in the
‘quarry marks’ had been painted upside down, and that some were
unrecognizable while others had been misspelt or used
ungrammatically.23
Was Vyse a forger?
I know of one plausible case made to suggest he was exactly that,24 and
although final proof will probably always be lacking, it seemed to me
incautious of academic Egyptology to have accepted the authenticity of
the quarry marks without question. Besides, there was alternative
hieroglyphic evidence, arguably of purer provenance, which appeared to
indicate that Khufu could not have built the Great Pyramid. Strangely, the