Astonishing discovery that could be final proof the Pyramids are more than they seem: Impossible physics, links to faraway galaxies.. and an underground city to 'survive Armageddon'
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Icebergs, as everyone knows, lie mostly below the surface of the waves. What we see is just the tip. But no one dreamed before now that the same might be true of Egypt’s Great Pyramids at Giza, the last surviving wonders of the ancient world.
To international disbelief, scientists announced at the weekend that they had mapped tunnels, pillars, pathways and cavernous halls that extend under the central Khafre pyramid, and probably stretch beneath all three.
The mind-boggling discovery was made with satellite radar technology, by researchers from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and the Italian University of Pisa.
‘When we magnify the images we will reveal that beneath it lies what can only be described as a true underground city... an entire hidden world of many structures,’ said Corrado Malanga, one of the archaeological researchers.
This vast network, Malanga and his colleague Filippo Biondi claim, descends 2.1km (about a mile and a quarter) into the sands. It must predate the pyramids, which were built around 4,500 years ago. But how much older it might be is still a mystery.
Could it already have been there thousands of years earlier? And if so, who on earth constructed it – and how?
Since our Victorian ancestors developed an obsession with ancient Egypt, archaeologists have talked about solving ‘the riddle of the sands’. But the reality now looks even more bizarre than our wildest surmises.
Three-dimensional images acquired using a technology called synthetic aperture radar (SAR) show five structures at the base of the middle pyramid, which stands about ten miles south-west of central Cairo. The purpose of these structures is unknown, but geometric passages connect them.
Far more spectacular are eight vertical columns that plunge 2,125ft into a pair of colossal cubic chambers which are 263ft in each direction. This depth is almost five times the height of the Khafre pyramid above the earth, which stands at 448ft.
The stone cylinders are aligned in two rows of four, running north to south. And this precise arrangement is certain to be significant: the Great Pyramids are aligned so their edges face exactly north, south, east and west.
The Khafre pyramid, combined with the columns and cubes on which it stands, totals 2,835ft – larger than the tallest man-made building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is 2,717ft.
A staircase-like walkway also spirals around each pillar. It is impossible to fathom how this could have been created 2,500 years before the birth of Jesus.
SAR uses radar pulses to discern objects buried underground, sending a subterranean signal in a similar way to radar beams that track distant aeroplanes. These pulses were sent from satellites orbiting 420 miles above earth.
‘If something appears in one satellite’s scan but not the other’s, we know it is a false signal,’ said Malanga last Saturday. ‘The readings were completely consistent, ruling out any chance of misinterpretation.’ He added that the team considered the possibility the pillars and cubes were a foundation for the pyramid.
But the SAR images also show a massive scattering of what look like archaeological remains, spreading far beyond the foundations at great depth. The scientists theorised this could be ‘an actual underground city’.
Since the discovery of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb with all its treasures in the Valley of the Kings 103 years ago, speculation about ancient Egypt has been fervent.
It reached a feverish peak in the 1990s, when maverick archaeologist Robert Bauval claimed to have decoded the astrological significance of the Great Pyramids.
The three giant edifices at Giza – supposedly built as tombs for the pharaoh Khufu (or Cheops), his son Khafre and his grandson Menkaure – align with the stars in the middle of the Orion constellation.
As the heavens look today, they don’t quite match. Bauval worked out the pyramids would have been exactly in place 10,500 years ago. And that’s baffling... because Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure lived between about 2,600BC and 2,500BC.
Orion isn’t the only significant constellation. The Sphinx faces due east, and on the vernal equinox (the first day of spring) it faces the star sign Leo. Many archaeologists believe the Sphinx, which takes the shape of a human-headed lion, is modelled on Leo.
Bauval’s colleague Graham Hancock argues the Sphinx must be thousands of years older than conventional wisdom allows. The statue is badly eroded, not by wind and sand, but by heavy rainfall. And Egypt has not seen torrential rain for nearly 10,000 years.
The vertical fissures in the sandstone could only have been caused by running water, Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University told Hancock in the early 1990s. ‘Water picked out the weak spots in the rock,’ he said, calling it, ‘clear evidence that this feature was caused by rainfall’.
Hancock also proved a direct ratio between the height and circumference of the Khufu pyramid, to the radius and circumference of the Earth. In both cases, it was exactly 43,200 to one.
This is meaningful, he said, because it takes 43,200 years for the sun to rotate through the 12 zodiac signs. In his documentary Egypt’s Cosmic Code, currently airing on Sky History, amateur Egyptologist Bradley Walsh put this to Professor Meredith Brand from the American University of Cairo. ‘Coincidence,’ she scoffed.
But Bradley picked up on another of Hancock’s puzzles. The Khufu pyramid consists of 203 stacked layers, all hewn and laid by hand. Yet its base is completely level. From one corner to another, the lowest level varies by no more than three-quarters of an inch.
As Bradley pointed out, such accuracy might be possible today, but only with laser-guided tools.
The pyramid was supposedly commissioned by the pharaoh to be ready for his burial, and completed in 24 years. But it is built from 2.3million blocks of stone, each one perfectly cut and weighing between 2.5 tons and 70 tons.
As Hancock put it: ‘Assuming the masons worked ten hours a day, 365 days a year, they would have needed to place one block every two minutes.’
Theories range from brute force (the employment of thousands of slaves) to magic. One invoked ‘acoustic levitation’, the use of sound waves to render blocks weightless. This idea dates back more than 1,000 years to the historian Abul Hasan Ali Al-Masudi, who said an inscription written on papyrus was slipped beneath each block. At the sounding of a note, the stone levitated and floated into place.
A millennium later, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe suggested the pyramids were blast shelters from asteroid showers. He pointed to rare gems scattered across North Africa’s deserts, fragments of rock that could be the remains of an asteroid impact.
If a meteor wiped out an early Egyptian civilisation, he reasoned in 2000, it would be plausible the pharaohs took precautions by building bunkers.
Could the underworld city be a haven for ancient kings to wait out Armageddon? Incredible as that seems, the real explanation will probably be stranger still.
THE MYSTERY OF THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA
For more than 4,500 years, Egypt's pyramids have kept their secrets hidden deep within the labyrinth of passages and chambers that lie inside their towering stone structures.
But the long-running row over whether the Great Pyramid of Giza is hiding a network of previously undiscovered tunnels behind its stone walls has now been answered.
The researchers confirmed the find using cosmic particles known as muons to scan the Great Pyramid of Giza.
They used the scans to create maps to reveal the internal structure of the 479 feet (146m) high pyramid.
Last year thermal scanning identified a major anomaly in the Great Pyramid, the largest and oldest of the pyramids at Giza and one of the seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Those scans identified three adjacent stones at its base which registered higher temperatures than others.
This led to theories that they may be hiding a secret chamber that had yet to be discovered.
A team of experts then set up the ScanPyramid's project to use muons, tiny subatomic particle that are typically produced by cosmic rays smash into atoms on Earth, to peer through the Pyramid's huge stone blocks, some of which weight up to 15 tons.
Dr Hawass has in the past been sceptical of the usefulness of conducting such scans.
He recently clashed publicly with British Egyptologists over their theory that a secret burial chamber may be hidden behind the walls of Tutankhamun's tomb in his pyramid in the Valley of the Kings.
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