Interesting how the pyramids have been around for 4500 years and we still don't know all about their structure...
Fun fact: there's a Neolithic site in Ireland, Newgrange, that's actually older than the pyramids. Fascinating and worth a visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange
Fun fact: Cleopatra and Mark Antony etc. lived closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of the Great Pyramids. Egyptian history is deep.
Funner fact: the Great Pyramids were built closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of Göbekli Tepe. Human history is way deep.
Funnest fact: if we don't fuck it up, we're still only at the dawn of history, not at the end of it.
The style of the animal carvings is really interesting - they look somewhat symbolic as letters in a "visual language" instead of artistic... "artistic" drawings/sculptures seek either to be skeurmorphic, aka imitate nature, or intentionally simplistic but following some "universally aesthetically pleasing" style, relative as it may be. These have things like the number of legs correct, but nothing about the angles.
These look like neither... and that's damn weird! Almost like what a blind carver would make from listening to a description of a thing he never saw and carving it.
Probably the oldest cave paintings are like this, but those are like "simplest thing one can do" while these imply effort, but... somehow "skillfully retarted", like there was something "messed up" with the minds of the designers, or simply very different from our own.
Imagine if they find an opened chamber, and that it contains artefacts that can be carbon-dated, and they turn out to be thousands of years older than conventional Egyptology expects.
(I expect there will be artefacts, and I expect their dates will coincide with what we already expect, but I’m always holding out for ”new science” that needs to be explained.)
There are thousands of sumerian cuneiform tablets left to translate, if you're bored ;-) Many of these predate the pyramids by a thousand years or so. Most translated ones contain mundane enough stuff, so its likely that the rest are similar, but if you're looking for something ancient to discover something in, I can't think of a better place to look given their age and that they're already found (ie available to read).
While we are imagining unlikely thing, I'm going to imagine there are instructions from aliens (yes, the same ones that actually built the pyramids, don't ya know) on how to build a faster than light drive.
It seems that peoples through the ages have respected the pyramids enough to leave them mostly intact and undisturbed, giving us the unique heritage that we have today. I can't help but contrast this with the British explorers who just started blowing through it with explosives and pulling stuff out wholesale.
Not at all. Most of the pyramids, and many many other burials were ransacked by graverobbers and scavengers in antiquity - in a lot of cases, even while there were still pharaohs. It's assumed that a lot of them were robbed immediately, by the same workers who built them - in fact, even as early as the Middle Kingdom, there was a thriving trade in robbed grave goods for the explicit purpose of reuse in another burial, so it's far from uncommon to find people interred with spells on papyri that are centuries older than them, but have had the original owner's name scratched out and the new one inserted. If anything, the respect shown for the Giza complex in the last hundred years or so is the exception in its history. Heck, one of the two smaller pyramids has a huge hole in the side from where a 16th or 17th century caliph tried to demolish it.
The Pyramids were originally cased in a layer of white limestone. Almost all of that is gone, since, if I recall, they were small enough that they could be carted away, unlike the granite that remains.
Monumental buildings almost always end up being wholesale building supply once they aren't revered and maintained.
Almost every pyramid was looted nearly immediately, and the limestone covers on the pyramids were stolen long ago. Most of the reason the pyramids remain as they are is because they are made of very large blocks which are inordinately difficult to move and impractical to use for other purposes.
I'm aware that they were subjected to grave robbing. That seems like more low-level thieving than actual organized pillaging though, which required destroying structure to pull off, as evidenced by the fact that the most important artifacts, including the riches of the burial chamber and the sarcophagus itself, were still there until modern times.
Also the giant monolith/megalith structures in Russia are out of this world.
Personally I think some of the footage and pictures of them are more impressive than the pyramids. The size of the blocks compared to a human is just incredible.
In Sardinia, Italy, there are also hundreds of neolithic sites called Domus de Janas (House of the Fairies) dating back to 3000 BC. Some of them are quite impressive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domus_de_Janas
The diagram only shows the shaft intersecting the void because it is a 2D projection of overlapping 3D volumes. In reality the shafts pass next to, but do not intersect with, the purported void.
A) proper digging shouldn’t destroy the monument. B) removal of parts of the structure is how we know what’s in it at all. The same is true for any othe other monuments that are structures. We had to dig through the valley of the kings to find the tombs. If we don’t breech the obstruction, we won’t understand the thing.
I don't think that a 12 inch hole drilled big enough for a drone in a section of the pyramid that is protected from the weather and not visible to the public is "Destroying a monument".
Do you think that the DNA test of King Tut was also destruction?
100% agree. Let's wait, been waiting for millennia already. Otherwise, next year another team has another curiosity that requires just a small hole...and 2000 years later the thing is crumbling.
Um, no. The diagram is 2D, pyramid is 3D; by losing one dimension, disjoint objects seem connected. Even in the image, shaft passes behind the void, not through it.
How can you be so certain? The picture alone provides no clue. It would be unheard of for a tree to grow out of someone's head, but strictly speaking not categorically impossible. In fact, for the sake of argument the only reason you're able to make that statement at all is due to your previous experience. There's nothing at all in the picture that tells you she doesn't have a tree growing out of her head.
Not sure how highly I would rate crystalinks.com as a source, given that they also talk about how viewing repeated digits 'activates' your DNA... http://www.crystalinks.com/11.11.html
That last link of yours is worth reading through carefully. It puts forward the theory that the pyramid of Giza is a power plant. Pretty cool conspiracy theory!
This shaft is 4500 years old. I wonder how many people have been down it.
It seems arrogant to call the "big void" a discovery, being that someone actually built the big void.
I would expect this "discovery" has been discovered a few dozen times, considering the age of the pyramids, but previous discoveries were lost to history.
"discovery" in the sense that the modern world previously had no understanding that it existed. It is the same logic that Columbus discovered America-- obviously it existed but the discovery was revealing it to the rest of the world.
Amazing this stuff still yields secrets after thousands of years. Meanwhile the 3.5" floppy disks in my parents attic on which I've kept all my teenage Turbo Pascal source code have long lost all their data.
This is something I think about a lot. How do we build a "data pyramid" that can be interpreted by future generations. I feel like much of our culture will be lost to bit rot.
Wikipedia could be encoded into DNA and them spliced into species that are very long lived, geologically speaking, such as horseshoe crabs. Absent any negative selection against "wiki DNA", they could remain readable in millions of years time.
One line of thought I was going down recently was information encoded by printing very specific and precise three-dimensional "monoliths" that display information based on postion of the nearest star (which I assume would still be Sol, and would still be around in this distant future).
Way off topic, but have you actually tried to read them? I was able to get data off some ~25 year old 5.25" C64 diskettes a few months ago, encouraged by success with data recovery from some 3.5" diskettes a few months before that.
Yes, most of them didn't last more than a few years before the bits started falling off. This may partially have been because most of them were SD (720kb) that I'd drilled the HD (1440kb) marker hole into to save money. Worked fine at the time, but probably didn't help boost their longevity.
Wasn't our understanding of how the pyramids were built, particularly the great pyramid, still very much up for debate until modern times? Let alone 1893? Plenty of older theories have been debunked.
It's an interesting subject no doubt but a more modern source would likely be a better use of time.
Yes, this work is clearly based on the cosmic ray muon detector approach that Nobel prize winner Luis Alvarez developed in the 1970’s, and looks to be a significant effort that would need considerable international support to accomplish, so somebody obviously thinks there is reason to believe Luie’s team missed something.
In addition to the results, I’m very interested to understand what led them to think there might have been something missed in the analysis of the great pyramid of Khufu/Cheops.
Key takeaways that might answer why the original team missed the clues... note the Simulation results from the Japanese team. Throughout the video it's clear they're chasing the scent of information through data analaysis and visualisation.
I think the Hololens stuff at the end is a little fluffy but it speaks to the tools scientists and engineers have available today versus the 70's
On the contrary, it is no coincidence that it this has been found by a team comprised of (also) French academics. This is very much compatible and inspired by his work.
His theory involves the Grand Gallery being a purely functional structure required to accodate a trolley that helped serve as a counterweight to heave the massive stones that relieve the weight acting upon the roof of the King’s Chamber. Implicit in this theory is the idea that there are other ”ceremonial routes” from the outside to the King’s Chamber. It is very possible that this is actually the unopened anteroom that contains the provisions for the Pharos’ afterlife (or other artefacts that could be carbon-dated).
It looks like it disproves it. The theory speculates on the presence of peremiter ascending pathways behind the exterior walls - if they do exist I’m guessing they would have shown in the scans.
The scans focused on a particular area. The technology works by placing 'plates' in desired location and collecting the particles that hit those plates. They could only place plates inside the pyramid where they had access, and collect from particular (sic) paths. They aimed for a best-guess area previously unknown but speculated upon. I assume they will repeat the experiment wherever possible to gather more data in the future.
Does HN have any domain experts that can comment on how reliable this research is?
I got super excited about the Queen Nefertiti / King Tut secret chamber theory a year or two back (which used similar methods, it seemed), and was really disappointed when it turned out to be all wrong...
This is not the same method at all and this is much more reliable. For King Tut, they used ground penetration radar, which is very hard to interpret. Here: (1) this is confirmed by 3 independent teams using 3 different detection technologies, (2) we used the same statistical criteria as for discoveries in particle physics (deviation 5 sigma from the model).
In addition, we clearly see the new void on Nagoya's data (Fig.2).
Unfortunately, cosmic-ray muons cannot be used in King Tut tomb because we can only see "above us" (the muons come from the sky).
I'm definitely looking forward to where this research takes us. I'm curious if there have been any efforts to create a muon-like transmitter that would add more flexibility to the sensor system. Is there something about muons that prohibits this?
The ScanPyramids team is being very careful not to describe the cavity as a "chamber".
He says the muon science is sound but he is not yet convinced the discovery has significance.
"It could be a kind of space that the builders left to protect the very narrow roof of the grand gallery from the weight of the pyramid," he told the BBC's Science In Action programme.
"Right now it's just a big difference; it's an anomaly. But we need more of a focus on it especially in a day and age when we can no longer go blasting our way through the pyramid with gunpowder as [British] Egyptologist Howard Vyse did in the early 1800s."
One of the team leaders, Hany Helal from Cairo University, believes the void is too big to have a pressure-relieving purpose, but concedes the experts will debate this.
No wild claims have been made, we are in the realms of safe science with nobody being taken for a ride. There is no promise of some Hollywood grade new fantasy pyramid feature, just a mystery void.
Voids have had precedents in Egyptology. My favourite being the mess the Mormons got into with the Book of Abraham. Their visionary founder guy buys some Egyptian 'scrolls' from someone who was doing the rounds taking some mummies on tour. So this was magically interpreted as the Bible Part 3, the New, new testament, a.k.a. The Book of Abraham. There were those that had seen the scrolls so they were known to actually exist however there was some big fire in Chicago and the scrolls were apparently lost.
Many decades later someone finds the scrolls in New York, they checked out to be the real deal as the illustrations were the same, including the missing bits. By now people knew a thing about how to read these things properly and the 'scrolls' that had inspired the Book of Abraham turned out to be standard funeral documents, a death certificate of sorts.
The bits that were missing from the 'scrolls' included the heads of Horus et al, therefore our Mormon friends were drawing in the heads of 'Abraham' et al. It was beyond their imagination that Egyptian figures on papyrus documents would have heads of other animals, dogs etc. So the Mormons got it completely wrong, they filled the void in with expected content - human heads - but that was an assumption too far.
So yes, this is just science, nobody is trying to found a new religion here.
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Fun fact: there's a Neolithic site in Ireland, Newgrange, that's actually older than the pyramids. Fascinating and worth a visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
Funner fact: the Great Pyramids were built closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of Göbekli Tepe. Human history is way deep.
Funnest fact: if we don't fuck it up, we're still only at the dawn of history, not at the end of it.
These look like neither... and that's damn weird! Almost like what a blind carver would make from listening to a description of a thing he never saw and carving it.
Probably the oldest cave paintings are like this, but those are like "simplest thing one can do" while these imply effort, but... somehow "skillfully retarted", like there was something "messed up" with the minds of the designers, or simply very different from our own.
(I expect there will be artefacts, and I expect their dates will coincide with what we already expect, but I’m always holding out for ”new science” that needs to be explained.)
Essentially, humans have always been garbage.
Monumental buildings almost always end up being wholesale building supply once they aren't revered and maintained.
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Personally I think some of the footage and pictures of them are more impressive than the pyramids. The size of the blocks compared to a human is just incredible.
Seems the answer is that they have, but there's something blocking the shaft and they're not willing to destroy it any further for some reason:
http://guardians.net/hawass/articles/news_on_the_robot_Dec_2...
http://www.crystalinks.com/gantenbrink.html
http://www.gizapower.com/Articles/door2.html
I agree with you, let’s not be arrogant, like in the past, and destroy what we should save for future generations.
Do you think that the DNA test of King Tut was also destruction?
(In other words, this is not a girl with a tree growing out of her head, either: https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/188/434949407_3271582421_z.jpg... )
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It seems arrogant to call the "big void" a discovery, being that someone actually built the big void.
I would expect this "discovery" has been discovered a few dozen times, considering the age of the pyramids, but previous discoveries were lost to history.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/human...
Also with a lesser extent of knowledge storage this one is interesting: https://www.wired.com/2009/04/ff-guidestones/
To give an illustration of what I am trying to describe, I am imagine something like the cover of GEB (https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1331382003l/24115.jpg), but on a multi-dimsensional scale.
Full disclosure: [7] ;)
Noticed the newest book on Project Gutenburg is:
A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE IN ALL COUNTRIES, FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PRESENT DAY.
By JAMES FERGUSSON, D.C.L., F.R.S., M.R.A.S., FELLOW ROYAL INST. BRIT. ARCHITECTS,
So I click on it, and the very first building is the Great Pyramid, complete with diagram: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55870/55870-h/55870-h.htm#Pa...
1893.
It's an interesting subject no doubt but a more modern source would likely be a better use of time.
So what ones should I look at? :-)
1. http://lappweb.in2p3.fr/~chefdevi/Work_LAPP/Arche/alvarez_70...
Edit: Thanks to jbmouret for pointing out Alvarez studied a different pyramid in the same complex!
Also, the precision of the detectors improved a lot since the sixties (this is the kind of detectors that are used in the LHC, for instance).
In addition to the results, I’m very interested to understand what led them to think there might have been something missed in the analysis of the great pyramid of Khufu/Cheops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB-MOGw0RMo
Key takeaways that might answer why the original team missed the clues... note the Simulation results from the Japanese team. Throughout the video it's clear they're chasing the scent of information through data analaysis and visualisation.
I think the Hololens stuff at the end is a little fluffy but it speaks to the tools scientists and engineers have available today versus the 70's
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His theory involves the Grand Gallery being a purely functional structure required to accodate a trolley that helped serve as a counterweight to heave the massive stones that relieve the weight acting upon the roof of the King’s Chamber. Implicit in this theory is the idea that there are other ”ceremonial routes” from the outside to the King’s Chamber. It is very possible that this is actually the unopened anteroom that contains the provisions for the Pharos’ afterlife (or other artefacts that could be carbon-dated).
Or maybe another gallery leading to a third chamber. These are my theories.
I got super excited about the Queen Nefertiti / King Tut secret chamber theory a year or two back (which used similar methods, it seemed), and was really disappointed when it turned out to be all wrong...
This is not the same method at all and this is much more reliable. For King Tut, they used ground penetration radar, which is very hard to interpret. Here: (1) this is confirmed by 3 independent teams using 3 different detection technologies, (2) we used the same statistical criteria as for discoveries in particle physics (deviation 5 sigma from the model).
In addition, we clearly see the new void on Nagoya's data (Fig.2).
Unfortunately, cosmic-ray muons cannot be used in King Tut tomb because we can only see "above us" (the muons come from the sky).
I've posted this video elsewhere in the this thread but putting here for completeness. It's a better overview compared to the bbc article.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB-MOGw0RMo
Voids have had precedents in Egyptology. My favourite being the mess the Mormons got into with the Book of Abraham. Their visionary founder guy buys some Egyptian 'scrolls' from someone who was doing the rounds taking some mummies on tour. So this was magically interpreted as the Bible Part 3, the New, new testament, a.k.a. The Book of Abraham. There were those that had seen the scrolls so they were known to actually exist however there was some big fire in Chicago and the scrolls were apparently lost.
Many decades later someone finds the scrolls in New York, they checked out to be the real deal as the illustrations were the same, including the missing bits. By now people knew a thing about how to read these things properly and the 'scrolls' that had inspired the Book of Abraham turned out to be standard funeral documents, a death certificate of sorts.
The bits that were missing from the 'scrolls' included the heads of Horus et al, therefore our Mormon friends were drawing in the heads of 'Abraham' et al. It was beyond their imagination that Egyptian figures on papyrus documents would have heads of other animals, dogs etc. So the Mormons got it completely wrong, they filled the void in with expected content - human heads - but that was an assumption too far.
So yes, this is just science, nobody is trying to found a new religion here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Abraham