Ancient Egyptians outwit modern science
Ancient Egyptian ingenuity defeated 21st century technology in front of a world wide TV audience today when a toy train sized robot cut through a door inside the Great Pyramid and revealed for the first time in 4,500 years - another door.
Researchers are now planning more exploration after their high-tech probe solved one puzzle and introduced another.
The robot dubbed the Pyramid Rover took two hours to crawl through a narrow shaft to a door in the Great Pyramid outside Cairo. The robot pushed a camera through a hole drilled in the door to reveal the second door.
Zahi Hawass, the director of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said it was no anticlimax.
“This is very important,” said an excited Hawass as the robot broadcast its first images.
The tiny camera showed a small, uncluttered space backed by a vertical, sheer stone surface Hawass believes is another door. Hawass said the next job for researchers was to study the footage and plan for further inspections, which could take up to 12 months.
Hawass’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, along with engineers from the Boston firm iRobot and researchers from National Geographic, had spent a year planning the robot’s expedition.
“I enjoyed the moment of discovery. We were not disappointed - we were successful in our mission,” said Tim Kelly, president of National Geographic’s television and film division,.
American station Fox TV and the National Geographic Channel went live with footage of the robot inching along the rough, 200 feet shaft toward a limestone door adorned with two brass handles.
TV viewers and scientists got a simultaneous look at what was billed as the Secret Chamber.
From a chamber inside the pyramid, engineers controlled the robot’s movement by sending instructions via cables. The tons of stone all around made radio controls impracticable.
Engineers from iRobot, benefiting from the experience of a German team that sent a robot as far as the door in 1993, spent the last six months designing their £160,000 Pyramid Rover.
During the broadcast, Hawass made another find by lifting the lid on a stone sarcophagus found in a tomb built near the Great Pyramid, revealing the intact skeleton apparently of a man dating back to the period of the pyramid’s construction 4,500 years ago.
The programme included a re-enactment of the pyramid’s building and analysis of other pharaonic-era discoveries made on the world famous Giza plateau.
The Great Pyramid, built by Khufu, a ruler also known as Cheops, has four narrow shafts. It is the most magnificent of all Egypt’s pyramids, formed by 2.3 million stone blocks, and has lost little of its original height of 481 feet and width of 756 feet.
For more than a century, archaeologists have been wondering why such shafts were built and what secrets they might hold.
Hawass said the shafts may have played symbolic roles in Khufu’s religious philosophy. Khufu proclaimed himself Sun God during his life - pharaohs before him believed they became sun gods only after death - and he may have tried to reflect his ideas in the design of his pyramid.
The shafts - the one the robot ascended Tuesday was just eight inches square - were not designed for human passage.
Khufu’s pyramid has never yielded the treasures usually associated with pharaohs, perhaps because tomb robbers plundered it thousands of years ago.
