We may still be missing something about the Great Pyramid of Giza, the oldest and lone survivor of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Completed thousands of years ago around 2560 BC, it's astounding to think that we haven't yet unearthed everything there is to know about the Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu or the Pyramid of Cheops.
There are three known chambers inside the pyramid: one in the structure's bedrock and the two Queen's and King's chambers located higher up. With the use of modern technology, however, an "anomaly" has been discovered at the ground level of the eastern part of the Great Pyramid.
Combining several non-invasive and non-destructive scanning techniques such as infrared thermography, muon radiography and 3D reconstruction, researchers from Cairo University and the HIP.Institute (Heritage, Innovation, Preservation) completed the first phase of the #ScanPyramidsProject during which the anomalies were discovered.
The scanning was done throughout the day from sunrise as the sun heats up the stones of the pyramid to sunset as the pyramid cools down. It's the phases of heating and cooling that are being used to uncover what may be different building materials used, internal air currents, and even empty areas or hidden chambers.
Thermal scans from the two-week project located a multitude of insignificant thermal anomalies in other pyramids that ranged only from 0.1 to 0.5 degrees, but the one discovered on a specific set of stones on the Great Pyramid were as much as six degrees cooler or warmer than the ones next to them.
"There is something here," professor at Cairo University involved in the project, Hany Helal, said to CNN. "Something is not normal with respect to the other parts of the Pyramid."
Echoing the same observations, "The first row of the pyramid's stones are all uniform, then we come here and find that there's a difference in the formation," Mamdouh el-Damaty, the Egyptian minister of antiquities shared.
Not jumping to conclusions, however, the antiquities minister was reluctant to share his hypotheses before additional research was conducted. He did comment that the differences in temperature could be due to the "presence of voids beneath the surface" or moving "internal air currents" beneath the stone blocks.
It will take another two weeks of additional testing to confirm the results of the thermal scans and find out if there actually is anything else left to discover about the age old mysteries surrounding the Great Pyramid.
Photo: Sam Valadi | Flickr
