Secret rooms of the Cheops pyramid. Scientists have discovered a secret room inside the Cheops pyramid. How the cache was discovered

Scientists have discovered a long, hidden, narrow void in the Great Pyramid, helping to finally unlock the secrets of a 4,500-year-old wonder of the world. To study the riddles were used Newest technologies, and we are again getting closer to solving the mystery of the Great Pyramid!

The Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world for thousands of years. The Pyramid of Khufu is the only Wonder of the World that has survived to this day. Scientists around the world have been trying to solve the mystery of the pyramid for hundreds of years, and now this has become possible thanks to the latest technologies.

Scientists have made a grand discovery using particles that penetrate rock. Detectors installed throughout the pyramid, including the Royal Chamber. discovered an empty space called the ScanPyramids Big Void.

"The ScanPyramids Big Void is not a room or a chamber—we don't know whether it's horizontal or vertical, whether it's made of one or more sequential structures, but it's big," says author Mehdi Tayoubi, president and co-founder of the HIP Institute

The find is located above the Great Gallery, which connects two chambers of the pyramid. Although the exact name is not known, it is the most big discovery, starting from the 19th century.

The space may be on a slope, meaning it could have been used to transport huge blocks to the center of the pyramid, experts say.

Three methods were used for the study:

Infrared thermography
3D scanning using lasers.
Cosmic ray detectors.

It was cosmic ray detectors that helped obtain an overall picture of the mysterious cavity

Muons are created when the atmosphere reacts with cosmic rays, creating a stream of particles, some of which decay into muons. Elementary particles, which weigh 200 times more than electrons, can pass through any structure very easily, even large and thick rocks such as mountains

Researchers from the scientific committee of the Ministry of Ancient Egyptians suggest that this may be a "construction gap" - part of a trench that allowed workers to access the Grand Gallery and the Royal Chamber while the rest of the pyramid was built.

This find may finally explain how this pyramid was built. Scientists are confident that modern particle physics can shed light on the archaeological heritage of the world

After examining the pyramid, scientists, using computer technology, tried to recreate the appearance of this room.

MOSCOW, November 2 – RIA Novosti. Physicists have found a previously unknown void area in the Cheops pyramid that may be a secret tomb or a passage into it, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.

“When we saw this area of emptiness, we realized that we had come across something very interesting and big, we abandoned all other projects and concentrated on studying this area, located directly above the corridor to the tomb of Cheops. Now we are sure that it really exists, and this "This is the first discovery of its kind in the Cheops pyramid since the Middle Ages, when it was opened by Caliph Al-Mamun in the 9th century," said Mehdi Tayoubi from the HIP Institute in Paris (France).

Physicists have found two “unknown voids” in the Cheops pyramidArchaeologists and physicists have discovered two, as they put it, “previously unknown voids” inside the Cheops pyramid, which may be secret rooms where the remains of Pharaoh Khufu rest.

Secrets of the Pharaohs

The Pyramid of Cheops, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, was built in the middle of the third millennium BC, during the time of Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops), a representative of the fourth dynasty of the Old Kingdom, at the same time as all the “great pyramids” Ancient Egypt. This structure, 145 meters high and 230 meters wide and long, remains one of the tallest and largest buildings ever created by mankind.

Over the past two centuries, scientists have discovered three rooms in the pyramid, in one of which the pharaoh himself was supposedly buried, in the other his wife, and the third was considered a bait or trap for robbers. In the walls of the corridors that lead to Khufu's tomb, unusual channels and structures were found, which scientists believe are elements of the “security system” that protected the pharaoh from defilers.

The mummies of the pharaoh and his wife were never discovered, which is why many archaeologists believe that in fact their tombs are still hidden in the thickness of the pyramid. Two years ago, scientists from the universities of Nagoya, Paris and Cairo began searching for these secret rooms, studying the pyramid using cosmic particle detectors and telescopes as part of the ScanPyramids project.

Breath of space

Every second, millions of muons are formed in the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere - charged particles resulting from the collision of cosmic rays with gas molecules in the air. These collisions accelerate muons to near-light speeds, thanks to which they penetrate tens and hundreds of meters deep into the surface of the planet. As scientists' measurements show, every square meter The Earth's surface absorbs about 10 thousand of these particles.

French archaeologists and physicists, together with Japanese scientists, have adapted telescopes that can “see” muons to search for voids and hidden rooms in monuments ancient architecture.

This technique works very simply - the flux of muons decreases in the air and in empty space much more slowly than when passing through rock or earth, which makes it possible to search for secret rooms by bursts in the muon background.

Last October, participants in the ScanPyramids project announced a sensational discovery - they managed to find several previously unknown voids in the pyramid, which could be the secret tombs of the “lord of two houses” and his wife. This discovery caused sharp rejection among archaeologists and Egyptologists, who accused physicists of incorrectly interpreting the data obtained.

Physics and lyrics

These accusations forced scientists to take repeated measurements using three different muon telescopes. This time, as Tayubi emphasized, the observations were carried out according to the same rules and principles by which the Higgs boson and other particles unknown to science were searched for at the LHC and other accelerators.

“Our measurements absolutely rule out that this void area could have arisen due to differences in the properties of the stones or due to errors in construction,” says Zahi Hawass. Voids of this size and configuration could not have appeared between the blocks by chance, neither with engineering nor any other technology. "The Egyptians were too good builders to screw up the pyramid, leave a hole in it and create a room or corridor somewhere else," said Hany Helal of Cairo University.

Checking whether this is true or not, scientists installed a set of films sensitive to the action of muons in the supposed tomb of Cheops’s wife, and placed semiconductor particle detectors at the bottom of the pyramid. After a few months, they collected the data, processed it and compared it with how muons should move through the pyramid if there were no other voids in it, except for the already known corridors and rooms.

If the initial results of scanning the Cheops pyramid were erroneous, then, as Elal notes, the “pictures” obtained by different muon telescopes would not match. In fact, they turned out to be the same, which confirmed the assumptions of physicists and refuted the insinuations of archaeologists.

The images showed that above the main corridor of the pyramid there is a zone of emptiness thirty meters long, eight meters high and about two meters wide. As Tayubi noted, it can be either a solid corridor running parallel to the ground, up or down, or a suite of rooms. So far, physicists do not have enough data to rule out the first or second option.

Scientists emphasize that they are not interpreting their discovery in any way and do not claim that they managed to find a secret room - this task, according to them, should be carried out by Egyptologists.

Jean-Baptiste Mouret, a physicist at the University of Paris, hopes his team's discovery will convince Egyptian historians that they were wrong in their assessments and will open the door to debate whether it is worth trying to penetrate this void zone. if yes, how to do it.

A new round of history

In the near future, as scientists noted, they plan to continue studying the void zone, as well as other sections of the Cheops pyramid, including the tomb of the pharaoh himself, and will begin to scan other pyramids that may hide secret rooms and unknown voids.

These data, physicists hope, will help us understand exactly how the pyramids were built and whether we can trust the descriptions of their construction, which have come down to our time in the works of Herodotus.

At the same time, as scientists noted, muon scanners can not reveal all the secrets. ancient history. For example, according to Tayubi, they cannot be used to search for the secret tomb of Nefertiti in the tomb of Tutankhamun, the existence of which was recently announced by the famous British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves.

“Muon scanners cannot be used to study the tomb of Tutankhamun and other burials in the Valley of the Kings for the reason that we do not know how the voids are distributed in the rocks located above them,” the scientist explained, answering a question from RIA Novosti.

Such research, added Sebastien Procureur, a colleague of Moret, is further complicated by the fact that man-made particle accelerators cannot be used to scan pyramids and other ancient buildings, since delivering them to Giza or the Valley of the Kings would entail unacceptably high costs.

“In short, this is simply not feasible. Muons cannot be created directly - they arise from the decays of kaons and pions, and there are too few particle accelerators in the world capable of accelerating them to the required speeds. In addition, they are all very large - at least 700 meters in length. It would be easier for us to transport the pyramid to such a facility than to try to build it in Giza or other parts of Egypt. Therefore, we have to rely on space for such observations,” the agency’s interlocutor concluded.

Illustration copyright AFP Image caption Scientists have to understand whether the find is of scientific value

Scientists continue to solve mysteries Egyptian pyramids: this time they discovered a previously unknown room inside the largest and oldest pyramid of Cheops.

The room (in the picture below - Big Void) about 30 meters long and about two meters high is located in the very center of the pyramid. Its purpose is still unclear; it is also unclear what is inside and whether there is anything valuable there, since there is no access to the premises.

It was found thanks to muon radiography technology, which allows you to scan rock and find empty cavities in it using highly sensitive radar, so-called cosmic rays.

Also, using radar, scientists were able to detect a small room near one of the sides of the pyramid.

The study, the results of which were published in the journal Nature, involved a group of archaeologists and scientists from Egypt, France, Canada and Japan. It took about two years to discover the find.

WITH early XIX century - this is the first find of this scale.

The age of the Cheops Pyramid (Great Pyramid of Giza) is estimated at 4.5 thousand years old, it was built between 2509 and 2483 BC.

It is the largest structure of the archaeological complex of the Giza Pyramids, located on the west bank of the Nile River near Cairo.

Next to the pyramid of Cheops are the pyramids of Khafre and Mikerin. All of them bear the names of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.

It is known that the Cheops pyramid has three large rooms and many passages, shafts and tunnels. The largest of the rooms - the Great Gallery - is located exactly in the middle. This is a narrow, almost vertical shaft about 8 meters high and 47 meters long.

The void discovered by scientists is located directly above this gallery and has similar dimensions.

“We don’t know whether this room is horizontal or tilted, whether it consists of one room or several,” explained Mehdi Tayobi from the Paris-based HIP Institute, an organization that studies pyramids. “But we are sure that it is there. This impressive, because no theory suggested this, as far as I know."

Illustration copyright SCANPYRAMIDS Image caption The space found is located directly above the Great Gallery

The team behind the ScanPyramids project, which brings together scientists studying the pyramids at Giza, is wary of attempts to call the find a “room.”

The Cheops pyramid has special compartments that were designed to avoid rock collapse due to high pressure from above (the total weight of the pyramid is about 4 million tons).

Above the King's Room, which is located above the Great Gallery, there are five such voids.

Illustration copyright Getty Images

The famous American archaeologist Mark Lenner is on the commission that evaluates the work of the ScanPyramids team. He says muon radiography can be trusted, but he's not yet sure the find is significant.

"This could be a space that the builders left to protect very narrow roof large gallery from the weight of the pyramid," he said on the BBC's Science in Action program.

"This is very important; this is an anomaly. We need to concentrate on this, especially in an age when we can no longer blow up the walls of a pyramid, as [British] Egyptologist Howard Weiss did in the early 1800s."

Illustration copyright SCANPYRAMIDS Image caption Muon telescopes reveal voids in natural materials

One of the team's leaders, Hani Helal of Cairo University, believes the cavity is too large for pressure distribution alone, but admits that experts will still debate this.

"We are trying to understand the internal structure of the pyramids and understand how they were built," he told reporters. "Famous Egyptologists, archaeologists and architects - they have several hypotheses. We give them data, and they will tell us whether it is possible or not."

Non-penetration void testing technology has evolved over the past 50 years to probe the internal structure of various natural components, from volcanoes to glaciers. It was also used to investigate the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident.

Muon radiography uses streams of charged particles created after cosmic rays collide with gas molecules in the air. This collision produces various new particles, including muons.

These particles move at speeds close to the speed of light. And they, in turn, are absorbed by the surface of the planet at different speeds. By the rate of this absorption, voids in the structure of the material can be determined.

Illustration copyright SCANPYRAMIDS Image caption So far it is known for sure that the room in the pyramid exists, and it is impressive in size

The ScanPyramids team used three types of muon telescopes, and all three showed the same data on the position and size of the void.

Sebastian Procurer from the University of Paris emphasized that only large spaces can be seen with this method, and scientists did not take into account the usual porosity of the pyramid structure.

“You can measure the integral density using muons,” he explains. “It would remain the same if there were a lot of small voids. We would see an average value. But if you see an excess of muons, then it is a larger void.”

"It's not Swiss cheese," he says.

The question of how to explore the discovered premises is now being discussed.

Jean-Baptiste Muret from the French National Institute of Informatics and applied mathematics said that they have an idea on how to do this, but it must first be approved by the Egyptian authorities.

"Our idea is to drill a very small hole. We want to put a robot in there that can fit through a three-centimeter hole," he said.

A previously unknown area of emptiness has been found in the Cheops pyramid, which may be a secret tomb or a passage into it, says an article published in the journal Nature.

Secrets of the Pharaohs

The Pyramid of Cheops, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, was built in the middle of the third millennium BC, during the time of Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops), a representative of the fourth dynasty of the Old Kingdom, at the same time as all the “great pyramids” of Ancient Egypt. This structure, 145 meters high and 230 meters wide and long, remains one of the tallest and largest buildings ever created by mankind.

Breath of space

Every second, millions of muons are formed in the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere - charged particles resulting from the collision of cosmic rays with gas molecules in the air. These collisions accelerate muons to near-light speeds, thanks to which they penetrate tens and hundreds of meters deep into the surface of the planet. Scientists' measurements show that every square meter of the Earth's surface absorbs about 10 thousand of these particles.

French archaeologists and physicists, together with Japanese scientists, have adapted telescopes that can “see” muons to search for voids and hidden rooms in ancient architectural monuments.

Physics and lyrics

Scientists emphasize that they do not interpret their discovery in any way and do not claim that they managed to find a secret room - this task, according to them, should be carried out by Egyptologists.

A new round of history

At the same time, as scientists noted, muon scanners can not reveal all the secrets of ancient history. For example, according to Tayubi, they cannot be used to search for the secret tomb of Nefertiti in the tomb of Tutankhamun, the existence of which was recently announced by the famous British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves.

"In short, this is simply not feasible. Muons cannot be created directly - they arise from the decays of kaons and pions, and there are too few particle accelerators in the world capable of accelerating them to the required speeds. In addition, they are all very large - at least 700 meters in length. It would be easier for us to transport the pyramid to such a facility than to try to build it in Giza or other parts of Egypt. Therefore, we have to rely on space in such observations,” the agency’s interlocutor concluded.

Physicists have found a previously unknown void area near the pharaoh's tomb and the main corridor of the Cheops pyramid that may be a secret tomb or a passage into it, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

"When we saw this area of emptiness, we realized that we had come across something very interesting and big, we abandoned all other projects and concentrated on studying this area, located directly above the corridor to the tomb of Cheops. Now we are sure that it really exists, and it "This is the first discovery of its kind in the Cheops Pyramid since the Middle Ages, when it was discovered by Caliph Al-Mamun in the 9th century AD," said Mehdi Tayoubi of the HIP Institute in Paris, France.

Secrets of the Pharaohs

The Pyramid of Cheops, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, was built in the middle of the third millennium BC by Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops), a representative of the fourth dynasty of the Old Kingdom, during which all the “great pyramids” of Ancient Egypt were built. At 145 meters high and 230 meters wide and long, this structure remains one of the tallest and largest structures ever created by mankind.

Over the past two centuries, scientists have discovered three rooms inside the pyramid, in one of which the pharaoh himself was supposedly buried, in the other his wife, and the third was considered a bait or trap for robbers. In the walls of the corridors that lead to the tomb of Khufu, unusual channels and structures were found, which today scientists consider to be elements of the “security system” that protected the pharaoh from defilers.

The mummies of the pharaoh and his wife were never found, leading many archaeologists to believe that their tombs were not actually discovered and are still hidden in the depths of the pyramid. Two years ago, physicists from the University of Nagoya, Paris and Cairo began searching for these secret rooms, studying the pyramid using cosmic particle detectors and space telescopes as part of the ScanPyramids project.

Breath of space

Every second, millions of muons are formed in the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere - charged particles resulting from the collision of cosmic rays with gas molecules in the air. These collisions accelerate muons to near-light speeds, thanks to which they penetrate tens and hundreds of meters deep into the surface of the planet. Each square meter of the Earth's surface, as scientists' measurements show, absorbs about 10 thousand of these particles.

French archaeologists and physicists, together with Japanese scientists, have adapted telescopes that can “see” muons to search for voids and hidden rooms in ancient architectural monuments.

This technique works in a very simple way - the flux of muons decreases in the air and in empty space much more slowly than when passing through rock or earth, which makes it possible to search for secret rooms by bursts in the muon background.

In October last year, participants in the ScanPyramids project announced a sensational discovery - they managed to find several previously unknown voids inside the pyramid, which could be the secret tombs of the “lord of two houses” and his wife. This discovery caused sharp rejection among archaeologists and Egyptologists, who accused physicists of incorrectly interpreting the data obtained.

Physics and lyrics

Such accusations forced scientists to take repeated measurements using three different muon telescopes. These observations, as Tayoubi emphasized, were carried out this time according to the same rules and principles that were used at the LHC and other particle accelerators in the search for the Higgs boson and other particles unknown to science.

“Our measurements absolutely rule out that this area of void could have arisen due to differences in the properties of the stones or due to errors in construction, as Zahi Hawass claims. Voids of this size and configuration could not have appeared by chance between the blocks, neither with engineering nor with According to some other point of view, the Egyptians were too good builders to screw up the construction of the pyramid, leave a “hole” in it and create a room or corridor somewhere else,” said Hany Helal from the University of Cairo (Egypt). .

Checking whether this is true or not, scientists installed a set of films sensitive to the action of muons in the supposed tomb of Cheops's wife, and placed semiconductor particle detectors at the bottom of the pyramid. A few months later, scientists collected data, processed it and compared it with how muons should move through the pyramid if there were no other voids in it, except for the already known corridors and rooms.

If the initial results of scanning the Cheops pyramid were erroneous, then, as Elal notes, the “pictures” obtained by different muon telescopes would not match. In fact, they were all the same, which confirmed the suspicions of physicists and refuted the insinuations of archaeologists.

All these images showed that above the main corridor of the pyramid there is a void zone 30 meters long, 8 meters high and approximately 2 meters wide. As Tayubi noted, it can be either a “solid” corridor, running parallel to the ground or up or down, or a set of rooms. So far, physicists do not have enough data to rule out either the first or second option.

Jean-Baptiste Mouret, a physicist at the University of Paris in France, hopes his team's discovery will convince Egyptian historians that they were wrong in their assessments and will spark a debate about whether to try to penetrate this void zone and if so, how to do it.

A new round of history

In the near future, as scientists noted, they plan to continue studying this void zone, as well as other regions of the Cheops pyramid, including the tomb of the pharaoh himself, and will begin to scan other pyramids that may hide secret rooms and voids unknown to us.

These data, physicists hope, will help us understand exactly how the pyramids were built and whether we can trust those descriptions of the process of their construction that have come down to our time in the works of Herodotus.

At the same time, as scientists noted, muon scanners can not reveal all the secrets of ancient history. For example, as Tayubi noted, they cannot be used to search for the secret tomb of Nefertiti in the tomb of Tutankhamun, whose existence was recently announced by the famous British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves.

Such research, added Sebastien Procureur, a colleague of Moret, is further complicated by the fact that “scanning” pyramids and other ancient buildings cannot be accelerated using man-made particle accelerators, since they cannot be delivered to Giza or the Valley of the Kings for a reasonable price money.

"In short, this is simply impossible. Muons cannot be created directly - they arise from the decays of kaons and pions, and there are quite a few particle accelerators in the world capable of accelerating them to the required speeds. In addition, they are all very large - their length is at least 700 meters. It would be easier for us to transport the pyramid to such a facility than to try to build it in Giza or other parts of Egypt. Therefore, we have to rely on space in such observations,” the agency’s interlocutor concludes.