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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

My takeaways:

- From the entrance, all the way to the Grand Gallery ... it doesn't not feel like that was an intended entrance path. It gives the vibe of an auxiliary tunnel (not main path).

- It's extremely "industrial". For what historians claim to be a monument, there's not a single hieroglyphic that I saw. It was the opposite of being ornate or lavish.

- There's numerous deep groves intended to guide something large carved into the granite in many of the larger spaces (like immediately outside the Kings Chambers). Similar to what you'd find in a Steel Mill to guide large hot containers. It appears as if this was a structure used to manufacturer something (not a tomb of a pharaoh). See previous point.

Note: I'm not trying to spread rumors or create speculation. Just my observations from viewing this incredible 3D scan (much appreciation to the author for capturing this incredible marvel)

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> For what historians claim to be a monument, there's not a single hieroglyphic that I saw.

It's the pyramid of Khufu, 2nd king of the 4th dynasty. None of the pyramids of the 4th dynasty have hieroglyphs. That slowly came into fashion in the 5th (or 6th? Too lazy to check) dynasty. If you measure ancient egypt from the 1st dynasty to Cleopatra, you come up with roughly 3000 years. This pyramid was built around the year 500 on that scale. There is not much writing left at all from that period. The palermo stone being one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Stone The most exiting recent find is the diary of Merer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_Merer It seems he was a middle manager in transporting stones to this, Khufus pyramid, which makes his writings the closest you can get to an eye witness account of the construction.

It says "We're entering today through a Robber's Tunnel, a tunnel that some believe was created in 820 AD by Caliph al-Ma'mun, when he was trying to break into the pyramid."

Dumb question: if this is the robbers tunnel - why haven’t modern day archeologist excavated the main pyramid entrance?

They have. It's a few levels higher. The robbers tunnel is easier to reach from the ground, so it became the main entrance for visitors for centuries now.

Is the main entrance actually opened/digged through? (I know it's not really needed, just curious).

It is not very clear from the picture outside. You can have a glance of the other side (as part of Descending Passage) as well in OP's tour, but again not clear, the view is blocked by something there.

> it doesn't not feel like that was an intended entrance path

The accompanying text says the entrance was made by robbers forcefully breaking through some random section because they did not find the true entrance. So they dug until they hit the existing tunnels.

Damn even after thousands of years the pyramids keep getting interesting!

My first reaction was one of astonishment that the robbers tunnel is so close to the actual entrance and tunnel. If just some random location was chosen that was quite lucky. After some googling I guess there's still a lot of uncertainty.

Here's an interesting article:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/inside-the-great-pyram...

The floor of the entrance is exactly at the right height, a little to the right of a crucial element to get access to the upper chambers: The crossing between the ascending and descending passage. This is where the ascending passage was blocked - you can see one of the large granite blocks still in place today. The (presumably) robbers goal was to get behind those granite blocks. This passage leads straight on to the crossing, then taking a sharp left turn just right behind the blocking. Whoever built this path must have known where it should lead to. That makes the story that Al Mamun did it so unlikely. He might have enhanced an existing tunnel, but there is no conceivable reason why he should have built it in the first place. Here is a rough illustration, the dark brown being the robbers tunnel: http://www.benben.de/Architektur/Cheops/Grafik/Mamun3.jpg

Understand that the inside of pyramids were supposed to be sealed up for eternity, not visited by people. Visitors would instead go to the mortuary temples in front of the pyramids, which indeed had ornate interiors and plenty of hieroglyphs. With the fifth dynasty pyramid of Unas, parts of what was presumably a funeral liturgy began to be inscribed on the inside of tombs for the benefit of the dead. This idea that these early, looted (and thus, empty) pyramids aren't tombs because they don't have writings inside is as silly as objecting that modern yet-to-be-filled burial vaults aren't burial vaults because they don't contain excerpts from the funeral liturgy from the Book of Common prayer on the inside. The writings on the outside tell you exactly what they are.

It's really old and has a lot of history post ancient Egypt a fair bit of it abusive, e.g. it looks like the sphinx's nose was chiselled off (not shot off with a cannon by Napoleon in the myth). People used to climb all over the great pyramid, etc. It's cool to go to the more recently discovered places like the valley of the queens to see the paint and hieroglyphics. All the stuff near Cairo has had more human interaction.

It’s a power station, have a read of ‘The Giza Power Plant’

I enjoy reading far out theories like these. I recently[1] saw one that claimed all the weird tunnels that terminate just short of the outside resemble wave guides, the big tunnel with the grooves was a low pass filter and the whole structure was basically a giant antenna

Any electrical engineers around feel like modelling it seeing how true it is?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb0zGX2gJIY

You wouldn't make an inverted-inverted-V antenna out of waveguide. The whole point of waveguide is to be a transmission line, not a radiating element. Even if we ignore that, a dipole antenna of those dimensions is two orders of magnitude larger than what you'd use to radiate on the hydrogen line.

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