A Tiny Camera Revealed a Hidden Passage in the Great Pyramid | Hacker News Reader

A Tiny Camera Revealed a Hidden Passage in the Great Pyramid

modernengineeringmarvels.com

86 pointsBrajeshwar41 comments

Better article with pictures (2023): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-64825526

From BBC:

  The officials say it could have been created to redistribute the pyramid's 
  weight around the entrance or another as yet undiscovered chamber.

From TFA:

  Specialists have linked the corridor to the pyramid’s internal load 
  management. Its position near the entrance and behind the gabled stonework 
  suggests it may have helped redirect the immense weight pressing down from 
  above, much as the relieving chambers over the king’s chamber were designed 
  to protect spaces below.

Yeah, looks like a "relieving chamber" [0] to me. It'd be interesting to take the densities from muon tomography and plug them into finite element analysis. A recent paper using the muon tomography data to inform comparisons of ramp styles [1] says that further data is needed:

  The possibility that the NFC functioned as a relieving chamber has been 
  previously suggested, though without consensus.  . . . where the NFC’s gabled 
  vault—an architecture well known for load redirection—could act as a 
  stress-moderating feature, limiting transmission toward the Descending 
  Passage. This interpretation remains hypothetical and does not imply 
  intentional design integration; it is based solely on geometric compatibility 
  and structural plausibility. Verifying a load-management role will require 
  dedicated finite-element analyses constrained by ERT geometry and improved 
  characterization of internal stratigraphy.

0. https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/37189/engine...

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-026-02405-x

This is why I'm a huge proponent of teaching history as an exciting course in schools.

Our understanding of the past is constantly evolving and changing shape in significant ways. It's rather sad that so many kids grow up never being exposed to an instructor with such an attitude. So many people consider the topic boring and that's tragic.

Huge wins for science make me happy, too.

I remember this being talked about >20 years ago when the idea came up and they had to get clearance from the Egyptian gov which were not keen on the idea. If this is indeed the same "hidden passage" ... Gee .. 20 years to get clearance.

Some people think the Egyptian government aims to control archeology so it doesn't find things conflicting with their view of history.

The alternate view is that it's mostly just hopelessly bureaucratic.

The other alternate view is that it's run by an incompetent narcissist (Zahi Hawass, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Department that controls who can do what in the pyramids). Hawass was not particularly supportive of the original ScanPyramids Project results.

'On November 2, 2017, the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass told the New York Times: "They found nothing...This paper offers nothing to Egyptology. Zero."' -- wikipedia.

The result from the ScanPyramids Project that got the most coverage was a strong suggestion that there is a major void (the ScanPyramids Big Void) above the Grand Gallery leading to the King's Chamber (which has not yet been confirmed). They also found weaker evidence that suggested there was a tunnel on the north face behind the chevron blocks. The existence of the ScanPyramids North Face Corridor (referred to in the literature as the SP-NFC) was confirmed in 2023, by inserting an endoscope into a crack between two of the chevron blocks. Zahi Hawass did his best to take credit for the discovery. Nobody took him seriously.

An alternative alternative view is that the pyramids are >4000 years old and 20 years is nothing in that context, so waiting a few years for technology to improve to the extent that they can be confident that the archeologists can do an investigation in a less invasive way that doesn't cause damage is time well spent.

Fibre-optic endoscopes have been around since the mid 1970s. So technology that is much older than the muon scanning techniques that the ScanPyramids project used to discover the North Face Corridor. The real problem, I think, was that Hawass went on record to reject the ScanPyramids results for reasons known only to Zahi Hawass, despite widespread scientific acceptance of the ScanPyramids papers.

That underground city near Derinkuyu in Turkey is suppose to have 18 levels, the first 8 are open to the public, the other 10 have been waiting for permission since 1963.

Did a quick search with perplexity, and it seems this is the other shaft from the 90s: https://www.crystalinks.com/GantenbrinksDoor.html .

It makes sense, to drum up as much interest and mystique as possible to for marketing purposes.

Are we able to generate muons outside of a particle accelerator, or does all muography rely on cosmic rays?

Muons are not stable, thus you cannot tear them off matter as you'd do with electrons. And they have a mass of 105 MeV each, which means you need a nice particle accelerator to create a few of them.

Furthermore, if you want (most of) them to fly in a particular direction, you need to scale that accelerator up.

It's pretty much just cosmic rays. I suppose you can sort of create them by using an accelerator to generate a beam of the appropriate particles that'll hit a target or decay and become a beam of muons outside the accelerator but that's not really all that practical. Incidentally, this is how neutrino beams are generated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_tomography:

“Muon tomography or muography is a technique that uses cosmic ray muons to generate two or three-dimensional images of volumes using information contained in the Coulomb scattering of the muons.

[…]

Since 2010s researchers are also exploring and attempting to use artificially generated muons—created by conventional accelerators or laser-plasma systems—for muon tomography.”

I may overlook something, but skimming the references, I get the impression the latter still is an idea. References are about simulating the machinery, discussing requirements of hypothetical machines, etc.

The Nature paper from last year: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-91115-8

Different Nature paper from last year. The article is regurgitating stuff that happened in 2023, with a 2026 byline date.

Your paper, on the other hand, seems to be comparing three different scanning methods (radar, ultrasound, and resistivity) for measuring the thickness of the chevron block in front of the North Face Corridor. So not related.

Just when you think Egyptology can't get more interesting, it does. No wonder "just a quick search about the Pyramids" turns into a lifelong obsession for many.

It's fascinating how we're STILL reverse engineering something built thousands of years ago, somewhat respectfully without disturbing it!

What's exciting about this is the opportunity to examine an untouched area of history. Sadly, over hundreds of years, much of the artifacts from these sites were looted. Hopefully we've learned our lessons at this point and can preserve them this round.

I sometimes wonder what digital historians will rediscover about our current era internet in 1000 years.

They're going to assume our entire society was built around /r/datahoarders (because that's all they'll ever find).

Would be fun to write a short story about it. I'm thinking a crossover between Motel of the Mysteries and Galaxy Quest and such.

"Their lives seem to have revolved mostly around musical concerts—not so much listening to them, as recording the audio from them like trophies to share for prestige among their peers. Mostly some kind of status-jockeying activity, as the art—such as it was, and if you've heard some of these recordings you know what I mean—seems to have been incidental. It's unclear whether anyone even listened to these recordings, but one acquainted with the material must suppose: no, not often. We speculate these concerts must have been difficult or trying to attend (again, one must agree that they were surely trying...) and so obtaining a recording of them as proof of one's attendance, and endurance of the entire trial, took on an almost hunting-trophy-like role in society.

Most of their highly-prized leisure entertainment seems to have been British and Eastern European television, plus something called 'Battletoads'."

We'd be exploring earth then like we are exploring mars now and someone akin to Elon would be making statements like "Occupy Earth".

They'll find whatever they need to find (or not find) just as we do. Its simply an impossible exercise to go back in time, carrying all of our assumptions about modern life and what we have been taught about the 'Ancient world'.

Who knows what the aliens left behind!

Although from the photos of the space, it looks to be empty, so no amazing artifacts to be discovered. I would guess that any ancient unknown artifacts that are discovered in the next century will come from undersea archaeology with all the limitations that exist for finding things that have been underwater for thousands of years.

> Hopefully we've learned ...

i think the recurrent problem across millenia is that "we" has varying definitions, with varying behaviors.

Wild that we're still learning new things about ancient architecture! I'd think with all the modern tech at our disposal we'd have full, high res scans of the inside by now.

Oh, an actual "modern engineering marvel". What a novelty, what a discovery!

another clickbait title

room was revealed and photographed with endoscope in 2023, nothing new happened since

it's not even "passage" - just a room

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