Ancient Egypt Mysteries Still Unexplained Today

Hidden chambers in the Great Pyramid that nobody's ever entered. Tiny stone doors sealing shafts no one's explored, a king who died under mysterious circumstances, and a lost labyrinth bigger than the pyramids themselves. These are ancient Egyptian mysteries still unsolved to this day. In 2017, scientists discovered something huge hidden inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. They found it without breaking through a single wall. A team called the Scan Pyramids Project used something called muon scanning. Muons are tiny particles that get created when cosmic rays hit our atmosphere. They fly through pretty much everything, including solid rock. So the researchers placed detectors inside the pyramid and tracked how many of these particles were passing through different spots. Basically, it works like an x-ray of the inside of the pyramid. When they looked at the results, something showed up that nobody was expecting. There's a massive empty space sitting above the Grand Gallery. That's the tall hallway that leads up to the king's chamber. The void is at least 30 meters long, about 100 feet, and it looks like it's a similar shape and size to the Grand Gallery itself. Nobody knew this space existed at all. It's the first major hidden structure found inside the Great Pyramid since the 1800s. Here's the thing, though. Nobody's actually gone inside it. Researchers don't know if it's a chamber, a passageway, could also just be a gap. It doesn't connect to any hallway or passage that we know of. And drilling into the pyramid just to peek inside isn't something anyone wants to do without a very good reason. So scientists can see the shape of this void using particle data, but what's actually in there, nobody knows. For a long time, people assumed we already knew what was inside the Great Pyramid. Then 2023 came along and proved that wrong. The ScanPyramids team found a hidden corridor tucked right behind the outer stones near the pyramid's main entrance. Same kind of approach as before, muon detection and tiny cameras pushed through small gaps in the stone. When they finally got a look inside, they found a narrow passage about 9 meters long, around 30 feet. It's sitting behind a set of large triangular limestone blocks that sit just above the entrance. Those triangular blocks have been noticed before. Everyone assumed they were just there to take weight off the entrance passage below, basically structural support. But finding a corridor behind them changes things a bit. Nobody's sure why it was built. One idea is that it's a part of the pressure relief design, just engineering, but another idea, a much more tantalizing one, is that it might lead deeper into the pyramid, somewhere nobody's ever been. Back in the early 90s, engineers sent a small robot into some of the narrow shafts that run through the Great Pyramid. These shafts are only about 8 inches wide, way too small for a person. For years, archaeologists figured they were just ventilation shafts. Then in 1993, a German robot was sent to crawl up one of those shafts coming out of the queen's chamber. Near the end of the shaft, it found this small limestone slab blocking the way. It was shaped almost like a tiny door and had two little copper handles attached to the front. That raised an obvious question. If these were just air vents, why would someone go to the trouble of putting a sealed stone door at the end of one? Later, another robot drilled a small hole through the slab and pushed a camera through to see what was on the other side. Instead of a room or open space, the camera found another sealed stone block just a short distance beyond the first one. So there are at least two separate barriers sitting in that shaft, and whatever's behind them has never been explored. Nefertiti is one of the most well-known figures from ancient Egypt. Her bust, the sculpture of her face, was discovered in 1912 and is one of the most famous ancient objects in the world. But the same can't be said for her tomb. That's never been found. She lived in the 14th century BCE, was the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten. She was a major player during a pretty unusual period in Egyptian history when the royal family tried to scrap the traditional Egyptian gods and replace them with worship of a single sun deity. After Akhenaten died, things get fuzzy. Some historians think Nefertiti may have actually ruled Egypt herself for a short time under a different name. Others think she died before that could happen. But the bigger question is where she's buried. And it's strange because most pharaohs and queens from that era have been found. One theory is that her tomb is somewhere in the Valley of the Kings. Some researchers have even said it could be hidden behind the walls of Tutankhamen's tomb. In 2015, radar scans of Tut's burial chamber picked up what seemed like hidden spaces behind the walls. Curious, but later scans gave mixed results, so there's still some controversy about that theory. Unfortunately, this one is still a mystery. In 1907, archaeologists opened a tomb in the Valley of the Kings called KV55. It was a strange scene from the start. The tomb had been messed with in ancient times. The coffin was smashed up, the gold face mask was torn off, and all the inscriptions identifying the person had been scratched out. Someone had put real effort into making sure nobody would know who this person was. Inside the wrecked coffin was a badly deteriorated mummy. At first, researchers couldn't even tell if it was male or female. Eventually, most concluded it was a male royal from the late 18th dynasty. But pinning down exactly who it was set off a debate that's been going on ever since. Some thought it was Akhenaten, the pharaoh I mentioned earlier, who tried to replace Egypt's traditional religion with worship of a single god called Aten. In 2010, DNA testing suggested the mummy was the father of Tut and the son of Pharaoh Amenhotep III. That points pretty strongly toward Akhenaten, but some researchers have issues with how old the body appears to be, whether the physical evidence really matches up with what we know about Akhenaten. So, more than 100 years after the tomb was first opened, we still don't know who exactly the mummy is or was. In 1954, workers clearing sand near the base of the Great Pyramid hid a big sealed pit made of limestone blocks. When archaeologists opened it, they found a massive wooden ship inside, but it had been taken completely apart. The whole vessel was broken down into 1,224 separate pieces and stacked neatly inside the pit. The wood had been sitting down there for around 4,500 years, going back to the time of Pharaoh Khufu. An Egyptian conservator named Ahmed Yosef spent years carefully putting it back together piece by piece. When it was done, the ship measured around 43 meters long, just over 140 feet. It's now known as the Khufu Solar Boat, but there's still debate as to what it was actually for. One idea is that it was used in Khufu's funeral, sailed along the Nile as part of the ceremony. An ancient Egyptian belief, the sun god Ra traveled across the sky each day in a solar barge. Some researchers think Khufu was buried with a boat so he could join that journey after death. But they're not actually sure if the boat was ever actually put in water or if it was built mainly as a symbolic object. Tutankhamun became pharaoh when he was around nine years old, and he died when he was about 19. Ever since his tomb was found in 1922, people have been trying to figure out what happened to him. For a long time, the leading theory was that someone took his life. Some historians thought he might have been killed during a power struggle. His father's reign had been pretty controversial and things were pretty unstable. X-rays taken in 1968 seemed to show a bone fragment inside his skull. Maybe he died from a blow to the head. Later scans changed the picture a bit. In 2005, CT scans showed that Tut had a bad fracture in his left leg. It may have happened not long before he died. That kind of injury could easily get infected back then. Then in 2010, DNA tests on the mummy found he had malaria. The testing also showed his parents were likely closely related, probably a brother and sister. And yeah, that kind of thing tends to cause some health problems. And the scans show he probably had a club foot and other issues with his bones. So not the healthiest guy from the start. But nothing's been proven for certain. Officially, the cause of his death is still unresolved. There might have been an enormous structure in ancient Egypt that was so big it made the pyramids look small. The Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt around 450 BCE and described this massive building of the Pyramid of Amenemad III. He called it a labyrinth. According to him, it had 3,000 rooms, half of them underground. He said the place was huge and almost impossible to navigate. Other ancient writers described it too. The Greek geographer Strabo mentioned it and said it was full of courtyards and halls all connected by passageways. But where is it? A lot of archaeologists think it was probably part of a large mortuary complex that over thousands of years, people came and took the stone blocks to use them in other buildings. That happened a lot in ancient Egypt. Excavations in the 1800s found some foundations and fragments in the area that might have been part of it, but nothing that comes close to what the ancient writers described. Some researchers think a large portion of it could still be buried somewhere out there, though. But until more of the site gets dug up, the real size and layout of the place will remain a mystery. The pyramids at Giza aren't just big, they're also lined up with almost perfect accuracy. The Great Pyramid is aligned with the four cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west, with an error of less than a fraction of a degree. That's remarkably precise for something built 4,500 years ago. So how'd they pull it off? There are some theories. One is that they used stars, specifically ones that circle the North Pole, to find true north by watching how they moved through the night sky. In 2000, a British Egyptologist named Kate Spence came up with a more specific theory. She thought the builders used two particular stars that lined up vertically in the sky around 2,500 BCE, Kochab and Mazar. The line between them basically pointed straight north. The builders could just line up a sighting stick or tool along that line to mark the direction of the ground. You might be wondering why we can't do that today. Well, the stars move slowly over time. The alignment of Kochab and Mazar doesn't point true north anymore. So this seems like a pretty plausible theory, but we still can't say for sure. The Great Pyramid of Giza was finished around 2560 BCE, built during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu. It was the tallest thing humans had ever built at that point, and it held the title for close to 4,000 years. It's made from roughly 2.3 million stone blocks. A lot of those blocks weigh between 2 and 15 tons each, and we still don't fully know how they did this. The main puzzle is how those stones got lifted into place. A few different theories have been thrown around. Some researchers think workers used long, straight ramps built out of mud, brick, and rubble. There's also evidence that workers brought stones by boat along the Nile and through a canal system that would have run close to Giza. One really useful piece of evidence showed up in 2013 near the Red Sea. A set of ancient papyrus documents, now called the Diary of Merer, they describe a worker named Merer who helped move limestone blocks for Khufu's pyramid by boat. The diary only covers getting the stones to Giza. It doesn't touch, you know, the hardest part, how millions of heavy blocks were lifted and stacked to create one of, if not the most iconic landmarks in the entire world. That's been the video for today. I'll catch you, yes you specifically, next time.