The Object Inside the Great Pyramid Isn't a Sarcophagus — And Egypt Won't Say What It Is

It's night, and men are burning their way into the Great Pyramid. They light fires against the stone and throw vinegar on it until it cracks. Then, somewhere inside the rock, something heavy falls. They dig toward the sound, get past solid granite, and climb to a room at the very top. Inside, it sits a granite box with a lock built into it. What they found inside, they never agreed on. That was 1200 years ago. Every guidebook calls that box Khufu's coffin. Egypt's own top archaeologist says Khufu's burial chamber has never been found. Those two things can't both be true. If the king was never buried in that room, then the box at the heart of his pyramid was built for something else, and Egypt has never said what. Its top archaeologist is looking somewhere else. Just above the pyramid's old entrance, at the end of a corridor no tourist has ever set foot in, there's a sealed stone door. A robot has crawled right up to it. At a book fair in the Emirates, Zahi Hawass stood up and promised that door would rewrite a chapter in the history of the pharaohs this year. He believes something very important is hidden behind it. Nine months into that year, it's still shut. Then whatever those men found in that box, it wasn't a king. Getting to it was the hard part. The passage they needed was jammed with granite, block after block, wall to wall, packed in from above by whoever sealed the pyramid. They couldn't move it, so they cut around it through the softer stone. On the other side, the way climbs. It runs up a steep hall taller than a three-story house, tilted up into the dark, then shrinks to a hole barely higher than a man's waist. They'd have crawled that last stretch on their knees, with six million tons of stone above their backs, and come out into a room built entirely of red granite, hauled hundreds of miles down the Nile. At the far end sat the box. The first thing a torch would pick out is the lock. Once its lid slid home and its three pins dropped, that lid wasn't coming off without somebody breaking something. Whoever lay inside wasn't going to climb out. So who was the lock for? The box was It was rougher than the room around it. The saw had bitten too deep at one corner, more than once, and there were drill holes someone had tried to grind away. It was too big for the passage they'd just crawled through. It had been set down there while the pyramid was still open to the sky, and the walls went up around it. They went home, and their stories didn't match. In one account, they found a vessel holding a thousand coins of the finest gold. The Caliph had the cost of all that digging added up, and the treasure matched what he'd spent, to the coin, as if somebody had left exactly enough in there to send the diggers home satisfied. In another, the box was opened, and inside were ancient human remains. A third has a body lying in golden armor covered in precious stones, a sword in its hand worth more than anyone could put a price on, and above its head, a ruby the size of an egg, three stories out of one room. Not one of them mentions a LID. A granite lid for a box like that is a slab it takes a crew to shift. Why haul it back down a passage you had to cut and crawl through, unless the lid was worth as much to somebody as whatever it was covering? The lid has vanished from the pyramid completely. So has the king. Thieves who got there first would have had to carry him and everything buried with him out through the only other way down, a rough shaft too narrow to haul much of anything. The men with the fire might have been the first people that Box fooled. They weren't the last. Centuries later, explorers went up instead of in. Above that room, stacked in the stone, are hidden spaces with no way in. So they packed gunpowder into the rock and blasted into them, one after another. On the walls up there, painted in red by the crews who hauled the stone, they found the names the work gangs gave themselves. One of them reads, The white crown of Khnum Khufu is powerful. That's the only place inside the pyramid his name has ever turned up. Above the box, in spaces sealed off for good, where only work crews ever looked. There's nothing written on the box at all. Those red marks are the proof Egypt points to whenever anyone asks whose pyramid this is. The men who found them climbed back down and stood over the box like everyone else, and for them, it was still the king's coffin. For a king's coffin, the name is in an odd place. Pictures of Hawass's door already exist. The day anyone says out loud what's on the other side of it, this story gets its ending, and the subscribe button is how you hear it the moment it's said. Right beside the pyramid, the ground once gave something up by accident. A photographer was setting up his camera when one leg of his tripod slipped into a crack in the rock. The crew dug where it went in and found plaster, then steps, then a shaft cut straight down into the bedrock, deeper than a nine-story building. The shaft ended in the sealed tomb of Khufu's own mother. Inside, it was full of piled things. The wood had rotted away and the whole floor was covered in the gold that had been wrapped around her furniture. Her coffin was carved out of white alabaster and its lid was in place. They sealed the room again and took it apart piece by piece. It took more than 300 working days and a stone fell from the ceiling on the man doing the recording and nearly took him with it. Finally, in front of a room full of important guests, they lifted the lid, and one of the people watching wrote, I saw to my great dismay that the queen was not inside. The sarcophagus was empty. Along the top edge were the scars of a metal tool, where someone had forced it long before. Someone had pried open a queen's coffin and taken her body. Her organs were sitting right beside it, sealed into the wall in a chest tied with cord, still floating in the liquid they'd been packed in. The gold was still all over the floor. A robber doesn't break into a royal tomb, take the one thing he can't sell and leave the gold where it lies. Whoever took her wanted the body. The man who dug her up believed her first grave was robbed and that one of the king's own ministers kept it from him. In his version, Khufu gave the order to rebury his mother and nobody told him the coffin he was burying was already empty. That would make the first person in Egypt to stand over an empty royal box and say nothing, a man who worked for the king. A few miles south, at the bottom of a pyramid that was never finished, there's one more sealed granite box. Its lid was in place when it was found, and inside were small traces of something. They were never tested, and today, they're gone. Pieces of a box just like it turned up in the ruins of the pyramid of Khufu's own son. Joe Rogan has said on his show that the inside of that box matches the Ark of the Covenant. He's talked about a radiation reading that came back higher inside the box than in the granite walls around it. Strike it, and it rings. What kind of coffin rings when you hit it? Hawass went on that show himself, and it turned into a fight. Rogan came out of it saying it was the worst podcast he'd ever done, and that Hawass was a close-minded fellow who's been in charge of gatekeeping all the knowledge. Hawass said it was the worst interview of his life. He offered to walk Rogan through the pyramids himself, and Rogan turned him down for Graham Hancock. The gatekeeper is quick to say what the answer isn't. He told the hall, in the same talk where he announced the door, no extraterrestrial beings or supernatural forces were involved. When researchers said their radar had picked up giant structures under the pyramids next door, he dismissed it as completely wrong and fake news. What he hasn't said is what that box was for, if Khufu was never buried in it. He'd already said where he thinks the king is. Egypt's antiquities minister had called reporters to the foot of the pyramid to show the world a hidden corridor. The week a tiny camera was pushed through a gap in the north face and found a corridor that had stayed dark since the pyramid was closed, Hawass went on record. The burial chamber of King Khufu hasn't been discovered, and he expects to find it beneath that secret passage. Now there's his sealed door by the entrance, a robot sitting in front of it, and a promise with three months left to run. If the king is behind that door, then for four and a half thousand years, every person who reached the box upstairs was looking at the wrong grave. The caliph's men, the explorers with the gunpowder, the people who've written every guidebook since, and millions of visitors bent double through that last passage, straightening up in the red room to lean over the box. Go back to the men with the fire, stepping into that room for the first time. Look at it the way they did. A long climb, a grand hall, a granite room at the top, and a box at the end of it with a lock on it. Everything a thief is looking for, laid out in the one place a thief would end up. The box could have been built to be found. A thief gets past the granite, forces the lock and finds the box empty, or finds a little gold waiting for him, exactly enough to pay for the digging. He walks out believing the king was robbed long before he got there, and he never goes looking for another room. The rushed corner makes sense now. A decoy only has to be found. Or say the box wasn't empty when they reached it. Say something really was locked in there, and they carried it out, lid and all, because the lid was part of what they came for. Rogan's Ark would fit, or anything else built to that size, and a box that rings when you hit it might never have been cut to hold a man. The three stories would then be three men trying to describe something they'd never seen before. His mother's body went missing the same way. What if the body was the point, both times? Either way, the men with the fire walked away from that box with the wrong answer, and so has everyone since. That door by the entrance is still shut, and the year Hawass promised is almost over. When it opens, one of two things comes out. Another empty box would mean Khufu's grave is still somewhere nobody has found, and so is whatever was locked away upstairs. A king would mean the most famous coffin on earth did exactly what it was built to do, to every single person who ever leaned over it. That includes you.