What's Below the Floor of the Great Pyramid King's Chamber?

Many of us have seen this picture, showing the inside of the King's Chamber at the Great Pyramid and in the north-western corner there looks to be a person digging. You may have also seen in old photographs that granite floor slabs are missing in the same corner of the room and metal grates were added later to cover the excavation. In more recent years, this area has been restored but under certain light, you can easily see the missing granite floor slabs. So, what's going on here? Is there something beneath the King's Chamber? Did somebody dig here in antiquity? Did they find anything? Well, in this video, I'll be giving you the full story. Hello everybody and welcome to Ancient Architects. Please subscribe to the channel for regular content on ancient architecture as well as all of the latest news from the world of archaeology. This famous picture was drawn by Luigi Meyer in 1801 and then coloured and engraved by Thomas Milton for publication in the book Views in Egypt. According to the British Museum, who have this picture in their archive, it's described as follows. Men with turbans inside the chamber, examining the sarcophagus at the end of the room. Two men coming in the chamber in the right foreground, one holding a torch. After Meyer, 1801. Hand-coloured aquatint with etching. On seeing this picture, what first caught my attention was the man digging in the northwestern corner and another man looking on, and we do know there had been a breach in the floor for hundreds of years, long before Meyer made this sketch. He also shows the openings into the northern and southern air channels, with the southern one undamaged, but the damage to the southern air channel happened long before 1801. The sarcophagus is also complete and unbroken, and so Meyer is not drawing what he saw, but he's actually depicting an historic event. What he believes is the first time the King's Chamber was entered into, since it was originally closed up thousands of years ago. He is probably portraying the Caliph al-Mamun and his men, who around 1,200 years ago, are believed to be the first people into the King's Chamber, although I should say that this is more opinion than hard fact, but the associated text in the book also alludes to this idea. The book does not describe the King's Chamber in any great detail, just that it's 35 feet long, 22 feet 5 inches wide, and 25.5 feet in height. It then gives the dimensions of the sarcophagus. There is no mention of the excavation in the corner of the room. So, we know it was there in 1801, and that Meyer believed it was opened in the 9th century by the Caliph al-Mamun, but I wanted to know more. The next thing to check was the work of Howard Weiss, who we know was inside the Great Pyramid in 1837 and must have seen the excavation in the floor. On page 4 of his volume 1, when giving an overview of the state of the pyramid before his work began, he says, "...one of the blocks composing the pavement had been taken up near the northwestern corner of the King's Chamber, and an excavation had been carried on beneath the sarcophagus. This last, however, was almost entirely filled up with rubbish." On February 4th 1837, a Maltese man named Paolo, accompanied by Captain Caviglia and Weiss's worker Mr Hill, had the plan to bore through the floor in the centre of the King's Chamber to find out what's beneath. This seems to have been an age-old idea in pyramid exploration, with the floor missing in the final chamber of the Red Pyramid, exposing an enormous gaping hole in the limestone masonry. When this was done, we don't know. The floor is also missing in the chamber in the subsidiary pyramid to the Bent Pyramid and this exposes a shaft. The floor was also taken up in the upper chamber of the Mencore Pyramid. Of course, beneath this floor there was a descending passageway and this did lead to the Mencore burial chamber, and so explorers did believe they had a reason to dig down. But due to the closeness of the joints between the granite, Paolo, Hill and Caviglia could not lift the floor slabs and so they could not start work in the King's Chamber. And so, the following day, Weiss directed Paolo to clear out the old excavation in the northwestern corner. He was to begin excavating at a depth of 6 feet and 4 inches below the surface of the granite, 3 feet from the northern wall and 10 feet 9 inches from the extent of the original excavation before Weiss began his work. It was already 6 feet 4 inches or around 2 meters in depth. Weiss does not give us any update on how his work progressed and we can only assume that nothing was discovered. The extent of the excavations from Weiss' mission are shown on the diagrams at John Perring, where, below the sarcophagus, we can estimate that a depth of around 4.2 meters was reached. Later in his Volume 1, Weiss says that he believed the small rectangular floor slab in the corner of the room had been removed in very early times, as there was an old belief that treasures were concealed below sarcophagi. As most of the floor was composed of large blocks of granite, these small slabs in the corner of the room would be an obvious starting point for any treasure hunter, so it's no great surprise they're missing. When clearing out the old excavation, it was noted by Weiss that great care had gone into the stonework beneath the floor, but there is no mention of any finds whatsoever. The next prominent diagram is from the 1867 book by Charles Piazzi Smythe called Life and Work at the Great Pyramid. The excavation is clear to see and although filled with rubble, the depth of the excavation does seem to marry up with Perring's diagram. Smythe does tell us something else interesting as well. When he was in the pyramid in 1865, he noted there was dust and dirt, as well as a large lump of limestone inside the sarcophagus. Apparently, the reason a chunk of limestone had been left inside the coffer was so tourists could bash it against the coffer to make it, as he says, sound like a bell. I would suggest the stone was in fact a chunk of granite from the floor in the northwestern corner and was probably bashed against the sarcophagus so people could take chunks for souvenirs, hence the damage we see today. Apparently, Smythe removed the chunk of rock from the sarcophagus and threw it into the hole in the floor to stop people damaging the priceless relic. In 1901, the Edgar Brothers also mention the excavation in their book Great Pyramid Passages Volume 1 and they say that the excavation was like a large hollow in the soft limestone below the granite. Although it was really nothing of note, it did show them that the granite walls of the King's Chamber rest on limestone, exactly 5 inches below the upper surface of the floor. They say the excavation was created by early looters and that some of the raised floor blocks were still inside the chamber, but there is no mention of how deep the excavation went. This is their picture from inside the King's Chamber and we can see the cavity to the right of the coffer. Regarding the excavation, we don't get a great deal more information from any future explorer and the next author I'll quote is J.P. Lepre, who in 1990 wrote the Egyptian Pyramids. Lepre is one of the few authors to mention the excavation, but compared to the drawings by John Perring and Charles Piazzi Smythe, his description is quite different. He says the excavation under the floor is 30 feet or 9.1 meters in depth, which is more than double what Perring recorded on his diagram of the King's Chamber. Now, Lepre was a great researcher, but I don't know where his measurements came from. There is no evidence he ever went under the floor of the King's Chamber and after Weiss's excavations, there is no record the crude pit was cleared of rubble, the same rubble that showed by Piazzi Smythe 30 years later. If it contained this rubble, Lepre would not have been able to measure its depth. So, Perring and Piazzi Smythe show the excavation is 4.2 meters deep, but Lepre says it's 9.1 meters. We don't know who is right, but I'm more inclined to believe Perring just because he was there in 1837, documenting the work by Howard Weiss and his team. And after 1837, there is no record of any further excavation under the floor of the King's Chamber, and so there is no reason to assume it was deeper than what's shown on this diagram. So, all we know for sure is that the excavation started in antiquity and Weiss's men deepened it, and although Meyer shows Arab explorers of the 9th century being responsible for its creation, it could well have been there since ancient times. Of course, there's no way to know and by all accounts nothing was ever found down there, well at least in the modern era. But I have come across some super rare photographs, two from 1997 from an unknown source, and a couple more from friend of the channel Nacho Ares. And for my Spanish speaking viewers, please do check out his fantastic channel which I've linked below. The pictures don't show a lot, but as far as I'm aware, they are the only views beneath the floor in existence. If you do have any more, please do get in touch and share them. Now, I've seen many pictures of the northwestern corner of the King's Chamber, and even in the past 100 years, it looks to have changed many times. The excavations have been open, they've been covered by wooden planks and then metal grates. Here we can see one of the lifted floor blocks, pushed into the corner of the room, and it looks to be covering some rope that's been pushed into a hole in the very corner of the chamber. You can see what looks like a wooden frame separating this hole and the metal grate. Now we're looking at the old grate, and there looks to be two excavations below it, separated by a wall of masonry. In this picture, we're looking into the westerly half of the grate, and we're looking in a northwesterly direction. On the right we can see the bottom of the King's Chamber northern wall, with the granite resting on the limestone. A brick wall has been crudely built, and beyond it is the wooden frame we've just seen. We can also see a wooden post. This modern work looks to have been done purely to support the metal grate, to stop tourists breaking a leg. Looking from above, and here is the approximate positions of the brick wall, the wooden frame and also the wooden post. The next image is looking down the easterly half of the grate. We can see that some brickwork has been added, and it's supporting another wooden post, again added to support the metal grate. In this picture, the excavation is deeper, and at the bottom of the picture, the excavation continues in a southward direction, and then continues beneath the sarcophagus. This picture from Nacho Ares looks to be showing the same view, but from a different orientation. If I place them side by side, this looks to be the same post, and I think that these two blocks are the same. It's really hard to tell, but they don't show a great deal. So, these are the only pictures in existence that show the excavation, well as far as I'm aware, and the diagrams by Perring and Piazzi-Smyth are the only sources of information regarding the depth, with an anomalous account by Lepra. And by all accounts, there really isn't too much to see, and I really only made this video for anyone that wanted to know what these people were doing in this famous old picture. I've also found these two diagrams on the internet, which show a plan view and a cross-section of the northwestern corner of the King's Chamber in the 1990s, before the restoration. I can't corroborate the accuracy of these diagrams, but it's worth including in this video, so at least we have a record. But there is one more thing I would like to share with you for completeness, because in the 1980s, the floor of the King's Chamber underwent microgravimetry and electromagnetic surveys. Before we look at the results, we know that the King's Chamber has a granite floor surface, resting on limestone masonry, and that a large excavation has been made, and this was mapped by Perring, and so we would expect anomalies in the geophysics. In terms of the microgravimetry survey, small negative anomalies were located in the northeastern, southeastern, and southwestern corners of the King's Chamber floor, as we can see on this diagram. The electromagnetic survey also showed anomalies below the floor of the southwestern and northeastern corners, but there was nothing in the southeastern corner. It's not known what these anomalies are, but I don't believe they're anything major, and they could reflect filler materials that are used in construction. We know the pyramid builders left lots of cavities in the masonry, especially around the Queen's Chamber, and they used rubble and quartz sand to fill them in. In both surveys, a large anomaly was found in the centre of the room, and this relates to the excavation we've been looking at in this video. All in all, there is nothing too strange with the data, and that brings us to the end of this video, and I've hopefully provided some clarity about what's going on in this famous 1801 picture by Luigi Meyer. There is a cavity below the King's Chamber, but it's not an original feature of the pyramid, and certainly in the modern era, nothing was ever discovered below the floor. Today, for obvious reasons, it's closed off, and although it would be great to have this excavation fully scanned, photographed and documented, I don't think this will ever happen. The excavation is now closed off, and I'm sure it's closed off for good. Yes, it is a feature of the Great Pyramid, but as far as I'm concerned, it's not an important one. It's more to do with the history of pyramid exploration, and not related to the building or function of the Great Pyramid. Thank you very much for watching this episode of Ancient Architects. If you enjoyed the video, please subscribe to the channel, please like the video and please leave a comment below. Thank you very much.