Muon detectors installed inside the Great Pyramid (ScanPyramids figure). Photo: Sébastien Procureur, Kunihiro Morishima, Mitsuaki Kuno, Yuta Manabe, Nobuko Kitagawa, Akira Nishio, Hector Gomez, David / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
2 Mar 2023 · Great Pyramid, Giza, Egypt
Hidden corridor confirmed behind the Great Pyramid’s chevrons
ScanPyramids used muon imaging to confirm a 9 m-long corridor above the main entrance, then filmed it with an endoscope. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced it on 2 March 2023.
Why it matters: It is the first confirmed new internal space in the Great Pyramid in modern times, and it fuels interest in what else the structure hides, such as the 2017 “Big Void”.
Mainstream view: Probably a relieving structure to spread weight over the entrance.
Alternative view: Some researchers see it as part of a still-unknown internal design.
Nature reported new geophysical survey results, published by Eldamaty, Abbas, Ballard and Reeves in the Amarna Royal Tombs Project’s occasional papers, that they say point to hidden chambers beyond the walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb, possibly the burial of Nefertiti.
Remote Sensing retracted Filippo Biondi and Corrado Malanga’s 2022 paper, which claimed SAR Doppler tomography revealed undiscovered internal structures in the Great Pyramid. The journal says an investigation after a reader’s concerns confirmed serious methodological flaws and statistical errors that undermine the conclusions.
Xavier Landreau, Guillaume Piton and Sayed Hemeda used satellite imagery, 19th-century maps and watershed mapping. They argue that two 600–700 m structures across Wadi Dahshur, west of the Red Pyramid, long read as stone-transport ramps, are dams, one with a duckbill-shaped spillway, linked to a roughly 1 km diversion channel passing close to the pyramid.
A ScanPyramids team from TU Munich and Cairo University published ultrasonic shear-wave scans, made in 2022, of the 45 accessible granite blocks in the two lower rows of the King’s Chamber walls. They built a 3D model of block thicknesses and joints and found internal reflectors up to about 3 m deep, including an anomaly about 2 m behind block NW9 on the north wall.
