Gantenbrink’s Door – Part II, the Second Robot Mission

Published on Egyptological, Colloquy – In Brief, February 27th 2012

By Kate Phizackerley

Great Pyramid at Giza

The first part of this series tells how, in the early 1990s, modern science revealed the existence of something at the far end of the small shaft heading upwards and outwards from the north and south walls for the Queen’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid. These shafts had attracted little attention since the 19^th century. Gantenbrink’s discovery, and explosive pictures, of a door at the end of the southern shaft changed the game.

The shafts were hot news. Gantenbrink and his team were not so subtly elbowed out of the picture and Dr Hawass took personal charge of sending a robot into the pyramid to discover what lay behind the “door”, although initially the establishment view was that the slab of stone was a terminus to the shaft, and not a door at all. The National Geographic Channel sponsored the project for a TV special.

The project was to take nearly a decade to come to fruition. The politics and financial arrangements were complex but the biggest issue was the technical challenge of designing a more advanced robot capable of climbing the shafts, cutting a hole in the slab and then inserting a camera through the hole. The Supreme Council of Antiquities, aided by archaeologists from the Giza Plateau Mapping Project at Chicago University, worked with the iRobot company of Boston, USA, to design a new robot, the Pyramid Rover, at a reported cost of $250,000.

The results were screened “live” in a TV special on 17^th September 2002 called Pyramids Live: Secret Chambers Revealed. It is a TV special which has gone down in the annals as one of the least convincing in its genre. As well as the great pyramid, a sarcophagus in the so-called Tomb of Osiris was opened live. The documentary also filmed beneath the Djoser Step Pyramid at Saqqara, as Dr Hawass reported in his article Secret Doors Inside the Great Pyramids, published on the Guardian’s Egypt website:

One of the main goals of the documentary was to show the public the evidence of the people who built the pyramids. I was to talk about tombs, show graffiti which names the work gangs that built the pyramids, and even go inside of the Step Pyramid of Djoser for the first time. The substructure of this pyramid consists of tunnels and passages and rooms with a total length of about three and a half miles. I believe that the interior was never shown in a film before, and that no living Egyptologist has entered it.

It was difficult to know whether to despair that archaeology was being rushed for live television, or wonder how far the audience’s credulity could be stretched to present the material as live. Certainly it seems highly unlikely any TV executive would wish something as fallible as the robot exploration of the slab of stone to be screened live, and the consensus of many viewers was the slab had been penetrated before air. Video 1 shows the moment the camera looked through the hole for the first time. (The version shown has German over-dubbing but is the best I can find.)

It may be that the scepticism is misplaced because Dr Hawass continues to insist the show was live, writing again on Guardian’s Egypt:

One day before the show, we found out by Altrosonic that the door in the southern shaft of the Great Pyramid is about six centimeters thick, which implied that there was something behind that door. We decided to drill a three-millimeter diameter hole in the door so we could send a camera behind it. In the last minute of the show, the camera was sent in, and I saw the second door 21 cm. behind the first door. It is not similar to the first in that it looks as if it is screening or covering something. There were also cracks all over the surface

There was huge anticipation. It is likely though that the worldwide TV audience was left disappointed compared to the build up by Dr Zahi Hawass and Dr Mark Lehner as reported by Robert Bauval:

In an interview given to the British Daily Mail, Lehner exclaimed:

“What do I think is in there? I think it might be a serdab. A serdab is a sealed room for a Ka-statue, a statue of the dead king which embodied his Ka or life spirit. The oldest pyramid of the hundred major pyramids of Egypt is the step-pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara; and that has a serdab…. Because his stone box is tilted, he (the statue of Djoser) is looking straight at the sky. It is almost as if he is sealed in a stone capsule, about to be launched towards Orion.”

And Dr. Hawass told the same newspaper that,

“There might be a papyrus of Khufu’s sacred book, which has never been found. We know it once existed. The Egyptian priest who first wrote out the list of the pharaohs of Egypt gave potted histories against each name. And one entry is: ‘Khufu also wrote the Sacred Book.’ As Khufu was the man who built the biggest pyramid, his Sacred Book might reasonably be expected to explain how, and more importantly, why.”

What is also not in doubt is that the sight of an apparently empty cavity behind the limestone slab was not the excitement for which live TV hoped, but the revelation exceeded the expectations of many Egyptologists because a deliberate void is generally known by the more appealing term, “chamber”: the Pyramid Rover robot had discovered a previously unknown chamber in the Great Pyramid. Whether the back slab is indeed another “door” remains conjecture, but it was clear that the front slab was indeed a door and deserves the name, Gantenbrink’s Door.

Some days later Pyramid Rover was sent back up the difficult northern shaft. Amongst the difficulties is that this shaft kinks to avoid the Grand Gallery and is difficult for a robot to traverse – Gantenbrink’s Upuat robot had failed to reach the end of this shaft. The Hawass team succeeded and discovered a twin to Gantenbrink’s Door. There are no reports that this slab was drilled but the inference is clearly that it too shields an unknown chamber.

So far no serdab has been revealed, nor has any papyrus or secret book of Khufu been found. What is in the chambers? Does anything lie behind the back slabs? The world would have to wait another decade to find out as will be revealed in Part III of this series.

Bibliography

The Osiris Shaft, Dr Hawass Blog, Dr Zahi Hawass, http://www.drhawass.com/blog/mysterious-osiris-shaft-giza

Secret Doors Inside the Great Pyramid, Guardian’s Egypt web site, Dr Zahi Hawass, http://guardians.net/hawass/articles/secret_doors_inside_the_great_pyramid.htm

Secret Chamber Revealed, Robert Bauval’s web site, Robert Bauval, “SECRET CHAMBERS REVEALED”