The Great Pyramid.
One of the most studied ancient riddles on Earth.
There were tens of thousands of people here building the pyramid.
Where’s their settlement?
6 million tons of stone shaped and transported over 30 years to build an eternal tomb with a sacred purpose.
Inside the Great Pyramid, there’s a door no human has opened in 4,500 years.
It’s smaller than a dinner plate and it has two copper handles.
In 2002, a robot drilled a hole through it.
It saw a second door behind it and then the camera stopped.
Over two decades later, we still don’t know what’s back there.
Now, the man who has spent his life guarding Egypt’s secrets, Zahi Hawas, says what lies behind it could rewrite history.
So, what are scientists afraid they’ll find?
And why has no one opened it?
Let’s go inside.
Deep inside the pyramid, there’s a room that early Arab explorers called the Queen’s Chamber, even though no queen was ever buried in it.
Two shafts leave that room, one heading north and one heading south, each about 20 cm square.
Higher up in the king’s chamber, a matching pair runs all the way out to open air.
These two don’t.
They climb into the masonry and stop.
And their openings were closed off at the chamber wall.
So for thousands of years, the room looked like a plain stone box.
People used to call them air shafts.
But these two can’t move any air because they were sealed in the room and blocked near the top.
No other pyramid we know of has shafts like these.
So before anyone could chase a door, somebody had to work out that the tunnels were there at all.
That somebody was a British engineer named Wayneman Dixon in 1872.
He knew the king’s chamber had two shafts, and he reasoned that the room below might have a pair as well, hidden behind the wall.
So he had the stone cut away where a shaft ought to be, and it opened into a square channel, climbing into the dark.
He tried the opposite wall, and found its twin.
Then Dixon and a Scottish doctor exploring with him, reached up into those shafts, and pulled out three small objects.
There was a metal hook, a stone ball, and a strip of cedar about 13 cm long.
Those three things are still the only objects ever recovered from inside the Great Pyramid.
The hook and the ball ended up in the British Museum.
The cedar went home with the doctor and then it disappeared.
For most of the next century, nobody could say where it was.
The doctor’s daughter gave it to the University of Aberdine in 1946, but it was never cataloged, and it ended up filed with the wrong collection.
At the end of 2019, a curatorial assistant named Abia Eladani was going through the museum’s Asian collection when she noticed a cigar tin with Egypt’s old flag printed on top.
She had spent 10 years working at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
So that flag stopped her.
Inside were the splinters of Dixon’s cedar.
She checked the museum’s records against the box, and the lost relic had been sitting on a shelf in Scotland the whole time.
Then the pandemic delayed the radioarbon lab work, so the answer to the obvious question took a little longer.
That would make a good story by itself.
But when the wood was carbon dated, it came back between 3,341 and 3,94 BC, roughly 500 years older than the pyramid it was found in.
The university’s head of collections offered two explanations.
The sample might come from the core of a very old tree, which dates the tree’s early growth and not the day it was cut.
Or the wood was already ancient when the builders used it because timber was so scarce in Egypt that people kept it and reused it for generations.
Either way, the date ties the relics to the original construction.
Someone placed this wood in the shaft while the pyramid was going up, possibly as part of a measuring rule, and then sealed it in.
And Dixon only took a fragment.
The rest of that piece of wood is still inside the pyramid in a spot no person can reach.
It was photographed in 1993 by the same little robot from the start of this video which was about to find something far stranger than old timber.
That robot was built by a German engineer named Rudolph Gantenbrink working with the German Archaeological Institute.
He named it after an Egyptian god known as the opener of the ways, and the name proved fitting.
The robot first explored the upper shafts of the king’s chamber, and after that success, the team directed it toward the lower pair, where no one had ever seen the far end.
When its light revealed the door at the top of the southern shaft, the slab proved to be Tura limestone, the fine white stone quarried across the Nile and used for the pyramids smooth outer casing.
We know a remarkable amount about how that stone moved because in 2013, French archaeologists working at an ancient harbor on the Red Sea coast discovered the oldest papyrus documents ever found, rolled up and tied with string, tucked between rocks inside storage tunnels cut into a hillside.
Several were the log book of a man named Marr, an inspector overseeing a crew of around 40 men.
Over roughly five months, near the end of Kufu’s reign, Merr’s boats transported white limestone from the Tura quaries down the river to Giza, making roughly 10 round trips each month and moving about 1,000 blocks during that period alone.
He reported to a nobleman who was Kufu’s half-brother and his boats unloaded at an artificial harbor dug directly at the foot of the Giza plateau which Merr called the basin of Kufu.
His log even records the pyramid’s original name, Aket Kufu, the horizon of Kufu.
It’s the closest thing we have to a daily work diary from the people who built it.
So consider what that door really represents.
A piece of the same premium stone that covered the pyramid’s exterior in a white shell was cut, polished, fitted with two copper pins, and placed deep inside the structure at the top of a shaft.
No person would ever crawl.
These were workers who carefully recorded their deliveries trip by trip.
They didn’t use their finest stone carelessly.
Remember that because this decision becomes the thread running through the entire story.
But Ganten Brink’s camera couldn’t see beyond the door.
And for 9 years, that single image was all anyone had.
Then in September 2002, National Geographic and Egyptian authorities sent up a new machine built by iRoot, the company behind the Roomba.
On live television.
It drilled a hole about 2 cm wide through the door and pushed a fiber optic camera inside.
Less than 20 cm behind the door was another stone.
This one was rough, cracked, and had no copper fittings whatsoever.
Zahi Hawas, who was heading Egypt’s Antiquities Council and leading the expedition, said the second stone appeared to be screening or covering something.
The camera also resolved an older debate.
Two pale round patches behind the pins, which some had hoped were royal seals, turned out on closer examination to be patches of mortar.
So the team moved to the other shaft.
The northern one bends partway upward, and it still contained old metal rods that earlier explorers had pushed inside, forcing the robot to navigate around them.
About 65 m from the chamber, it discovered another door made from the same fine limestone with its own pair of copper pins and the same highquality finish.
It stood at almost exactly the same distance from the chamber as the southern door.
Until then, nobody even knew the northern shaft extended as far north as the southern one extended south.
And National Geographic described the two discoveries together as the first major new information about the Great Pyramid in more than a century.
One sealed door could simply be a construction accident.
A block placed there to keep debris out, but two matching doors finished to the same standard on opposite sides of the pyramid looked much more like a deliberate plan.
The problem was that the 2002 camera could only see straight ahead.
It couldn’t turn toward the walls, the floor, or the back of the door it had drilled through.
So, the next robot needed to bend.
In 2011, a robotics team from the University of Leeds sent up a robot called Jedi, named after a magician whom Kufu consults in an old Egyptian story.
It carried a camera at the end of a flexible snake, thin enough to pass through the 2002 hole, and capable of curling around to look back the way it had come.
What that camera revealed on the back of the door is where this entire story changed for me.
And if you enjoy following a mystery all the way down to the evidence, subscribe because there are plenty more stories like this on the channel.
The space behind the first door is a pocket only about 20 cm wide in each direction.
The camera looked at the floor first.
Along the bottom of that tiny space was a red ochre line, the same kind of guideline masons painted elsewhere inside the shafts.
And next to it were three small red figures.
In their report, Hawas and his colleagues wrote that the two main figures resemble the way scribes wrote the number 21 in hieratic, the fast handwriting used for everyday records.
So, these are most likely marks left by the building crew.
People like mirrors men counting or labeling as they worked.
And the red line on the floor appears to continue underneath the second stone, raising the question the team still wants to answer.
If that second stone proves to be a thin slab resting on a ledge like the first door, one of the team’s engineers has said that would be a pretty strong sign there’s something on the other side.
So far, nobody has published that measurement.
Then the camera curled around and looked at the back of the door.
It was polished just as smoothly as the front.
And the copper pins that people had called handles for years passed straight through the slab and ended in tiny, neatly finished loops with openings only about 3 mm wide.
The engineer who designed the robot said the loops looked too small to serve any mechanical purpose and that a polished back suggested the door must have been important.
That’s the detail I keep returning to.
Nobody sealing a shaft polishes the sidefacing solid rock unless they expected someone to see it or unless the door was never intended for human eyes at all.
That second possibility has a long history.
In 1964, an Egyptologist at UCLA and Virginia Trimble, who was still an undergraduate and later became a well-known astrophysicist, figured out where the pyramids shafts pointed in the sky, when it was built.
In the king’s chamber, the southern shaft aligned with Orion’s belt, which Egyptians connected to Osiris, god of the dead, while the northern shaft pointed at Thuben, the pole star of that era.
In the Queen’s chamber, the southern shaft pointed toward Sirius, the star of Isis, whose return to the dawn sky signaled the yearly Nile flood.
The northern shaft pointed toward Coochab, one of the stars that circled the pole and never set.
Egyptian royal tomb inscriptions call those circling stars the imperishable ones, and they describe the dead king crossing over to take his place among them.
Trimble and her colleague never said anyone had gone through these shafts because they’re blocked.
Their idea was that the shafts served as roots for the king’s soul.
Those inscriptions were first carved during a later dynasty, so nobody can prove Kufu’s builders believed exactly the same thing.
But if they did, the polished back stops seeming odd.
If the shafts were intended as a path for the king’s soul, a finished door along that path makes sense.
Every answer within these shafts has brought along an even harder question.
And by the 2010s, the mystery had become bigger than two narrow tunnels.
If the builders concealed shafts this carefully, what else were they concealing?
Finding that out meant looking through solid stone.
The tool for doing that came from particle physics.
When cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere, they create particles called muons.
And around 10,000 of them hit every square meter of ground each minute.
Muons travel through rock, but the stone absorbs some along their journey.
So, if you count how many arrive from every direction, an empty space appears as a spot where slightly too many made it through.
The first person to test this on a pyramid was physicist Luis Alvarez, who proposed it in 1965, 3 years before he received the Nobel Prize.
His team placed detectors in a chamber below the pyramid of Cafrey, Kufu’s son, and discovered no hidden rooms at all.
Alvarez argued the result still mattered because it showed there were no chambers there to discover.
Then in 2015, a project called scan pyramids revived the method with much better detectors and this time aimed them at the Great Pyramid.
One Japanese team placed sheets of special photographic film inside the queen’s chamber, the same room where those shafts emerge, and allowed muons from above to leave their tracks on it.
In November 2017, the team reported in Nature that three independent types of muon detector had detected the same thing, a void at least 30 m long located above the Grand Gallery.
It was the first major structure discovered inside the pyramid since the 19th century.
A space news reports compared with the size of a passenger plane.
One physicist noted that it appears completely sealed.
So whatever is inside hasn’t been touched since the pyramid was built.
The team couldn’t tell whether it was one space or several or whether it ran level or sloped.
And the strongest skeptic in the room was Has himself.
He chaired the committee reviewing the research and he told reporters the pyramid is packed with voids, that the builders needed a space like this to build the grand gallery beneath it, and that in his words they found nothing.
Keep that quote in mind because the same man stands at the center of this year’s promise.
In March 2023, the scans discovered something a camera could actually reach.
On the pyramid’s north face, behind a group of huge limestone blocks leaning together into a point just above the original entrance, was a corridor about 9 m long and 2 m wide.
The team pushed an endoscope about 6 mm thick through a joint between the stones and became the first people in roughly 4,500 years to look inside.
They saw an unfinished passage with nothing inside it.
Egypt’s antiquities chief said it was likely built to distribute the pyramid’s weight around the entrance below or around another space that hasn’t been found yet.
And that scanning would continue beyond the corridor’s end.
So every sealed space opened so far has followed the same pattern.
Behind the first door, another stone.
Inside the hidden corridor, bare rock.
Inside the giant void, nothing anyone can reach yet.
And that pattern points directly toward the biggest empty space in the entire building.
Kufu’s own burial chamber is lined with red granite brought from Aswan about 800 km up the Nile.
At its western end sits his sarcophagus carved from one block of that granite.
It’s wider than the passage leading into the room, so it couldn’t have been brought in later.
It had to be positioned while the pyramid was still rising around it.
That detail makes the question of what lies beyond the known spaces even more difficult to ignore.
When Kiff al-Mamoon tunnneled into the pyramid around 820, they eventually reached that chamber and found the sarcophagus empty.
Kufu’s body has never been found here or anywhere else.
The king himself is almost as difficult to find as his body in the pyramid’s history.
In 1903, archaeologist Flender’s Petri was excavating at Abidos when his team uncovered an ivory figure of a seated king 7.5 cm tall with Kufu’s name carved into the throne.
It emerged from the ground without its head.
So, the team searched the site for 3 weeks until they found it.
Petri wrote that even at that size, you could see the king’s energy and commanding presence.
That tiny figure remains the only complete sculpture of Kufu anyone has discovered to date, even today.
And the builder of the largest stone monument in the ancient world could fit alone in the palm of your hand for a monument that huge anywhere in Egypt.
If headlines about this door have been appearing in your feed all year, this is where they began.
When Hawas spoke at the Sharah International Bookf Fair last November, that missing king was why the room leaned closer.
He said thermal imaging, 3D mapping, and Muan scans had found a corridor about 30 m long ending at a door, that robots had been clearing openings beyond human reach, and that next year, meaning this year, the world would see what’s behind it.
He also said a scientific report would appear before the reveal, and he wouldn’t say what he expected to be on the other side.
At that same talk, he rejected the idea that aliens or supernatural forces built the pyramid and he talked about wanting to find the tombs of Imhoteep and Nefertiti.
This is someone who wants the big discovery and who has also cooled down other people’s claims.
As of the latest reports I could find from late this summer, that report hasn’t been published and the reveal hasn’t happened.
And this corridor is a separate door from the ones inside the shafts.
Remember what Hawas said about the big void in 2017.
He was right to be cautious.
Then the pyramid really is packed with gaps the builders left and a scan can’t tell you what’s inside one.
That same caution applies to his own announcement.
What really worries the people who study this place is a day like one in 1927.
Near the Great Pyramid, at the bottom of a hidden shaft almost 90 ft deep, George Risner’s team had discovered the sealed tomb of Heterase, Kufu’s mother.
The expedition photographer spotted the shaft in 1925 while Risner was away, and he cabled back to close the tomb and wait.
Clearing everything packed inside took years because water had damaged the gilded furniture so badly that it was nearly crumbling.
The chamber contained an alabaster sarcophagus with its lid still in place.
In front of invited guests, they lifted that lid and the sarcophagus was empty.
Risyner told the room, “Gentlemen, I regret that Queen Hederas is not receiving.
Her organs were still sealed in their chest in the wall.
Her body was gone.”
Rynner’s theory was that her first tomb had been robbed soon after her burial and that the officials responsible quietly told Kufu his mother was safe and reeried an empty coffin.
So, a sealed lid told them nothing about what lay beneath it.
It’s the same caution a Bristol Egyptologist showed in 2017 when he put the odds of the big void containing treasure or a burial at almost nil.
So after more than 150 years of wires, robots, and particles from space, the hardest question remains the simplest one.
Why would a crew that recorded its stone deliveries trip by trip spend tura limestone, copper, and careful polishing on two doors that face solid rock at the ends of tunnels no person could ever walk through?
The best answer the evidence allows is that they were building an escape route for a king aimed at the stars that circle the pole and never set.
If that’s right, the treasure was never behind the door.
The door itself is evidence of what they believed.
And somewhere inside that pyramid right now, another door waits at the end of that hidden corridor.
If Hawas keeps his promise, someone will open it before this year runs out.
And when that door opens, I’ll be here to show you exactly what’s behind it, along with more mysteries like this one.
