Robot captures first images of Great Pyramid's secret chamber

An autonomous robot has transmitted the first images from inside a tiny chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt - something that has not been seen by anyone in 4,500 years.

Thought to be a gigantic tomb built for the the pharaoh Khufu over a 10 to 20-year period that ended somewhere around 2560 BC, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt is the single remaining vestige of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. When it was first built it was 146.5 metres high, before crumbling to 138.8 metres tall, where it stands now.

There are three known chambers in the Great Pyramid - the base chamber sits on the bedrock and supports the rest of the pyramid, while the upper two chambers are called the Queen’s and King’s Chambers. Extending from the north and south walls of the Queen’s Chamber are two tunnels - about 20 cm by 20 cm - that are blocked off by stone doors. No one knows what these tunnels were originally intended to do, but one theory is that they led to a secret chamber.

According to Rowan Hooper at New Scientist, researchers have tried several times to send little robots into the Great Pyramid to solve this mystery. In 1993, a robot made it 63 m up the south wall tunnel to find a small pair of stone doors set with metal pins. This was strange enough on its own, because metal was not found in any other part of the Great Pyramid, so what function was it performing here? Door handles, perhaps? Or a key?

Almost a decade after that, another robot drilled into a stone block in the tunnel and found a small, strange empty chamber that ended with a large stone block.

[link to www.sciencealert.com.au]