Icebergs are, as everyone knows, usually below the surface of the waves. What we see is just the tip. But no one dreamed that the same could be the same for the great pyramids of Egypt in Giza, the last remaining wonders of the old world.
To international disbelief, scientists announced during the weekend that they had mapped tunnels, pillars, paths and caverneous halls that extend under the central Khafre pyramid and probably under all three stretches.
The astonishing discovery was made with satellite radent technology, by researchers from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and the Italian University of Pisa.
“When we increase the images, we will reveal that it is below what can only be described as a real underground city … A very hidden world of many structures,” said Corrado Malanga, one of the archaeological researchers.
This huge network, Malanga and his colleague Filippo Biondi claim, falls 2.1 km (about a mile and a quarter) in the sand. It must date from before the pyramids, which were built around 4,500 years ago. But how much older it is is still a mystery.
Could it have been thousands of years earlier? And if so, who constructed it on earth – and how?
Because our Victorian ancestors developed an obsession with ancient Egypt, archaeologists spoke about solving 'The Riddle of the Sands'. But the reality now looks even bizarre than our wildest suspicions.
Three -dimensional images acquired using a technology called Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) show five structures at the basis of the middle pyramid, which is approximately ten miles southwestern Cairo. The purpose of these structures is unknown, but they connect geometric passages.
The mysterious and commander Pyramids on the Giza plateau near Cairo
Much more spectacular are eight vertical columns that dump 2,125 ft into a few colossal cubic rooms that are 263 ft in each direction. This depth is almost five times the height of the Khafre pyramid above the earth, which is at 448ft.
The stone cylinders are aligned in two rows of four, from north to south. And this precise regulation is certainly important: the large pyramids are aligned so that their edges are confronted exactly to the north, south, east and west.
The Khafre-Piramide, combined with the columns and cubes on which it stands, is 2,835ft-growing than the highest building made by humans, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is 2,717 ft.
A pedaly walkway also spirits around every pillar. It is impossible to understand how this could have been created 2500 years before the birth of Jesus.
SAR uses radar pulses to distinguish objects underground and sends an underground signal in a similar way such as radar beams that follow distant planes. These pulses were sent from satellites that revolves around 420 miles above the earth.
“If something appears in the scan of one satellite, but not that of the other, we know it's a false signal,” said Malanga last Saturday. “The measurements were completely consistent and exclude every chance of incorrect interpretation.” He added that the team considered the possibility that the pillars and cubes were a basis for the pyramid.
But the SAR images also show a huge scattering of what looks like archaeological remains, which spread far beyond the foundations at great depth. The scientists theoretized that this could be 'a real underground city'.
During the press conference, the university teams explained that they sent radar signals from two satellites, about 420 miles above the earth, in the Khafre pyramid, allowing them to analyze how the signals bounced back. Shown are hidden structures identified in the pyramid
Since the discovery of the boy Pharaoh Tutankhamun's grave with all his treasures in the valley of the kings 103 years ago, speculation about ancient Egypt has been fiery.
It reached a feverish peak in the nineties, when Maverick archaeologist Robert Bauval claimed to have decoded the astrological significance of the great pyramids.
The three gigantic areas in Giza – supposedly built as graves for the Pharaoh Khufu (or Cheops), his son Khafre and his grandson Menkaure – correspond to the stars in the middle of the Orion Constellation.
While heaven looks today, they do not fully agree. Bauval has worked out that the pyramids would have been exactly in place 10,500 years ago. And that is astonishing … because Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure lived between around 2,600 BC and 2500 BC.
Orion is not the only significant constellation. The Sphinx is confronted with the East, and on the Vernal Equinox (the first day of spring) it is on the Sterrenteken Leo. Many archaeologists believe that the Sphinx, who takes the form of a human lion, is modeled on Leo.
The team claimed that they discovered eight cylindrical structures under the Khafre, which travel more than 2,100 feet under the base of the pyramid. They identified spiral structures on the sides of the shafts
Bauval's colleague Graham Hancock argues that the Sphinx must be thousands of years older than conventional wisdom. The statue is very eroded, not by wind and sand, but due to heavy rainfall. And Egypt has not seen tours for almost 10,000 years.
The vertical gorges in the sandstone could only be caused by running water, Professor Robert Schoch from Boston University told Hancock in the early nineties. “Water chose the weak spots in the rock,” he said and called it, “clear evidence that this function was caused by rainfall.”
Hancock also turned out to be a direct relationship between the height and circumference of the Khufu -Piramide to the radius and the circumference of the earth. In both cases it was exactly 43,200 to one.
This makes sense, he said, because it takes 43,200 years before the sun turns through the 12 constellations. In his documentary Egypt's Cosmic Code, which is currently being broadcast on Sky History, Amateur -Egyptologist Bradley Walsh placed this to Professor Meredith Brand from the American University of Cairo. “Coincidence,” she spotted.
A team of Italian researchers claimed that they have discovered huge vertical shafts wrapped in 'spiral staircases' and a huge limestone platform that contained two huge rooms with falling channels that look like piping pipes
Some claim that the sphinx must be thousands of years older than conventional wisdom
But Bradley picked up another Hancock puzzles. The Khufu pyramid consists of 203 stacked layers, all minced meat and laid by hand. Yet the basis is completely equal. From one corner to the other, the lowest level varies with no more than three -quarters inch.
As Bradley noted, such accuracy can be possible today, but only with laser -guided tools.
The pyramid was probably put into use by the Pharaoh to be ready for his funeral and completed in 24 years. But it is built of 2.3 million blocks of stone, each cut and weighs between 2.5 tons and 70 tons.
As Hancock said: “Assuming that the Freemasons worked ten hours a day, 365 days a year, they should place one block every two minutes.”
Theories vary from brutal power (the employment of thousands of slaves) to magic. A 'acoustic levitation' called on, the use of sound waves to make blocks weightless. This idea dates more than 1000 years for historian Abul Hasan Ali Ali Al-Masudi, who said that an inscription in Papyrus was slipped under each block. When a note sounds, the stone float and drove into place.
A millennium later, professor Chandra Wickramasinghe suggested that the pyramids were explosion care of asteroid showers. He pointed to rare precious stones spread over the deserts of North Africa, fragments of rock that can be the remains of an asteroid impact.
If a meteor was to wipe out an early Egyptian civilization, he reasoned in 2000, it would be likely that the Pharaoh's precautions took names by building bunkers.
Could the underworld city be a refuge for old kings to wait for Armageddon? Unbelievable, anyway, the real explanation will probably be even stranger.
The mystery of the great pyramid of Giza
For more than 4,500 years, the Pyramids of Egypt have hidden their secrets deeply in the labyrinth of passages and rooms that are in their towering stone structures.
But the long -term row about whether the large pyramid of Giza hides a network of previously undiscovered tunnels behind the stone walls has now been answered.
The researchers confirmed the find with the help of cosmic particles known as muons to scan the great pyramid of Giza.
They used the scans to make cards to reveal the internal structure of the 479 feet (146 m) high pyramid.
Last year, Thermal Scanning identified an important deviation in the large pyramid, the largest and oldest of the pyramids in Giza and one of the seven wonders of the old world.
Those scans identified three adjacent stones at the base that registered higher temperatures than others.
The Egyptian museum in Cairo began to show the oldest papyruses in the country on Thursday, who date 4,500 years, with details about the daily life of the pyramid builders.
This led to theories that they may hide a secret room that still had to be discovered.
A team of experts then set up the project of the scanpyramide to use muons, small subatomical particles that are usually produced by cosmic rays that are beaten in atoms on earth, to lead by the enormous stone blocks of the pyramid, some of which are up to 15 tons.
Dr. Hawass has been skeptical in the past about the usefulness of performing such scans.
He recently crashed publicly with British Egyptologists about their theory that a secret burial room can be hidden behind the walls of Tutankhamun's grave in his pyramid in the valley of the kings.
Scientists use a MUON detection machine (depicted) to scan the internal structure of Giza's large pyramid
