September 20, 2002	Friday	Rajab 12, 1423

HAMBURG: Forget the “secret chamber” discovered inside the Great Pyramid on live TV - archaeologists from the Great Pyramid is a far more significant find than any “mystery chambers” in the depths of the pyramid.

In Tuesday’s live broadcast, a miniature robot camera discovered a cavity beyond a locked door at the end of the 20-by-20 centimetre shaft.

In a hole bored by the researchers, the camera photographed a cavity which contained a door at one end. What Pharaoh Cheops (2600- 2580 B.C.) left behind remains infuriatingly unknown for the time being.

But it is the skeleton that is intriguing scientists.

“Why wasn’t the body mummified?” asked Hartwig Altenmueller, a German archaeologist who serves as a consultant for the National Geographic Society, which sponsored the globally-broadcast media event.

“We can only surmise that the art of mummification had not been in general use in the Old Kingdom,” he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, saying he had cautious, scientific reservations about the whole thing. “Much more research is needed, but the find is truly intriguing,” said Altenmueller, who advises editors of the National Geographic magazine’s German edition.

In a pre-taped prelude to the “Pyramid Rover” segment of Tuesday’s TV extravaganza, archaeologists opened the lid of a 4,500-year-old sarcophagus which contained the skeleton of a man believed to be a high official from the time of the building of pyramids.

“The sarcophagus was in a stone tomb in the pyramid workers’ cemetery, indicating that he enjoyed a high position of some sort,” Altenmueller said. “But he was not mummified and no tomb artifacts were found — none of the gifts and jars of ointments and other things that were placed in later tombs. All of this throws a new light on burial practices at that early date.”

It could also explain why no mummy was ever discovered in the Great Pyramid — because bodies were not mummified then.

No body has ever been found in the Great Pyramid, nor have any inscriptions or tomb relics been found.

As for the “secret chamber”, archaeologists on Tuesday were largely unmoved by the television revelations, despite Egyptian Giza Plateau Antiquities Director Zahi Hawass’s on-air claims that, “This is a major discovery.”

“It was all a bunch of media hype,” said Dietrich Wildung, director of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum.

“Nothing of note was discovered during the live segment and the opening of the sarcophagus was pre-taped and was not live at all. They just rolled the videotape at the appropriate spot in the show.”

The fact that the show’s robotic camera revealed a 45 centimetre cavity within a shaft leading from the Queen’s Chamber to the exterior of the Great Pyramid was interesting, but hardly earth- shattering, according to trained Egyptologists.

“This is not a corridor to a secret vault containing treasures,” Altenmueller said of the shaft. “It and the three other shafts in the Great Pyramid likely served the dual function of providing air to workers during construction and serving in the after-life as routes for the deceased’s spirit to fly to join the sun god.”

He said it would be of interest to determine whether other Old Kingdom pyramids also had such shafts.

“So far they have only been discovered in the Cheops Pyramid — and that only by accident,” Altenmueller said.

And what lies beyond that locked door at the end of the shaft?

“Probably nothing,” he said. “But Egypt is the land of mysteries and that’s what makes our job interesting. There’s always something waiting to be discovered. And even if we find nothing beyond that door, it will add to our knowledge.”—dpa