Where is the Missing Lid to the Stone Box Inside the Great Pyramid?
Report Topics:
- Many mysteries surround what was carved into the lid of the lid missing from the King's Chamber, and what ultimately happened to it
Full Report:
There are some researchers on the mysteries of the Great Pyramid who feel that the story that has come down to us concerning Caliph Al Mamoun’s break-in excavation work into the monument in the ninth century is not entirely true, that portions of it may have been fabricated to cover up real events and their intentions. Let us look at the entire story point for point.
First, it is said that the Caliph ordered his workmen to dig their way into the center of the north face of the Pyramid because he did not know where the true entranceway was located. However, we read from the chronicles of his time that Al Mamoun was a scholar who had access to Greek and Roman classical works on the antiquities of the ancient Egyptians.
He could not have helped notice Strabo’s accurate description and location of the hinged swinging door which once covered the Pyramid’s entranceway. This door would have existed only before the casing stones that sheathed the Pyramid were stripped off beginning in 1356, to be used as building materials by Sultan Hasan for the building of his mosque in Cairo.
The original entrance to the Great Pyramid, now thoroughly exposed to the light of day, is located in the north face of the monument about 49 feet above the base and 24 feet east of the central axis line of the face. This off-centeredness is thought to have been purposely designed in order to thwart would-be intruders from easily determining where to locate the casing block covering the entrance.
Yet graffiti in Dynastic Egyptian hieroglyphs, as well as in Greek and Latin lettering from a later age, are located on the walls and ceiling of the Pyramid’s Pit Chamber, proving that the door was not only known but used by ancient tourists over a period of nearly two millennia for getting inside and climbing deep down to the lower portions of the monument.
The nature of the hinged door itself, being a moveable stone block, necessitated that it was identifiable by some type of handle, plus its use over many centuries of time must have left considerable wear marks around its edges that would have been visible to anyone scanning the Pyramid‘s exterior surfaces.
There was thus no reason why Al Mamoun could not have found the door and utilized it to go inside in the same manner as so many others had done before him. This means there had to have been another reason for digging by force the passageway ordered by the Caliph, and that it was done only after already gaining entrance.
The original story states that the Caliph’s workmen toiled for months breaking the limestone blocks apart, and were discouraged to the point of threatening to mutiny because they felt their labors were getting nowhere. But then, the story goes, they heard a noise of a stone falling down deeper inside the monument. They then changed course and angled their diggings in that direction until they broke into the Descending Passage.
The problem is, when you actually go and stand in the tunnel the workmen hacked out twelve centuries ago, which today is named the Al Mamoun’s Entrance, there is no detectable altering of direction in the tunnel’s course. I have personally had the opportunity to explore this passage dozens of times over the past four decades, and I find no obvious deviations present.
If one assumes the Caliph’s workmen were digging from the outside in, it would appear they somehow knew by unknown means exactly where they were going, to meet with the Descending Passage. But if instead they had really dug from the inside toward the outside, and were simply targeting a direct line to any point on the outer exterior of the monument, then the tunnel’s straightness makes better sense.
There is the additional problem of the claim that the workmen heard a sound while digging their tunnel. Normal sound waves do not carry inside the Pyramid through several hundred feet of solid masonry. You can only hear sound as it echoes through the air of existing opened passages. This means the noise of a falling stone must have occurred when Al Mamoun’s workmen had already gained access to the Descending Passage by means of the original entranceway, and were in a position inside to hear it.
The story recounts that the falling stone in question happened to be the block covering the entranceway from the Descending Passage up into the Ascending Passage leading the way to the upper chambers inside the Pyramid. But the discovery of this entranceway may not have been so fortuitous. To the east of the Pyramid are located what nineteenth century British archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie identified as the Trial Passages, a series of tunnel configurations carved out of the bedrock that generally matches the passageway system inside the monument. There is some evidence to strongly suggest Al Mamoun may have uncovered these in his time, during his initial probing explorations around the Pyramid and guessed that these tunnels were a guide to what he would find within. By applying the geometry revealed, he and his men could have easily located the entranceway to the Ascending Passage, and more than likely removed the covering stone themselves.
As for the enigmatic sound that was heard deep inside the Pyramid, it more probably was transmitted via an unknown chamber or passage that connects with the known passage system, but which has yet to be discovered. The noise was not that of a stone falling but rather of a door closing, shutting off the more secret areas from detection by the break-in intruders. In that day, did the age-old line of descended guardians of the Pyramid allow only part of the great mystery of the monument’s interior to be revealed?
According to contemporary Arabic accounts, when Al Mamoun finally entered the Queen’s Chamber and King’s Chamber, he was greatly disappointed to find them empty of any Pharaonic treasure. But what kind of treasure was the Caliph really looking for? The original story tells how when Al Mamoun found the stone box in the King’s Chamber devoid of any contents, he filled it with his own gold coins and paid his workmen with it as their wages. For his own compensation, he took the stone box’s lid out of the Pyramid as a souvenir and returned to Baghdad with it. Many years later, when Baghdad was sacked, the lid was said to have disappeared, and we hear nothing more about it.
And here is where the real mystery begins. We know from the dovetailing on the rim of the stone box that a lid did indeed once fit over it, sliding into place to seal it. We also know fairly closely what the length and width was of the stone box lid, but we can only estimate how high it was. More importantly, we have no clue of what if anything was carved into its surfaces. In later Dynastic times coffer lids were sometimes larger than their accompanying sarcophagus, weighing many tons and covered with pages of inscriptions and engravings. What did the stone box lid in the King’s Chamber have on it that was so significant that the Caliph recognized its value enough to claim it for himself and take it with him?
What we can surmise about the missing lid is that it was most likely made of Aswan granite, since the box on which it rested, and the entire King’s Chamber that surrounded it, were also made of this kind of stone. The box we know weighs an approximate three tons, and its accompanying lid very likely weighed the same, perhaps slightly more, depending on how massive it was.
The covering piece was undoubtedly designed with a sliding dovetail, which fit into a 1.5 inch ledge or groove cut into the box’s sides at its top, and was fixed into place by three pins which penetrated the lid and anchored into the three dowel-holes that presently can be seen on the box’s western lip.
Since the box measures 7.5 feet long and 3.25 feet wide (or 39 inches), the lid had to have been at least the same dimensions to be able to completely cover its top, including its 6.5-inch thick rims.
How high was the lid? Its maximum size limitations we can roughly determine by what obstacles the lid would have encountered when it was transported by the Caliph’s men out of the Pyramid. Regardless of what its size could have been, the one very real measurement we know of that could have caused difficulties is the lid’s width, matching that of the stone box itself, of 39 inches.
The exit from the King’s Chamber is composed of a small tunnel 8.5 feet long and only 41 inches wide and 48 inches high, that leads into the Antechamber. The next constricting space is through the 4-foot long tunnel leading from the Antechamber into the upper end of the Grand Gallery, which is 41 inches square. At the bottom of the Grand Gallery begins the Ascending Passage which is 110 feet long and is only 41 inches wide and 47 inches high. This means that the box lid, to get through to this point in the various Pyramid passages, could not have been more than 40.5 inches tall.
It is at the very bottom of the Ascending Passage that Al Mamoun’s workmen carrying the lid would have encountered a serious problem. Blocking the tunnel are three large stone plugs made of Aswan granite, which extend a combined distance of 15.5 feet. The Arabs in the ninth century did not have the technology available to break these plugs apart, so they did the next best thing. They dug their way around the granite through the softer limestone blocks surrounding them. But even this took tremendous effort, and we know that the resulting narrow tunnel was no more than 3 feet wide, through which the Caliph’s men managed to squeeze through to get to the upper passageways and chambers.
However, this was far short of the necessary space needed to get the lid through.
Beyond this the workmen would have encountered 92 feet of the Descending Passage that measures 42 inches wide and 47 inches high. While this could have been barely enough room to get the lid through, there is evidence that at the time of Al Mamoun’s break-in, a large plug of limestone that had been added as late as the fifth century blocked the tunnel within a few feet of the entrance.
In 1990, on one of my trips to Egypt, I had an opportunity to be able to thoroughly explore the entranceway during a cleaning and restoration project then underway, when the metal door that today permanently covers the entry was opened. I found traces on the passage floor where a large stone piece had been cemented in place.
This stone was certainly not there in earlier centuries, for we know the Dynastic Egyptians, Greeks and Romans had had easy access to the Pit Chamber. Significantly, we do not find any Byzantine graffiti inside the Pyramid, so the monument had to have been sealed circa the end of the Roman occupation of Egypt in the fifth century. Who the unknown individuals were who positioned this blocking stone is another question. Perhaps they were the age-old guardians of the Pyramid?
What we do know is that when Al Mamoun’s workmen broke through the limestone block to gain entrance into the Descending Passage, at that time they would have possessed only limited means for partially smashing through the stone, leaving behind protruding jagged edges. In later centuries the stone remains were most likely thoroughly removed by European archaeologists using more modern stone-cutting or dissolving methods, so that today the evidence for the block’s presence is barely discernible. But in the ninth century the remaining rough jagged edges of the block still cemented to the floor would have posed a serious obstacle to get around, especially for anyone trying to carry something that had only an inch or two of clearance to begin with.
As if this were not enough of a problem, the upper end of the Descending Passage once opened into a very small chamber that straddled the entrance. This missing chamber existed only before the outer casing stones were removed from the Pyramid’s exterior in the fourteenth century. The chamber, as we noted earlier from Strabo‘s account, was covered by a hinged swinging stone doorway. This had had very narrow dimensions, just large enough for an individual to barely squeeze through, perhaps no more than 3 feet wide. There thus would have been no way for the box lid to get through such an opening.
Yet despite these major obstacles, if Al Mamoun was determined to get the box lid out, what would have been his only possible solution? The answer was for him to order his men to dig a tunnel precisely from where the granite plugs meet with the Descending Passage, excavating the stone straight out toward the monument’s exterior, and making it amply large enough to easily accommodate the box lid. And this is precisely the configuration we find today, of the roughly excavated tunnel that has become known as the Al Mamoun Entrance.
If the Caliph’s workmen did in fact dig out rather than dig into the Pyramid, where did they put the resulting broken stonework that would have resulted from all their tunneling?
Medieval Arabic chronicles written just ten years after Al Mamoun’s break-in record that visitors to the Great Pyramid’s interior were unable to descend into the Pit Chamber or the lower end of the Descending Passage because the way was completely choked with small pieces of smashed stones and rubble. Even the Well Shaft that connects the Pit Chamber to the beginning of the Grand Gallery above was used as a dumping ground, for until it was finally cleaned out in 1893, the Well was filled in with rubble to a depth of 133 feet. The attempt to empty out the Pit Chamber itself was not started until 1909 by the Edgar brothers, and not fully completed until the final cleaning of the entire Pyramid interior by Baraize and Barsanti between 1917 and 1932.
The only source of where all this tremendous amount of debris could have come from would have been an early large-scale excavation performed somewhere inside the Pyramid. All together, a total of several hundred tons of debris was removed over several decades in the last century - just about equal to the amount of broken stonework that would have resulted from Al Mamoun’s excavation.
Had such an effort been made of digging from the outside in, we would have expected the materials to have been discarded somewhere on the grounds surrounding the monument’s exterior foundations. But the fact that it was instead deposited within the Pyramid itself points to the digging work having been from inside to outside.
This brings us to a crucial point. For so much work to have been expended on behalf of its removal, the box lid must have had some great intrinsic value known only to the Caliph himself.
Did the lid possess inscriptions concerning secret knowledge of lost sciences and technologies from the forgotten past? Or did the lid have carved onto it a map of all the chambers and passages, known and unknown, inside the Great Pyramid? Is it even possible it had a map of the entire Giza area depicting the location of the hidden Hall of Records beneath it?
Then there is the final question, where is the lid today? Some believe it may be still buried among Caliphate ruins somewhere in Iraq, in or near Baghdad. Others feel it may have gone the route of any one of several invading armies who subsequently plundered Baghdad in the past. Presently, the lid could still be hidden somewhere in a number of possible locations in central Asia.
Those who recognize there was a higher more secretive purpose for the lid believe there is evidence that the artifact was in more recent times spirited back into Egypt. Here it is being stored and protected in a safe place, awaiting its rediscovery at the right moment,by those who are destined to open again the ancient mysteries of the Great Pyramid and the Giza Hall of Records.
Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.
