inside the pyramids virtual tour

360° Tour inside the Great Pyramid of Giza (Video)

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The BBC's 360° tour through the Great Pyramid of Giza , one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, provides viewers with an immersive virtual reality experience. The video tour starts in the heart of the pyramid, the ceremonial passage known as the Grand Gallery, and continues to the King's Chamber . The precision and architectural brilliance of the pyramid become evident as the viewers navigate through the narrow, low-roofed passages of this over 4,500-year-old edifice.

The video also explores the mysterious subterranean chamber, a feature of the pyramid normally closed off to the public. This enigmatic section is hewn out of the bedrock below ground level and, unlike the smooth surfaces found elsewhere in the pyramid, has rough and irregular walls. The purpose of this chamber and its unusual features, including a strange deep shaft and a short tunnel that ends abruptly, remain a mystery. Despite the enduring secrets it holds, the Great Pyramid , thanks to technological advances in virtual reality, now also shines as a marvel in the virtual world, giving us an unprecedented look into its fascinating interiors.

• Great White Pyramid: Did You know Giza’s Great Pyramid Was Once Dazzling White?
• The Hidden Message in Khafre’s Pyramid: What Were the Builders Trying to Tell Us?

Top image: Stairway inside the Great Pyramid, Egypt. Source:  witthaya / Adobe Stock.

By Joanna Gillan

Joanna Gillan is a Co-Owner, Editor and Writer of Ancient Origins. 

Joanna completed a Bachelor of Science (Psychology) degree in Australia and published research in the field of Educational Psychology. She has a rich and varied career, ranging from teaching... Read More

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Take an 360° Interactive Tour Inside the Great Pyramid of Giza

in Architecture , History | July 31st, 2020 1 Comment

You can’t take it with you if you’ve got noth­ing to take with you.

Once upon a time, the now-emp­ty  Great Pyra­mid of Giza  was sump­tu­ous­ly appoint­ed inside and out, to ensure that Pharaoh Khu­fu, or Cheops as he was known to the Ancient Greeks, would be well received in the after­life.

Bling was a seri­ous thing.

Thou­sand of years fur­ther on, cin­e­mat­ic por­tray­als have us con­vinced that tomb raiders were greedy 19th- and 20th-cen­tu­ry cura­tors, eager­ly fill­ing their vit­rines with stolen arti­facts.

There’s some truth to that, but mod­ern Egyp­tol­o­gists are fair­ly con­vinced that Khufu’s pyra­mid was loot­ed short­ly after his reign, by oppor­tunists look­ing to grab some good­ies for their jour­ney to the after­life.

At any rate, it’s been picked clean.

Per­haps one day, we 21st-cen­tu­ry cit­i­zens can opt in to a pyra­mid expe­ri­ence akin to  Rome Reborn , a dig­i­tal crutch for our fee­ble imag­i­na­tion to help us past the emp­ty sar­coph­a­gus and bare walls that have defined the world’s old­est tourist attraction’s inte­ri­ors for … well, not quite ever, but cer­tain­ly for  Flaubert ,  Mark Twain , and 12th-cen­tu­ry schol­ar  Abd al-Latif .

Fast for­ward­ing to 2017, the  BBC’s Rajan Datar  host­ed “ Secrets of the Great Pyra­mid ,” a pod­cast episode fea­tur­ing Egyp­tol­o­gist  Sal­i­ma Ikram , space archae­ol­o­gist  Dr Sarah Par­cak , and archae­ol­o­gist, Dr  Joyce Tyldes­ley .

The experts were keen to clear up a major mis­con­cep­tion that the 4600-year-old pyra­mid was built by aliens or enslaved labor­ers, rather than a per­ma­nent staff of archi­tects and engi­neers, aid­ed by Egypt­ian civil­ians eager to barter their labor for meat, fish, beer, and tax abate­ment.

Datar’s ques­tion about a scan­ning project that would bring fur­ther insight into the Pyra­mid of Giza­’s con­struc­tion and lay­out was met with excite­ment.

This attrac­tion, old as it is, has plen­ty of new secrets to be dis­cov­ered.

We’re hap­py to share with you, read­ers, that 3 years after that episode was taped, the future is here.

The scan­ning is com­plete.

Wit­ness the BBC’s 360° tour inside the Great Pyra­mid of Giza.

Use your mouse to crane your neck, if you like.

As of this writ­ing, you  could   tour the pyra­mid in per­son , should you wish—the usu­al touris­tic hoards are def­i­nite­ly dialed down.

But, giv­en the con­ta­gion, per­haps bet­ter to tour the King’s Cham­ber, the Queen’s Cham­ber, and the Grand Gallery vir­tu­al­ly, above.

(An inter­est­ing tid­bit: the pyra­mid was more dis­tant to the ancient Romans than the Colos­se­um is to us.)

Lis­ten to the BBC’s “Secrets of the Great Pyra­mid” episode  here .

Tour the Great Pyra­mid of Giza  here .

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What the Great Pyra­mid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleam­ing, Reflec­tive White

How the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Were Built: A New The­o­ry in 3D Ani­ma­tion

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

Ayun Hal­l­i­day  is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of  the East Vil­lage Inky  zine.  Fol­low her  @AyunHalliday .

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Comments (1) |

Related posts:

Comments (1), 1 comment so far.

Absolute­ly love this. I hope to see a video of the Great Pyra­mid as it was when it was com­plete­ly whole.

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Students wearing 3D glasses take a virtual tour of ancient Egypt in Peter Der Manuelian’s “Pyramid Schemes” class.

Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Alvin Powell

Harvard Staff Writer

Digital Giza Project lets scholars virtually visit sites in Egypt and beyond, and even print them in 3D

Four thousand years ago, a member of Egypt’s elite was buried on the Giza Plateau in an elaborate stone tomb, complete with several rooms and underground chambers.

Then, in 1912, a team from Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston excavated the tomb, of a type called a mastaba , and brought back with them a limestone wall from its chapel.

The wall, housed at the MFA, is inscribed with images of the deceased, an official named Akh-meret-nesut, and his family in various poses — sitting, leaning on a staff, throwing a lasso.

Today, more than a century later, Harvard doctoral student Inês Torres wants to know as much as she can about Akh-meret-nesut: who he was, what he did, and why he was buried on the Giza Plateau in the shadow of the pyramids long after pharaohs’ burials there had ceased.

But Torres faces a problem familiar to many scholars studying ancient Egypt: getting access to what she’s studying. With part of the tomb in Boston and part in Egypt, she’d have to time travel to see it intact. Other scholars may face different hurdles, but the problem is the same: Documents and images are held in faraway archives, artifacts and other relics of ancient Egypt have been dispersed, stolen, or destroyed, and tombs and monuments have been dismantled, weather-worn, or locked away behind passages filled in when an excavation closes.

Hurdles can also be economic: The object of study may be intact, but the plane fare and expenses of living for weeks in the field or lodged in the cities — Cairo, London, Berlin, Paris, Boston — that are home to museums with large Egyptian collections hard to come by.

It was with scholars like these in mind that Digital Giza Project was born.

The project was created in 2000 by Peter Der Manuelian , who at the time was on the curatorial staff at the MFA. A scholar of ancient Egypt, Manuelian said his initial vision was to create a digital record of the work of Harvard’s legendary Egyptology Professor and MFA curator George Reisner and the Harvard-MFA Expedition he led. The expedition was one of the major academic archaeological efforts at Giza and other sites in Egypt during the early 1900s.

Reisner, who led the expedition for more than 40 years, dug at 23 sites, and Manuelian soon realized that just digitizing material relating to the vast finds on the Giza Plateau — which includes not only the pyramids and the Sphinx, but also associated temples, nearby cemeteries, and even a workers’ village — would be a career-long challenge. In 2010, he moved to Harvard to become the Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology and director of the Harvard Semitic Museum , and he brought the Giza Project with him.

The project staff’s ambition has since expanded to include not just Reisner’s work at Giza, but that of other archaeologists at the site as well, making it a comprehensive resource for Giza archaeology. It contains some 77,000 images, 21,000 of them Harvard University-MFA Expedition glass-plate negatives, and 10,000 of Manuelian’s own images. It has published manuscripts as well as unpublished expedition records, dig diaries, object record books, and sketches and drawings made by the archaeologists doing the digging. In January, during Harvard’s winter recess, Manuelian visited Egypt and collected another 5,000 digital images — including panoramic photos — of Giza and related objects in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

A key feature of the Giza Project is the fact that the material it holds is cross-referenced online, allowing a researcher to seamlessly move from a 3D image of an object to scholarly articles about it to diary pages by the archaeologist who discovered it.

“For people who focus on this particular period, this is the main resource for them to go to,” Manuelian said. “It’s thrown the doors wide open to this material that was previously only in the publications that Reisner lived long enough to finish.”

As the work has advanced, so has technology. Manuelian’s vision has expanded to include 3D re-creations of statues and artifacts that allow researchers to view them online, rotate them, and zoom in on specific features. Looking to the future, he said, 3D models’ source codes could be made available, which would allow distant scholars with access to 3D printers to create their own physical models.

“All of this allows us to ask new questions and to put the data together in ways not possible before and to make intelligent links,” Manuelian said. “If someone gets a grant and decides to go to the MFA and look through their records, good luck. There’s just so much, it’s overwhelming. If you go to Giza today, a tomb may have been reburied or vandalized, or is in not as good shape as it was in 1916. Objects might have gone to the basement of the Cairo museum, never to be seen again.

“With our attempt to put this all together digitally, with diaries and maps and plans and things, it allows you, first of all, convenient access to the data and then you can start to notice patterns.”

The Giza Projects’ 3D modeling extends beyond artifacts to locations. Manuelian’s team has already created video-game-like 3D versions of the entire Giza Plateau, with the Khafre pyramid, the Sphinx, and several temples and tombs posted so far and more to come. Those models can be accessed from the Digital Giza website and toured using controls on a laptop or desktop computer. Other re-creations, using high-resolution photographs of tombs’ interiors, let visitors walk through virtual burial chambers using stereo headsets. Visitors can move around inside the tombs and even walk up to a wall to examine a particular relief or other detail. About 20 tombs have been modeled in detail so far, with hundreds more to go.

“My hope is eventually to fly drones over the site, documenting everything from the air,” Manuelian said. “And complementing that with walks up and down the ‘streets’ [between rows of tombs] creating 360-degree panoramic visualizations, all linked to the more-traditional archaeological data that we have already assembled.”

For someone like Torres, studying a tomb that has one room in Boston and the rest in Egypt, a virtual model is the only way to see the intact structure, so she’s planning on creating one as part of her doctoral work.

“This tomb is divided between two countries,” she said. “3D modeling is the only way we can put it back together again.”

The overarching goal, Manuelian said, is to make scholarship in Egyptology more accessible than ever. And, while digital images may not fully replace the real thing, he said, foundational study can be conducted using the wide array of material presented by the project, allowing scholars to conserve scarce resources for when they’re essential.

The project’s 3D re-creations and data visualizations, together with the capabilities of the Harvard Visualization Center, also allow the Giza Project to give students a unique educational experience. Last fall, Manuelian gathered his students in a tomb in cyber space, using the center’s virtual reality headsets, and linked the class to students in Zhejiang University in China. Students’ avatars gathered at the virtual site — in this case, the Sphinx — with the technology, allowing Manuelian to act as a cyber tour guide.

“The project is all of these diverse approaches,” Manuelian said. “It’s a traditional database and website. It’s the intelligent linking of this photo to that tomb to this diary page. It’s the 3D modeling as we try to build more and more of the necropolis all the time. And it’s ultimately intended to enable the kind of remote teaching — what I call educational telepresence — where we can all be at Giza virtually and visiting the site and having a lecture inside a decorated tomb chapel no matter where you live.”

Torres said there is an irony to studying Giza: It is one of the world’s most famous archaeological sites, but in many ways it is still unknown. While the pyramids and Sphinx are world-famous, and have been for centuries, in their shadow new tombs are still being uncovered, while known tombs, workers’ houses, and other sites are yet to be fully explored and studied.

“Giza is such a well-known site, but in some sense, it’s understudied,” Torres said. “Because the pyramids are so amazing, the things all around them fade.”

With so much work to be done, the access to digitized documents and materials might inspire scholars curious about ancient Egypt but without access to the sites themselves or a major Egyptological library to take up the job.

“I think that’s the way to go forward, to make sure everyone has access,” Torres said. “Possibly there are geniuses who don’t have a great library and could do something wonderful with the information.”

Another graduate student, Hilo Sugita, plans to study the sarcophagi found at Giza. Using the Giza Project’s data, she can examine photographs of inscriptions, find their original locations within tombs, and even create 3D models.

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“We have photographs, journals, glass negatives, letters, artifacts, publications,” Sugita said. “I think the Digital Giza Project is amazing because we’re trying to collect all the data about Giza everywhere and make it available on the website. You don’t have to go to the MFA, you don’t have to travel to Berlin.”

Technology’s advance is not without challenges, however. The digitization of archaeology, Manuelian said, is something like “the Wild West,” with competing file formats and uncertainty about how the growing data troves will be translated into next-generation software.

In addition, standards for what goes into a 3D re-creation are loose. Should a digital model reflect the state of a tomb as it was found, for example, or is it OK to color in reliefs on the walls to match paint residue found there? How far should digital re-creations go in filling in missing details, some of which are backed by scholarship, but others of which are more speculative, driven by knowledge of common practice rather than evidence at that specific site?

Early in the spring term, Manuelian gave students in his Gen Ed “Pyramid Schemes” class, which provides an overview of ancient Egypt, a glimpse of Giza using Giza Project models. The students visited the Harvard Visualization Center’s home on the second floor of the Geological Museum building, which is equipped with a curved floor-to-ceiling screen occupying one full wall and a suite of 3D and virtual reality tools.

He gave them a tour of both the technology — which can depict sites in detail — and the archaeology, showing them three-dimensional re-creations viewed with 3D glasses and letting them walk through a tomb via a virtual-reality headset.

Manuelian also encouraged students to not only soak up the experience, but to think about the challenges inherent in such an approach, where it might further education and scholarship, and what its shortcomings might be. And, with so much work still to do, he also made a pitch.

“This is a project that is waiting for people like you,” he said.

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Discover the secrets of Egypt’s Great Pyramid on this new virtual tour

A new tool gives you access to the inside chambers of one of the Ancient Wonders of the World

Always wanted have a look around an Egyptian pyramid but never quite managed to go all the way to Giza? Here’s your chance for a sneak peek. You can now take a free virtual tour of the Great Pyramid of Giza – and, even online, it’s pretty spectacular.

On a website called Giza.Mused , the tour gives viewers a comprehensive look into one of Egypt’s most famous pyramids. It renders the ‘entire interior’ in digital 3-D form, taking virtual tour attendees through the king’s chamber at the top, the queen’s chamber in the middle and a subterranean chamber, which is cut into the bedrock beneath. 

So what’s so special about the Great Pyramid of Giza – despite, obviously, it being ‘great’ and all? Well, it’s the biggest pyramid in Egypt and stands at just over 138 metres tall. Built about 4,600 years ago, it houses the tomb of fourth dynasty pharaoh Khufu and is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (and the only Ancient Wonder still standing).

In other words, it’s a pretty sweet place to get a virtual tour of. Giza.Mused doubles up as a fascinating history lesson, with facts about everything from its construction and location to the current entrance, which was apparently dug by robbers in the ninth century.

You can do the tour for yourself here – and get fantasising about just how incredible it would be to see the pyramids IRL.

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Visit the Pyramids of Giza Without Even Leaving Your Couch

By ellen gutoskey | apr 15, 2021.

If going to the Giza Plateau in person is the ultimate way to experience the ancient Pyramids of Giza, Harvard University’s Digital Giza is at least the next best thing.

As Nerdist reports , Digital Giza is an offshoot of Harvard’s Giza Project , an international endeavor to catalog and consolidate archives and information about the Giza Plateau from all over the world. Researchers have used this data to create a digital platform with 3D models, virtual walking tours, and other free interactive resources to help people explore the region from afar.

You can, for example, amble around the largest of the three pyramids, commissioned by King Khufu around 2550 BCE and also known as the Great Pyramid . Not only is it the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it’s also the only one that still exists (That said, historians aren’t sure that some of them ever existed at all—hard evidence of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, for example, has proven difficult to find.) The other two pyramids that tower over the rest of the plateau are the Pyramid of Khafre and the Pyramid of Menkaure, built by (and named for) Khufu’s son and grandson, respectively.

Digital Giza offers plenty of sites to explore beyond those three edifices. The Great Sphinx , thought to have been built during Khafre’s reign, is also a must-see. While it’s currently the same sandy color as the rest of the plateau, pigment residue suggests that it might’ve once been painted red, blue, yellow, and perhaps other vibrant hues. The platform also has virtual tours of several extravagant tombs, complete with details about the art and sculptures you see inside.

If you’re interested in an immersive (and educational) virtual vacation, you can explore Digital Giza here .

[h/t Nerdist ]

Inside the Great Pyramid

No structure in the world is more mysterious than the Great Pyramid. But who first broke into its well-guarded interior? When? And what did they find?

There is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid. When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile expedition of 1798 (it goes), he determined to spend a night alone inside the King's Chamber, the granite-lined vault that lies precisely in the center of the pyramid. This chamber is generally acknowledged as the spot where Khufu , the most powerful ruler of Egypt's Old Kingdom (c.2690-2180 BC), was interred for all eternity, and it still contains the remains of Pharaoh's sarcophagus—a fractured mass of red stone that is said to ring like a bell when struck.

Having ventured alone into the pyramid's forbidding interior and navigated its cramped passages armed with nothing but a guttering candle, Napoleon emerged the next morning white and shaken, and thenceforth refused to answer any questions about what had befallen him that night. Not until 23 years later, as he lay on his death bed, did the emperor at last consent to talk about his experience. Hauling himself painfully upright, he began to speak—only to halt almost immediately.

"Oh, what's the use," he murmured, sinking back. "You'd never believe me."

As I say, the story is not true—Napoleon's private secretary, De Bourrienne, who was with him in Egypt, insists that he never went inside the tomb. (A separate tradition suggests that the emperor, as he waited for other members of his party to scale the outside of the pyramid, passed the time calculating that the structure contained sufficient stone to erect a wall around all France 12 feet high and one foot thick.) That the tale is told at all, however, is testament to the fascination exerted by this most mysterious of monuments–and a reminder that the pyramid's interior is at least as compelling as its exterior. Yes, it is impressive to know that Khufu's monument was built from 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing on average more than two tons and cut using nothing more than copper tools; to realize that its sides are precisely aligned to the cardinal points of the compass and differ one from another in length by no more than two inches, and to calculate that, at 481 feet, the pyramid remained the tallest man-made structure in the world for practically 4,000 years—until the main spire of Lincoln Cathedral was completed in about 1400 A.D. But these superlatives do not help us to understand its airless interior.

Few would be so bold as to suggest that, even today, we know why Khufu ordered the construction of what is by far the most elaborate system of passages and chambers concealed within any pyramid. His is the only one of the 35 such tombs constructed between 2630 and 1750 B.C. to contain tunnels and vaults well above ground level. (Its immediate predecessors, the Bent Pyramid and the North Pyramid at  Dahshur , have vaults built  at  ground level; all the others are solid structures whose burial chambers lie well underground.) For years, the commonly accepted theory was that the Great Pyramid's elaborate features were the product of a succession of changes in plan, perhaps to accommodate Pharaoh's increasingly divine stature as his reign went on, but the American Egyptologist Mark Lehner has marshaled evidence suggesting that the design was fixed before construction began. If so, the pyramid's internal layout becomes even more mysterious, and that's before we bear in mind the findings of the  Quarterly Review , which reported in 1818, after careful computation, that the structure's known passages and vaults occupy a mere 1/7,400th of its volume, so that "after leaving the contents of every second chamber solid by way of separation, there  might  be three thousand seven hundred chambers, each equal in size to the sarcophagus chamber, [hidden] within."

But if the thinking behind the pyramid's design remains unknown, there is a second puzzle that should be easier to solve: the question of who first entered the Great Pyramid after it was sealed in about 2566 B.C. and what they found inside it.

It's a problem that gets remarkably little play in mainstream studies, perhaps because it's often thought that all Egyptian tombs—with the notable exception of  Tutankhamun's —were plundered within years of their completion. There's no reason to suppose that the Great Pyramid would have been exempt; tomb-robbers were no respecters of the dead, and there is evidence that they were active at Giza—when the smallest of the three pyramids there, which was built by Khufu's grandson Menkaure, was broken open in 1837, it was found to contain a mummy that had been interred there around 100 B.C. In other words, the tomb had been ransacked and reused.

The evidence that the Great Pyramid was similarly plundered is more equivocal; the accounts we have say two quite contradictory things. They suggest that the upper reaches of the structure remained sealed until they were opened under Arab rule in the ninth century A.D. But they also imply that when these intruders first entered the King's Chamber, the royal sarcophagus was already open and Khufu's mummy was nowhere to be seen.

This problem is one of more than merely academic interest, if only because some popular accounts of the Great Pyramid take as their starting point the idea that Khufu was never interred there, and go on to suggest that if the pyramid was not a tomb, it must have been intended as a storehouse for ancient wisdom, or as an energy accumulator, or as a map of the future of mankind. Given that, it's important to know what was written by the various antiquaries, travelers and scientists who visited Giza before the advent of modern Egyptology in the 19th century.

Let's start by explaining that the pyramid contains two distinct tunnel systems, the lower of which corresponds to those found in earlier monuments, while the upper (which was carefully hidden and perhaps survived inviolate much longer) is unique to the Great Pyramid. The former system begins at a concealed entrance 56 feet above ground in the north face, and proceeds down a low descending passage to open, deep in the bedrock on which the pyramid was built, into what is known as the Subterranean Chamber. This bare and unfinished cavern, inaccessible today, has an enigmatic pit dug into its floor and serves as the starting point for a small, cramped tunnel of unknown purpose that dead-ends in the bedrock.

Above, within the main bulk of the pyramid, the second tunnel system leads up to a series of funerary vaults. To outwit tomb robbers, this Ascending Passage was blocked with granite plugs, and its entrance in the Descending Passage was disguised with a limestone facing identical to the surrounding stones. Beyond it lies the  26-foot-high Grand Gallery , the Queen's Chamber and the King's Chamber. Exciting discoveries have been made in the so-called air shafts found in both these chambers, which lead up toward the pyramid's exterior. The pair in the Queen's Chamber, concealed behind masonry until they were rediscovered late in the 19th century, are the ones  famously explored by robot a few years ago and shown to end in mysterious miniature "doors."  These revelations that have done little to dampen hope that the pyramid hides further secrets.

It is generally supposed that the Descending Passage was opened in antiquity; both  Herodotus , in 445 B.C., and  Strabo , writing around 20 A.D., give accounts that imply this. There is nothing, though, to show that the secret of the Ascending Passage was known to the Greeks or Romans. It is not until we reach the 800s, and the reign of an especially curious and learned Muslim ruler, the  Caliph Ma'mun , that the record becomes interesting again.

It's here that it becomes necessary to look beyond the obvious. Most scholarly accounts state unequivocally that it was Ma'mun who first forced his way into the upper reaches of the pyramid, in the year 820 A.D. By then, they say, the location of the real entrance had been long forgotten, and the caliph therefore chose what seemed to be a likely spot and set his men to forcing a new entry—a task they accomplished with the help of a large slice of luck.

Popular Science  magazine,  in 1954 , put it this way:

Starting on the north face, not far from the secret entrance they had failed to find, Al-Mamun's men drove a tunnel blindly into the pyramid's solid rock.... The tunnel had progressed about 100 feet southward into the pyramid when the muffled thud of a falling rock slab, somewhere near them, electrified the diggers. Burrowing eastward whence the sound had come, they broke into the Descending Passage. Their hammering, they found, had shaken down the limestone slab hiding the plugged mouth of the Ascending Passage.

It was then, modern accounts continue, that Ma'mun's men realized that they had uncovered a secret entrance. Tunneling around the impenetrable granite, they emerged in the Ascending Passage below the Grand Gallery. At that point, they had defeated most of Khufu's defenses, and the upper reaches of the pyramid lay open to them.

That's the story, anyway, and—if accurate—it adds considerably to the mystery of the Great Pyramid. If the upper passages had remained hidden, what happened to Khufu's mummy and to the rich funerary ornaments so great a king would surely have been buried with? Only one alternate route into the upper vaults exists—a crude "well shaft" whose entrance was concealed next to the Queen's Chamber, and which exits far below in the Descending Passage. This was apparently dug as an escape route for the workers who placed the granite plugs. But it is far too rough and narrow to allow large pieces of treasure to pass, which means the puzzle of the King's Chamber remains unresolved.

Is it possible, though, that the Arab accounts that Egyptologists depend on so unquestioningly may not be all they seem? Some elements ring true—for instance, it has been pointed out that later visitors to the Great Pyramid were frequently plagued by giant bats, which made their roosting places deep in its interior; if Ma'mun's men did not encounter them, that might suggest no prior entry. But other aspects of these early accounts are far less credible. Read in the original, the Arab histories paint a confused and contradictory picture of the pyramids; most were composed several centuries after Ma'mun's time, and none so much as mentions the vital date–820 A.D.— so confidently stated in every Western work published since the 1860s. Indeed, the reliability of all these modern accounts is called into question by the fact that the chronology of Ma'mun's reign makes it clear he spent 820 in his capital, Baghdad. The caliph visited Cairo only once, in 832. If he did force entry into the Great Pyramid, it must have been in that year.

How can the Egyptologists have got such a simple thing wrong? Almost certainly, the answer is that those who spend their lives studying ancient Egypt have no reason to know much about medieval Muslim history. But this means they do not realize that the Arab chronicles they cite are collections of legends and traditions needing interpretation. Indeed, the earliest, written by the generally reliable al-Mas'udi and dating to no earlier than c. 950, does not even mention Ma'mun as the caliph who visited Giza. Al-Mas'udi attributes the breaching of the pyramid to Ma'mun's father, Haroun al-Rashid, a ruler best remembered as the caliph of the  Thousand and One Nights —and he appears in a distinctly fabulous context. When, the chronicler writes, after weeks of labor Haroun's men finally forced their way in, they:

found a vessel filled with a thousand coins of the finest gold, each of which was a dinar in weight. When Haroun al-Rashid saw the gold, he ordered that the expenses he incurred should be calculated, and the amount was found exactly equal to the treasure which was discovered.

It should be stated here that least one apparently straightforward account of Ma'mun's doings does survive;  Al-Idrisi , writing in 1150, says that the caliph's men uncovered both ascending and descending passages, plus a vault containing a sarcophagus which, when opened, proved to contain ancient human remains. But other chroniclers of the same period tell different and more fantastical tales. One, Abu Hamid, the Andalusian author of the  Tuhfat al Albab , insists that he himself entered the Great Pyramid, yet goes on to talk of several large "apartments" containing bodies "enveloped in many wrappers, that had become black through length of time," and then insists that

those who went up there in the time of Ma'mun came to a small passage, containing the image of a man in green stone, which was taken out for examination before the Caliph; when it was opened a human body was discovered in golden armor, decorated with precious stones, and in his hand was a sword of inestimable value, and above his head a ruby the size of an egg, which shone like fire.

What, though, of the earliest accounts of the tunnel dug into the pyramid? Here the most influential writers are two other Muslim chroniclers,  Abd al-Latif  (c.1220) and the renowned world traveler  Ibn Battuta  (c.1360). Both men report that Ma'mun ordered his men to break into Khufu's monument using fire and sharpened iron stakes—first the stones of the pyramid were heated, then cooled with vinegar, and, as cracks appeared in them, hacked to pieces using sharpened iron staves. Ibn Battuta adds that a battering ram was used to smash open a passage.

Nothing in either of these accounts seems implausible, and the Great Pyramid does indeed bear the scar of a narrow passage   that has been hacked into its limestone and which is generally supposed to have been excavated by Ma'mun. The forced passage is located fairly logically, too, right in the middle of the north face, a little below and a little to the right of the real (but then concealed) entrance, which the cunning Egyptians of Khufu's day had placed 24 feet off center in an attempt to out-think would-be tomb robbers. Yet the fact remains that the Arab versions were written 400 to 500 years after Ma'mun's time; to expect them to be accurate summaries of what took place in the ninth century is the equivalent of asking today's casual visitor to Virginia to come up with a credible account of the lost colony of Roanoke. And on top of that, neither Abd al-Latif nor Ibn Battuta says anything about how Ma'mun decided where to dig, or mentions the story of the falling capstone guiding the exhausted tunnelers.

Given all this, it is legitimate to ask why anyone believes it was Ma'mun who entered the Great Pyramid, and to wonder how the capstone story entered circulation. The answer sometimes advanced to the first question is that there is a solitary account that dates, supposedly, to the 820s and so corroborates Arab tradition. This is an old Syriac fragment (first mentioned in this context in 1802 by a French writer named Silvestre de Sacy) which relates that the Christian patriarch  Dionysius Telmahrensis  accompanied Ma'mun to the pyramids and described the excavation that the caliph made there. Yet this version of events, too, turns out to date to hundreds of years later. It appears not in the chronicle that De Sacy thought was written by Dionysius (and which we now know was completed years before Ma'mun's time, in 775-6 A.D., and composed by someone else entirely), but in the 13th century  Chronicon   Ecclesiasticum  of  Bar-Hebraeus . This author, another Syrian bishop, incorporates passages of his predecessor's writings, but there is no way of establishing whether they are genuine. To make matters worse, the scrap relating to the pyramids says only that Dionysius looked into "an opening" in one of the three monuments of Giza—which might or might not have been a passage in the Great Pyramid, and might or might not have excavated by Ma'mun. This realization takes us no closer to knowing whether the caliph really was responsible for opening the pyramid, and leaves us as dependent on late date Arab sources as we were before.

As for the story of the falling capstone–that remains an enigma. A concerted hunt reveals it first appeared in the middle of the 19th century, published by Charles Piazzi Smyth. But Smyth does not say where he found it. There are hints, which I still hope to run to ground some day, that it may have made its first appearance in the voluminous works of a Muslim scientist,  Abu Salt al-Andalusi . Abu Salt likewise traveled in Egypt. Very intriguingly, he picked up much of his information while held under house arrest in an ancient library in Alexandria.

The problem, though, is this: even if Smyth got his story from Abu Salt, and even if Abu Salt was scrupulous, the Muslim chronicler was writing not in the 820s but in the 12th century. (He was imprisoned in Egypt in 1107-11.) So while there may still be an outside chance that the account of the falling capstone is based on some older, now lost source, we certainly can't say that for certain. It may be equally likely that the story is a pure invention.

You see, the forced entry that has been driven into the pyramid is just a little too good to be true. Put it this way: perhaps the question that we should be asking is how a passage dug apparently at random in a structure the size of the Great Pyramid emerges at the exact spot where the Descending and the Ascending Passages meet, and where the secrets of the upper reaches of the pyramid are at their most exposed.

Coincidence? I hardly think so. More likely someone, somewhere, sometime knew precisely where to dig. Which would mean the chances are that "Ma'mun's passage" was hacked out centuries before the Muslims came to Egypt, if only to be choked with rubble and forgotten—perhaps even in dynastic times. And that, in turn, means something else: that Khufu's greatest mystery was never quite as secret as he'd hoped.

Jean-Baptiste Abbeloos & Thomas Lamy.  Gregorii Barhebræi Chronicon Ecclesiasticum.. . Louvain, 3 volumes: Peeters, 1872-77; Anon. 'Observations relating to some of the Antiquities of Egypt...'  Quarterly Review  XXXVIII, 1818; JB Chabot.  Chronique de Denys de Tell-Mahré. Quatrième partie . Paris, 2 vols: É. Bouillon, 1895; Okasha El Daly,  Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings . London: UCL, 2005; John & Morton Edgar.  Great Pyramid Passages . Glasgow: 3 vols, Bone & Hulley, 1910; Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne.  Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte.  Edinburgh, 4 vols: Constable, 1830; John Greaves.  Pyramidographia . London: J. Brindley, 1736; Hugh Kennedy,  The Court of the Caliphs: the Rise and Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty . London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004; Ian Lawton & Chris Ogilvie-Herald.  Giza: The Truth . London: Virgin, 1999; Mark Lehner.  The Complete Pyramids . London: Thames & Hudson, 1997; William Flinders Petrie.  The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh . London: Field & Tuer, 1873; Silvestre de Sacy.  'Observations sur le nom des Pyramides.' [From the "Magasin encyclopédique."] . Paris: np, 1802; Charles Piazzi Smyth.  Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid . London: Alexander Strahan, 1864; Richard Howard Vyse.  Operations Carried Out at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837 . London, 3 vols: James Fraser, 1840; Robert Walpole.  Memoirs Relating to European and Asiatic Turkey . London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818; Witold Witakowski,  The Syriac Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre . Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiskell International, 1987; Witold Witakowski (trans),  Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre Chronicle (Also Known as the Chronicle of Zuqnin) . Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996.

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Mike Dash is a contributing writer in history for Smithsonian.com. Before Smithsonian.com, Dash authored the award-winning blog A Blast From the Past.

Great Pyramid of Giza Virtual Tour

Hey there! Thank you for joining me again for another insane virtual tour! On today’s virtual tour we are going to visit one of the seven wonders of the world, the Great Pyramid of Giza. There is so much conspiracy on how this pyramid was built and that is because of its insane size and time period it was erected. It has been said that this pyramid is perhaps the most colossal single building ever erected on the planet.

The Great Pyramid of Giza stands at 481 feet tall and is 755 feet long on each side. It is made up on limestone and granite blocks that when you see you think, how the hell did people move these without machine power?

Approximately 2.3 million blocks of stone were cut, transported, and assembled to create this 6.5-million-ton structure, which is a masterpiece of technical skill and engineering ability. The biggest feat to me being that they had no technical resources and no machine powered equipment to help them. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built my brute force and strategy.

As you can see the outside of the Great Pyramid has deteriorated a lot. It used to be covered in a white shiny limestone that would sparkle when the sunlight hit it. You can see the last of this limestone at the very top of the pyramid giving it a little shiny cap.

This virtual tour of the Great Pyramid will start at the main entrance, which is on the north side, about 60 feet above ground level. Once inside, you will find an original descending corridor that will come to a fork where you can either go straight, up, or down.

Meet me in there I can not wait to show you aGreat Pyramid of Giza Virtual Tour!

The Grand Gallery

As we enter the Great Pyramid of Khufu, we go down a shallow ramp and come to a crossroads. We can either continue going down, to the Subterranean Chamber, or we can go up on an ascending passageway up towards the Queen’s Chamber, Grand Gallery, and eventually to the King’s Chamber.

Let us go up the ascending passageway right now. As we reach the top of this passageway we come to a grand opening. This is the Grand Gallery.

Archaeologists and other scientists have tried to figure out what the use of the Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid of Giza was for, but that is tough to figure out without any fellow Egyptians to ask. One theory is that the Grand Gallery served as an observation point for astronomers to use to map out the stars and constellations. This would only have been while the Great Pyramid was under construction and the roof was not complete yet. Historians came up with this theory because they Great Pyramid is directly aligned with the constellations.

The theory I have always heard is that the Grand Gallery was used to haul the massive granite stones up the Great Pyramid and to the King’s Chamber. This one just makes more sense to me because I believe the incredible size of the Grand Gallery had to have some functional use. It is also the hallway leading up to the King’s Chamber, which is our next stop. The Grand Gallery also just could be a grand entrance into the King’s Chamber because the King was such a prominent figure and they wanted to give him the most royal entrance they could. Although who knows the real purpose, all we can do now is speculate!

Next stop on the Great Pyramid of Giza Virtual Tour is the King’s Chamber. Head up the steep staircase and I will meet you there!

Don’t forget to check out our other virtual tour adventures here !

The King’s Chamber

Watch your head as you step into the King’s Chamber. This low entrance opens up into a large, gorgeous room. This room is entirely lined and roofed in granite. It is the only room in the Great Pyramid where granite is used instead of limestone. That tells us that whoever was buried in here had to be a King.

Right now, we are directly in the middle of the Great Pyramid. If you want to get freaked out just think about how much wait in rock is on top of us right now. I hope you are not claustrophobic! The King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid measures 10.45 meters by 5.20 meters and is 5.80 meters tall.

Above the King’s Chamber are five compartments separated by massive horizontal granite slabs. No one knows the exact purpose of these granite slabs up there, but it has been assumed by scientists that the slabs were intended to shield the ceiling of the burial chamber by diverting the weight of the pyramid above it. It would explain how there could be a hollow room under all the force of the rock on top of it.

This being the room where the King was buried, it can be assumed that it used to be filled with extravagant items and gold. It is now bare after hundreds of years of robbers and looters. The mummified King even got removed from his own tomb! I don’t know about you but after all the movies I have seen, there is no way I am going anywhere near a mummy! All that is left is the sarcophagus where the King was laid to rest. If you are wondering what a sarcophagus is (like I was), it is pretty much an Egyptian coffin.

The sarcophagus is huge, it is estimated to be 3.75 tons. Compared to other features in the Great Pyramid of Giza, this tomb is not well finished. There are clear saw marks on the outside, and it appears they cut too deep on multiple occasions. The top of the sarcophagus is also missing which probably went away with the King’s mummy.

Also in the King’s Chamber are two air shafts that are tiny tunnels diverting upwards to the outside of the Great pyramid. It is unknown whether these are meant for air ventilation or have some other religious purpose.

Let’s head back out and down the Grand Gallery. Next stop on the Great Pyramid of Giza Virtual Tour is the Queen’s Chamber!

The Queen’s Chamber

As we get to the bottom of the Grand Gallery, we need to make a U-turn and head back into the middle of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Queen’s Chamber is right below the King’s Chamber. Although it sounds contradictory, this chamber was not meant to house any Queens. The King’s Queens would have gotten their own smaller burial pyramids outside or in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Queen’s Chamber was only named this by the first people who discovered it.

The Queen’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza is made entirely of beautifully crafted limestone rocks. It sits on the 25 th level of the pyramid (think of each row of rock as one level). The walls in here are bare, again with no artwork, no murals, and no carvings except one niche in the east wall. People have speculated that this niche is all the remains of a statue that stood here of the King.

Historians have theorized that this room would have been sealed off and only used as a room for the King’s spiritual soul. The ancient Egyptians were very spiritual people, so this is the likely reason for the chamber to exist.

In 1872 an explorer found three strange objects in the Queen’s Chamber: a granite sphere, a wooden slat, and a copper hook. It has been since determined that these objects were used as tools of some sort.

That’s all for the Queen’s Chamber, head back to the entrance and we will go check out the basement of the Great Pyramid of Giza otherwise known as the Subterranean Chamber.

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The Subterranean Chamber

The Subterranean Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza is accessed from a descending passageway starting at the entrance of the pyramid. It is a very unfinished chamber compared to the other two chambers in the pyramid. This Subterranean Chamber lies 90 feet below the surface of the ground and is under the pressure of 2.3 million blocks of stone weighing about 6.5 million tons.

Original workers have chipped away at the limestone bedrock to build what was thought to be the original burial chamber for the King. Historians believe the chamber is so unfinished because the King suddenly decided he wanted his burial chamber to be higher in the Great Pyramid to where the King’s Chamber lies today.

This theory is hard for me to see because the other pyramids next to the Great Pyramid both have this unfinished subterranean chamber as well. No one actually know the real reason behind this chamber, everything is only speculation.

What do you think this subterranean chamber was meant for? Leave a comment below!

Thank you so much for coming along this Great Pyramid of Giza Virtual Tour! I had a blast sharing my knowledge with you all and hoped you enjoyed your inside look at the Great Pyramid. I can not wait to see what virtual tour we are going to go on next. If you have any recommendations on where we should tour leave a comment below!

Don’t forget to leave us a comment of what you thought about this adventure and be sure to check out more adventures here !

About The Author: Sean Boyle

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Virtual Tour of the Pyramid of Giza

Explore a virtual tour of the Pyramid of Giza from the inside on EON-XR and marvel at the architecture and engineering expertise of our ancient forefathers!

The oldest and largest of the three pyramids at Giza, known as the Great Pyramid, is the only surviving structure out of the famed Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was built for Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops, in Greek), Sneferu’s successor and the second of the eight kings of the fourth dynasty.

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Exploring Egypt's Great Pyramid from the inside, virtually

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Argentina seals $300 million deal for 24 F-16 jets from Denmark

Argentina inked a deal for 24 F-16 jets for its air force from Denmark for some $300 million, the government said on Tuesday.