The pyramids are among the most important tourist attractions in Egypt, whose tourism industry has been damaged by violent instability – and most recently by the crashed Russian passenger jet that a few believe could have been brought down by the “Islamic State” militant group.
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Mystifying “hot spots” have been detected on Egypt’s Giza pyramids using thermal scanning equipment.
While the team observed a number of thermal anomalies in all four Giza pyramids, the researchers detected a particularly striking one in the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
The project called “Scan Pyramids” is aiming to solve the 4,500 years old mystery of Egyptian pyramids including Khufu or Cheops, Khafre or Chephren at Giza and has been carried out by a team of Cairo University’s Faculty of Engineering and a Paris based organization HIP under the authority of Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities.
“This anomaly is really quite impressive and it’s just in front of us, at the ground level”, said the founder of Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute, Mehdi Tauyoubi, in the Discovery News report.
Anomalies in thermal measurements can be explained by the presence of cavities, internal air currents, or different materials with specific thermal capacity.
When infrared cameras scanned the interior of Tut’s burial chamber, in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, the ministry said anomalies were found along the northern and western walls.
“The first row of the pyramid’s stones are all uniform, then we come here and find that there’s a difference in the formation”, Antiquities Minister Mamdouh al-Damati said as he showed reporters the three stones showing higher temperatures. According to UPI, the scientists who did the infrared thermal scanning think that it is possible that “the temperature differences may reveal hidden gaps in the stones”. This is one hypothesis that the el-Damaty was able to reject out of hand: “Does he even deserve a response?” the antiquities minister asked. The great pyramid, or pyramid of Khufu, is the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world that is still standing.
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How they reached their conclusion has been done through several techniques. Though new information could arrive soon. “We need now to build models and thermal simulations to test different hypotheses in order to understand what we have found”.
