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Egyptian Pyramid Mysteries to Be Explored Live
An anonymous reader noted that "National Geographics will probe the inside of a blocked shaft in the Great Pyramid of Giza, and will also open the oldest intact sarcophagus found in moder times." Since this
is the shaft where all the secret alien technology has been stored for the last few thousand years, and everyone knows that these "Sarcophagus" things are
what the Gou'ald use to regenerate, I think this whole thing will be interesting as hell. Awh who am I kidding- I'm just a junkie on watching those specials where they explore pyramids.
The article sais that a stone hatch with copper handle were discovered in 1872. Wrong!.
In 1992-3, a team using a small robot with a video camera revealed a strange stone slab, which blocks the 40-degree, 200-foot southern lower shaft. This stone has 2 copper fittings. Rudolf Gantenbrink, the head of the research project narrates: The face of the inspector sitting next to me at the monitor has become chalk white. He draws my attention to two round, white marks on the copper fittings. "These are seals, these are seals!" he exclaims, visibly shaken.. Read this totally fascinating story here. The entire UPUAUT project scientific report page is available here too.
SG1 !
/usr/bin/awake/too/long
This shaft has been known for quite some time. Why has it taken so long to finally explore what many believe may be a significant find?
A previous attempt to penetrate the mysterious
shaft ended in disappointment when it was discover
that Lara Croft's cross-section was too large to
permit her entry into the shaft.
So the robot wakes the mummy, gets cursed, and comes out of the pyramid with XP embedded in it's firmware...
Yes, but there are new developments... specifically, UserFriendly's take on the matter. Clearly this is enough for /. to post the story again...
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
After Al Capone's Vault, you'd think Geraldo would be a natural choice for this event.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
.. with this + this with a lot of that
Live web cams
Of course Hawass and his ilk are disdainful of this theory, but in the Sphinx, there is reportedly a hidden "hall of records" that is supposed to be under one of the shoulders of the Sphinx. According to Edgar Cayce, it was supposed to crumble away around the year 2000 and humankind's lost knowledge would be revealed. Naturally, Hawass and his ilk conducted extensive repairs of the Sphinx a year or two before Cayce's prophecy was supposed to come true, although there have been ground penetrating radar surveys that showed that there is indeed something there. Oddly enough, Mark Lehner was once upon a time associated with Cayce's estate and was a member of one of these teams led by SRI International that discovered this tantalizing evidence. What brought about his volte face so he's now 100% with the orthodox Egyptological establishment is unknown.
But they aren't going to the Sphinx, right? They're shooting for that strange sealed door at the end of one of the shafts inside the Queen's Chamber. After Rudolf Gantenbrink discovered this mysterious door in 1993, which also had a wood fragment in front of it which Gantenbrink's robot couldn't pick up (and settle once and for all the question of when the Pyramid had been built), he was prevented from sending yet another improved robot down the shaft. Political pissing contest at the Antiquities Bureau sounded like. If they do manage to get the wood fragment, hopefully there'll be no cover up on the radiocarbon dating results. There has already been one (on the mortar used in some parts of the Pyramid, conducted in 1986) that gives a date for the building of the Pyramid about a thousand or so years before the 2500 BC date traditionally accepted by Egyptologists. Gee, so the Pyramid was supposedly built ca. 3800 to 2800 BC. In the Predynastic Period! Of course these results were universally ignored by Egyptologists as it would greatly upset the neat chronology they have for the building of the Giza monuments.
This is what I get from reading too much Graham Hancock!
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I think they're actually *forced* to do that, since I don't think they're allowed to take rocket launchers with them without a really good reason.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I predict that behind the stone at the end of the tunnel wil be ... more stone.
This looks to be the web site for Rudolf G, the finder of the shaft plug/door that will be opened. Surprisingly, he seems not to be involved in this recent live opening project...more on that here where they quote Rudolf:
"I became aware of National Geographic plans - for the first time - through the media 6th of August 2002..."
that upon opening the door some booby trap mechanism will crush the chamber behind it because the scientists didn't follow some secret sequence when approaching the door.
Haven't they watched the Indiana Jones series ?
"Hey guys, look at that 4000 year old gigantic stone structure, which has what we believe to be a large room at the end of a long, bending, unaccessible shaft thats only 20cm by 20cm, and blocked by a large, tightly wedged limestone rock with brass handles in it.
/SOUNDS/ exactly like the beginning of an extremely cheesy horror movie.. but it's actually important science. At least until they open it and unleash the apocalypse. ;)
Even though it's painfully clear that people arent supposed to be opening up this heavily guarded chamber in the 4000 year old structure, and there is no real value for us in doing so, other than to satisfy our curiosity, lets send a small robot down there to pull the block out so we can send a camera in."
I mean, sure, it
According to the UK site, there's going to be a live web cast.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Another article, with pictures of the pyramid rover, and also some background on the Rudolf Gantenbrink controversy. He's the robotics engineer who (some argued) was left uncredited and uninvolved (not even invited to the opening?). I don't know the whole story.
CNN blurb on this special (with video clip)
The ananova take on the special.
The Times (UK) take. Pretty good.
A little on Zahi Hawass
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
One thing that kind of pisses me off about the whole
egyptology thing, is that the egyptian government is pretty strict on who they
let come and do work like this over there. If they don't agree with some of your
views on the history of the pyramids, good luck getting a permit to do anything
there. The history of the pyramids is very sketchy, and how the traditional
egyptologists think their theories are 100% correct is very arrogant.
Please remember that the pyramids are Egyptian, not American, not English, etc... The Egyptian government is only protecting their culture, their history. And if it seems like they're are too harsh, too strict I think you need to remember that most Egyptian artifacts and surviving mummies are in foreign museums, not Egyptian. (The majority of the world's mummies are at the British Museum).
I think that the American government (or any nation's government) would install the same strict laws and codes to protect its people's heritage from export.
On FOX...naturally!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
You can only carbon-date biological material.
There would be straw in the mortar, and they would carbon date that, to get a date for when the mortar was made.
section 107 of the copyright act designates 4 factors, two of which are important:
2)character of use: is it non-profit or education use?
4)effect on potential market: will this make the product less valuable?
you're correct, these aren't laws, they're guidelines.
Since it's entering from one market where it's given away freely(TV, commercials not withstanding), to another person(not market) where it cannot be obtained by any reasonable means, I do not see where the problem would be.
They only way I could see a problem with this is if it was being sold or otherwise exceeded the second guideline. it would also be a violation if it was given away enmasse to the public as a whole- however, since it's available on broadcast tv, that would not affect the market there either unless they later planned on broadcasting it to the unaffected region for profit(commercials). which would make it very difficult to exceed the 4th guideline.
btw, IANAL, I'm just an idiot trying to bring some sense to the world..
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Yes, whereas the European usage of mummies for medicinal and alchemical purposes was much more enlightened.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Thanks AC for plagarizing one of my posts from the original story!
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Looted by ancient civilizations with robots? If WE couldn't get in there till now, what makes you think people hundreds or thousands of years ago could?
What makes you think anyone would think otherwise? Especially if you left the commercials in like he said. I REALLY doubt that Fox would do anything to you, for the exact reasons you mentioned. I think this is more a case of you ranting to defend rights that aren't in jeopardy.
"Jimmy Haffa!? How the hell did you get in here?"
"Shuddup and help me, kid. My legs are stiff."
Table-ized A.I.
(* the egyptian government is pretty strict on who they let come and do work like this over there. If they don't agree with some of your views on the history of the pyramids, good luck getting a permit to do anything there. *)
Aside from rewriting history, it is otherwise understandable seeing the past splunking that they have been subject to.
Anyhow, there is some speculation that the government is allowing this right now because the terrorist attacks and their Palistine viewpoints have scared away tourists. This may be an attempt to re-spark the tourism industry.
Table-ized A.I.
Remember, only one statuette or figurine can win the title of number one ancient object of worship!'
Host: Thank you Bob! Alright folks, just like the ancient mummies of the Sphinx - it's finally time to wrap this competition up!
*ba-dum-crash!*
Host:Thank you. And while we're at it - let's here it for those King Tut dancers! You guys have been great. You know Anubis was so upset about losing last night, he still hasn't gotten over it - I heard he's in de-Nile!
*ba-dum-crash!*
Thank you
I could go on all night, but is that what you meant?
. . . it was probably built between 5 000 BCE and 7 000 BCE. That date is before archeologists admit that homosapiens was running around on the planet.
I don't know what archaeologists you talk to, but I'm pretty sure that we'e been on the planet longer than 9000 years.
so... what? you're suggesting the shaft leads to the lettuce crisper? the butter compartment? do go on - we want to know more!
The opening of Al Capone's vault!
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Do Cell Phones Make Us Stupid?
The Raven
The only way I know to air a show at 8pm Eastern and Pacific is to have it recorded! So now, is it live? Or is it recorded?
Isn't 8pm EST 4am in Egypt? Gawd, I hope for the archaeologists' sake that it's recorded. Let 'em sleep in for crying out loud!
Gimme a slice. This will either suck, rock, or bore. No, it will bore and suck for 58 minutes, then be exciting for 10 seconds, then it will be over. Then AC Neilsen will count the suckers and collect.
There are pictures of the block, and pictures of the robot. The robot doesn't look powerful enough to move that block. How is this done?
You really wouln't want to be out there working in the full heat believe me. It's probably a good idea!
That does make sense, though I don't know how hot it is inside the pyramid (where I assume the hidden chamber is). I tend to think of the inside of large stone structures as being cool. I don't know about pyramids, though.
I seem to have unleashed a firestorm by asking for a copy of this program in an obviously evil format such as DivX.
Sorry, my bad.
Could one of you who knows me mail me a tape then?
Cheers,
Jim
(I hear it will be webcast, but can you imagine trying to actually watch one of those for something shot in such low light? It would look like a cubist art video...)
-- My Weblog.
>A bit of history here...Rudolph Gantenbrink
:
>and his team discovered the door some years
>ago. Zahi responded by rushing them out of
>the country and making sure that they
>wouldn't be able to come back.
This is actually a VERY misleading statement. Gantenbrink, by way of Robert Bauval, let the word out on the findings of the 'door', whereas it is standard procedure for *everyone* who is doing research there to go thru the Council of Antiquities FIRST.
That Bauval was associated somehow with it is probably what tipped the balance (for fairness, you can read Bauval's account of the events in Secret Chamber by RB, chapter 9 I believe). The combination of having an "alternative" historian (that means one who cherry picks his 'evidences') together with the the breaking of the rules relating to announcement of discoveries is a big no no for egyptology, simply because these things get out of control, in terms of wild and completely unfounded speculation, REALLY quickly.
Many might not realize this, but there is a huge *industry* revolving around the "mysteries" of ancient egypt, where authors who know very little of (or chose to ignore) the HUGE coherent picture that egyptology is, ignoring montains of evidence supporting it and countless others that go against their own "brilliant" speculation, end up transforming a culture into a "legacy", heavily hinting at mythical places such as Atlantis (a spurious story already of which ONLY plato talks about, and in terms heavily metaphorical), and often sliping into concepts like "noble or higher race" and the like.
The world of "alternative egyptology" is fascinating at first glance, but is roten from the inside, trust me on this.
Another point is that the "door" hardly is a door, as it is located in a shaft that is 8x8 inches, unless someone has a book to write about little beings using this shaft as a corridor for their daily affairs (I suspect this would easily be linked to our alledged martian legacy in a sleight of hand). The two "handles" could be many things, but even if they are handle, that doesn't make the thing a door, it just makes it a plug, with handles.
The third thing i'd like to mention is the latent hatred of that "alternative research" community toward people like Zahi Hawass, who has, despite these people crave to dig everywhere, been dedicated to protecting and researching the Giza site for many decades. Granted Zahi has a big mouth, granted he doesn't know how to talk to journalists, but his dedication and honnesty are obvious to anybody who looks into the field (and no, reading Graham Hancock's 'work' does not qualify). Mark Lehner is in a somewhat similar yet different position, since as an ex-Cayce believer, he began his career with the goal of finding things like the "Hall of Records" (his academic training was financed by ARE, the Cayce fundation). Having learned a lot since his debuts, and having grown up, he is now bashed by his old buddies for being honnest. (don't you find it strange for instance that RB's "orion correlation theory" used to 'lock' giza to 10500BC, just as Cayce 'predicted' ? Thorough examination shows there is no such lock to such an epoch to be found, and the OCT has now been reduced to a "astetically pleasing representation" that lacks any form of precision, and hence any predictive power, rendering 10.5kBC completely and utterly arbitrary)
The way I see it, "alternadoxy" is jumping to the gun on this, let's just wait and see what they find, if they indeed find anything, because whatever is or isn't there, it'll be one hell of a special.
The alledged hijacking of Rudolf Gantenbrink's work is a straw man, Gantenbrink is refered to in all the papers you will find in academia relating to the exploration of the shafts. The nature of research dictates that one researcher follows another on a site, research is not for personal glory, it's about uncovering the truth. That Gantenbrink isn't always mentioned in the press is not the big deal that "alternadoxy" makes of it, after all, Dyxon isn't either and probed the shafts many decades before Gantenbrink (in his probings, he did find that the southern queen's chamber shaft seemed to be blocked at the height we know of today as the location of the plug). Also Gantenbrink has been associated with this special, if only in providing his experience to the i-robot team.
As for "why so long?", well the pyramids aren't going anywhere, these things always take time, specifically because we do NOT want to rush in. I think the REAL question to ask is
Why NOW ?
Well, think about it, it'll probably boost egyptian tourism by solving a mini-mystery. That tourism took a big blow after 9/11.
Now THAT qualifies as very good reason to be doing this now rather than later.
Which may be neither here nor there anyway; the Sphinx was carved out of, and in part built on top of, a natural rock outcropping which is itself certainly older than human civilization. We shouldn't be too surprised to see weathering on it inconsitent with the time when it became the Sphinx instead of "that rock over there."
And the brethren went away edified.
You know, I thought I had read these same words before, on the last
But I guess if the "editors" (who do no editing) are allowed to repost their own stories and call it news, a post author is allowed to copy and paste his own text from two days previous and get more karma for it all over again. :-) It works out.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
> He was also totally reckless with the artifacts, are there so many in Egypt that they don't bother being careful any more?
I saw a documentary once that claimed that there were so many mummies that they used to burn them for fuel in locomotives.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
just like any godo slashdotter i should be all over the previous article copy/pasting away all the +4/+5 comments to this new one to boost my karma... unfortunatly i hit the cap so im not going to waste my time formatting... just go to this link and see all the insightful goodness of the past article...
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I'm betting that the robot is going to see the inside of a place where teenagers have been partying for years; a mildewed matress in the corner, empty beer bottles and cans all over the place, and graffiti on the walls; stuff like "JUDAS PRIEST RULEZ," "VENOM," and "CLASS OF '86."
I stand corrected.
The majority of "above-ground" mummies are in the British Museum.
Great comic about this story, here.
I wished the open up the chamber between the the two paws on the Sphinx--even if it's just a pin whole with a fiber cable and camera setup to look in it.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
A space of several inches, then what appears to be another door. I say door rather than wall, as the sides of the shaft are pretty obvious going in past the new door. Didn't look very much like the old door, however. The old door was white, and had two metallic attachments. The new "door" is grey, cracked, and has no attachments. Nothing much visible on the floor either. Just dust.
Don't be silly. It's not a bust. It was all arranged with the original builders (you know, those alien dudes) so that Fox could air a sequel! In fact, the entire shaft is filled with little stone plugs every few feet, with some cheesy artifacts and heiroglyphics here and there to keep audiences tuned in. Proceeds from the advertising will help fund the alien's continuing integration into our society.
;-D
Rumor has it that there may be some nasty traps inside the shaft also, so that in case the series doesn't work out, Fox will have plenty of footage for a few When Pyramids Attack! specials...
DennyK
How would we feel if tons of Egyptians came over and took over the study of American Indian stuff and kept looting treasure from burial mounds? Even if the occasional farmer had shredded a mound with his tractor, we wouldn't say that America had lost its right to the mounds.
May we never see th
And behind door #1...
is door #2!
Score 5, Flamebait?!?!
Can't.... compute....
core dumped
The door was 200 feet into the chamber, that is a REALLY long stick being wielded by someone with REALLY good low light eyesight. It was also 3.5" of solid stone, so it would have to be a pretty strong stick as well.