Egyptian Pyramid Rover Finds... Another Door

JoeRobe writes "In what appears to be more evidence that ancient Egyptian architects had a sense of humor, MSNBC is reporting that the pyramid rover has determined what was behind the door at the end of a mysterious shaft alluded to earlier - another door."

Comments

Wait a second... live?

[matth]

How can it be live when the webpage says:

The National Geographic Channel special Pyramids Live: Secret Chambers Revealed airs in the United States on Fox Television on Monday, September 16, at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

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?

Re:this was tried

[aussersterne]

The history of the pyramids is not very skechy, there is an entire library of literature about them going into great detail and there is much documentation that has been translated from ancient records as well; visit your local university library and try reading for a change instead of getting all of your data from TV aliens-are-everywhere specials.

The reason the Egyptian government is wary about letting any old Tom or Dick go digging about is because of the very long history of looting by nearly everyone who's come into contact with ancient treasures over the centuries -- the west being especially guilty of such things. There's also the worry that with today's travel/tourist mania, X-files pilgrims and crowds of pseudo-scientists, the ancient treasures could easily be ground into dust by foot traffic, or worse.

People with academic credentials and valid (i.e. not having to do with aliens, sorry) research interests can still get access when necessary.

Re:this was tried

[Zeinfeld]

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.

Take a look at the British Museum or Louvre sometime and you will see the reason why. Graverobbers took much of the best stuff in the 19th century and hauled it back home with them under the guise of 'archeology'.

If you go and tour the sites you will find walls covered with hieroglyphics with great big chunks missing where an 'archeologist' stole some particularly good looking piece.

The last thing anyone needs is a bunch of crystal waving new age hippies moving in to gather evidence to support their theory that the pyramids were marketing props for aliens selling a new type of chocky mint.

There are legit revisionist archeologists such as Romer who are challenging the chronology which everyone agrees is out of sync with the Greek and with the old testament.

Re:If someone's planning on making a DivX... OT

[morgajel]

yes this is off topic, and yes I will get modded down as such.
man, if I had cable, I'd LOVE to give you a divx of it. hell, I'd even mail you a copy of the cd. Why?
Because it's frickin fair use!
If you can't watch a show, it is within your FAIR USE to have someone to record it at a later time.
My parents would always do that for me when I'd miss saturday moring cartoons to go to my sanchin ryu classes. that was fair use... that's the DEFINITION of fair use.
So why is this different? because it's Divx? because he asked on an open forum? if that's the case, would it be illegal to ask your bowling buddies if they could tape a show for you?

he said he'd be willing to watch the commercials, which he probably wouldn't anyways if he was watching it live(channel surf, bathroom, etc).

This is the kinda shit that makes me sick. that someone automatically thought it was in bad taste because he was excersizing his fair use rights.

To the parent poster, as I said, I don't have cable either. If someone does score you a divx of it, let me know.I doubt they'll ever release this bad boy to dvd.
as for the moderators who are gonna mod me as flamebait or a troll, blow me. I have promise you I have more karma than you have mod points(unless it's an ed.).

Re:Enter from the outside...

[Psiren]

why don't they just carefully excavate into it from the outside, instead of going to all the touble of sending these robots in etc...

Let me get this straight. You want to explore one of the wonders of the world, by cutting fucking great holes in it?! Please tell me you're not a brain surgeon.

Two running themes on the night...

[RebelTycoon]

Here are more beer pots... They must of contained beer...

And, look at the fingerprints... Surely Eygptians built this... My question is, wouldn't they have done their best to make sure flat surfaces were just that, flat, and free of fingerprints, because I would think fingerprints would make the thing look ugly.

Next point which really got to me was the fact that NO SLAVES were used and that it was a labor of love... That's such BULLSHIT. The evidence presented allows one to conclude several facts.

1) There was good food... Meats, fish, probably fruit. BUT was there enough for all? This I doubt. The better food was either a reward for the most productive teams OR for the skilled workers.

2) There were dorms... But only for about 2,000... This would mean an estimated 23,000 had to sleep elsewhere... Again leading to a conclusion of two or three possible workforces.

3) "Advanced" medical surgery was available... BUT for who? The skilled workers or the slave mules?

My conclusions...
1) There were slaves, used as mules to get the stones into near position.
2) Skilled workers positioned blocks accurately, these would receive the medical treatment and better accomodations.
3) Managers... All factories have them, why wouldn't the "advanced" Eygptians... Of course managers and overseers would be taken care of.

Better food was used for feeding the skilled and managers, and used as a reward for top performing slaves...

Re:Two running themes on the night...

[mikerich]

Without any access to the programme itself...

Here are more beer pots... They must of contained beer...

We know the Egyptians drank beer in preference to water as the fermentation process helped purify the water and reduced the risk of waterborne disease.

And, look at the fingerprints... Surely Eygptians built this... My question is, wouldn't they have done their best to make sure flat surfaces were just that, flat, and free of fingerprints, because I would think fingerprints would make the thing look ugly.

No, the interior of the Pyramid is really quite roughly hewn (albeit a lot better than most pyramids). Only the outer courses were finished to a fine standard after the blocks were lain in-situ. Constructing the big pyramids required blocks to be placed every minute or so, there was no time to do anything other than the roughest of shaping.

Next point which really got to me was the fact that NO SLAVES were used and that it was a labor of love... That's such BULLSHIT. The evidence presented allows one to conclude several facts.

Perhaps they didn't show all the evidence?

1) There was good food... Meats, fish, probably fruit. BUT was there enough for all? This I doubt. The better food was either a reward for the most productive teams OR for the skilled workers.

Sorry wrong. Not only was Egypt one of the traditional breadbaskets of the Near East (by Roman times it fed large parts of the Empire), but a good portion of the land was owned by Pharaoh (we have the estate records). This food was used to feed people on state projects.

Meat would have been rarer than in the modern diet, but there would have plenty of vegetarian foods, beer and bread to keep people going.

2) There were dorms... But only for about 2,000... This would mean an estimated 23,000 had to sleep elsewhere... Again leading to a conclusion of two or three possible workforces.

Sorry, wrong again. The Gizan necropolis has never been completely excavated. Large amounts of the site - including temples are now buried by modern developments, other parts of the site are buried under the waste from the quarrying in later times. There is plenty of room for more habitation. Your argument is like saying because we've only found a few houses in Yorks' Coppergate there can't have been a Viking city called Jorvik.

3) "Advanced" medical surgery was available... BUT for who? The skilled workers or the slave mules?

Egyptian medicine was the highest regarded in the Ancient World. Imhotep, architect of the first pyramid was also renowned for his medical learning and much later identified with Aescapulus by the Greeks.

This was a state organisation, the Pharaoh would have been interested in a healthy workforce. There is no reason to suspect that health care was anything other than good.

The Pyramids are social engineering on an epic scale. For one third of the year the Nile would have flooded all of the arable land in the country. 90% of the workforce would have been unemployed and restive - so they were put to work on the Pyramids. In exchange, they got food and the country remained stable.

Unfortunately, the structures also sucked wealth out of the economy and helped bring about the disintegration of the Old Kingdom.

One problem we have looking back at Egypt is that we try to put our own processes into the heads of people who thought and worked in a very different way. We know that the Romans and the Greeks used slaves to construct their vast projects; we've read the Bible and seen how Exodus talks about Israelite slaves in Egypt and we colour our image with those thoughts.

The Egyptians did keep slaves, they weren't squeamish about the fact and their temples and tombs are decorated with images of slaves.

During the Old Kingdom Egypt was a very isolated country and did not have ready access to foreign populations for slaves. Slavery becomes much more common (although never as common as in Greece and Rome) in the Middle and New Kingdoms as Egypt broke out of its isolation and began to invade Nubia (to the South), Libya (to the West) and the modern Near East.

But we don't find any signs of slavery on the pyramid sites. We do find household junk, dockets, mentions of the origins of the workforce and so on. We know they were Egyptian workers.

My conclusions... 1) There were slaves, used as mules to get the stones into near position.

Unskilled labourers certainly with skilled team masters, but not slaves.

2) Skilled workers positioned blocks accurately, these would receive the medical treatment and better accomodations.

Modern reconstructions show that unskilled labourers working under supervision of skilled workers can perform the task to the required precision.

3) Managers... All factories have them, why wouldn't the "advanced" Eygptians... Of course managers and overseers would be taken care of. Better food was used for feeding the skilled and managers, and used as a reward for top performing slaves...

There were managers, we have their tombs. Of course they had better food (more meat, wine that sort of thing), but that doesn't mean the people working for them were slaves any more than the fact that the head of a company earns more than his staff, enjoys fine Bordeaux and has a house in the Hamptons.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:Two running themes on the night...

[mikerich]

While I agree with the majority of your comment, it still seems to me that it's a dubious proposition to say with certainty that the workers weren't slaves merely because they were treated well. To me, the word "slave" implies forced laborer. When you're talking about work that hard, it makes sense to keep you workers fit, slave or no. They were skilled workers, not easily replaceable. I simply find it hard to believe that if a pyramid worker tired of his profession, he would be allowed to leave and go on about his business. To me that's slavery. The same could be said about medieval feudalism.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:Two running themes on the night...

[Reziac]

Thanks for posting this, it saved me the trouble :)

What people also forget is that "slaves" in the ancient world were not the yoked, whipped, starved, and generally mistreated image that modern folk have got from movies. It was more like an indentured job where you could count on food, clothing, shelter, and sometimes a small wage, oft as not with a target date when the slave had the option of buying himself free (most didn't -- where would they go that paid as well?) In those days, the average freeman was doing well to have work that paid in sufficient food and housing, never mind money; about all he had over the average slave was social status, and sometimes not even that.

And there wasn't a big police force available to catch runaways -- so if you mistreated your slaves, they were liable to just up and leave and there was nothing the owner could do to stop them. I recall reading of an incident where some Roman landowner did so (mistreating slaves was a serious criminal offense under Roman law), and the entire slave workforce simply picked up their tools and left.

In a talk back in 1983, C.J. Cherryh (who used to be a history teacher) pointed out that furthermore, slave labour (what moderns think of as slaves, that is) is inefficient for big projects like the pyramids, where you need a stable workforce who have some clue what they're doing. OTOH, for several months of the year (during the entire flood season), the Pharoah had a few million idle farmworkers with nothing better to do than drink beer and cause trouble -- the sensible thing to do was put them to work on big public projects where they got paid and stayed out of trouble. The bigger the project, the more idle farmers were kept busy, and the fewer social problems as a result. Pharoah wasn't stupid. :)

C.J. also spoke of HOW the big stone blocks were moved. Nile River clay is so slick that when it's wet, you almost can't stand up on it. C.J. decided to try a little experiment with her 8th grade class. She didn't have stone blocks and Nile clay available, but did have wet grass and a two-ton metal construction weight. She harnessed her 8th graders to this two-ton block and -- well, the moment they got it moving, it damnear ran them over, it was that easy to move on mere wet grass. So the boys decided to ride on the block while 8 girls pulled. It still all but ran away with them, and in their haste to avoid being squished, they managed to drop it into a ditch. They'll never get it out of there, right?? Ha! The kids heaved on the ropes and it came flying up out of the ditch, over their heads and landed somewhere beyond 'em. Eeep!!

C.J. concluded that with Nile clay to provide slipperyness, the major problem was not getting the massive stone blocks moving, nor hauling them up the ramps, but rather keeping them from running away under their own power!!

And behind the second door

[goldcd]

they find a priceless gold sarcophagus of unimaginable scientific value - how the f*ck do they intend to get it out?

VERY MISLEADING

[Anonymous Coward]

>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.

Two things:

[tomzyk]

1) You have got to learn that if you want to find out ANYTHING from a FOX special (or any FOX news broadcast) you don't watch it until the LAST 5 minutes. Honestly, I didn't even turn it on until the last 20 and I saw both the opening of the coffin and the camera going into the shaft.

2) About the British-accent babe... ooooooh yeah. :-)

Re:Two running themes on the night... [OT]

[Drakonian]

I don't really understand the wave of "backseat experts" at Slashdot. People study things like the Egyptians their whole lives. It's widely accepted that slavery wasn't used to build the pyramids, it was social engineering on a massive scale. There was employment when the citizens had nothing else to do (during the Nile season of innundation.) Come to /. and read posts like this or the article a few days ago about comptuer voting systems with Michael saying.... "Welllll actually you are wrong, despite this being your area of expertise, if you make it open source it's guaranteed to be perfect." People have studied these things for years. Come here and write some a comment. If it get's modded +5, suddenly you become an expert.

I learned 5 new things last night...

[elbowdonkey]

First of all, having Tivo last night was like a fluffy dream come true. As the distance between "real" content decreased with each commercial break, I became more and more thankful for the commercial skipping features. All told, my viewing of the real content probably only trailed live users by a handful of minutes.

According to Zahi, I learned a few new things:

1. Not a single slave helped build the pyramids.

2. Using a crowbar to chip into a 4000 year old sarcophogas is just fine, rather than using more delicate means (did you see the huge chunk of the lid flake off as he got a little too excited?).

3. Zahi thinks the rest of the world with theories opposed to his "kind and loving egyptians built the pyramids" are idiots because of a thumbprint on the sarcophogas lid. (!?)

4. Zahi's bone specialist confirms: no slaves here, we have 50% men and 50% women in our findings (as if slavery was something only men had to endure).

5. Robots aren't as snazzy as portrayed in the movies. Most movie robots would have been at least able to MacGuyver their way through the second door.

Digging the Weans

[Reziac]

Anyone who still believes that every ancient artifact or construction must have been of great religious significance, or due to aliens, or whatever mysterious force, needs to read "Digging the Weans" by Robert Nathan. It's a parody on the archeological mythologies that have developed from the natural human tendency to believe that anything remote in time or distance is automagically beyond human understanding. "Here be dragons."

As to this 8"x8" shaft with two doors... my guess is that it was either an air shaft or a communication shaft (much akin to the speaking tubes used on board large ships, before the advent of modern electronics). Which is just common sense architecture in a project that large. Why go way the hell outside to communicate with your supervisor when you can just shout up the handy tube?? Not to mention that it's kinda hard to work if everyone has breathed all the oxygen out of the air supply already.

Re:A bit of history here

[Anonymous Coward]

Your "fact" that they cauterized the amputation wound with hot metal is just a guess. All we know is that the hand was cut off pretty cleanly, and that the person survived to do very hard work afterwards. The hand was probably cut or sawed off, but beyond that we know NOTHING about how the blood was stopped, how infection was prevented, etc.

They may have been slaves, they may have been free. The point of the argument is that the absolutely lame justifications for claiming they were free men only make all the other arguments suspect.

Re:Egyptian Engineers:

[WWWWolf]

Seriously, doesn't this make you wonder if satire existed in ancient times? We take everything as truth. What if the ancient egyptians were grand pranksters?

My own guess...

Here, back when the technology for recording TV programs came available in TV studios, they realized they couldn't record everything. So, naturally, they decided only to record stuff that matters. So, the archives now have boring stuff like ballet and other "art" stuff, and no comedies. I suspect the same about ancient manuscripts and writings. They had somewhat limited means of recording anything, so they recorded stuff that "mattered". I'm sure ancient civilizations had their ways of having fun and play with language, too, but they just didn't bother to record all that because either humor was not good according to etiquette (think of it: The Pharaoh was a God on Earth or something, do you think it'd look good in history books if it listed all bad jokes he told to the servants? This thought may have crossed the minds of the ancient scribes... =). or if not, the humor had lower priority.

Of course, I'm not a historian and don't know the history of comedy, but this is just something that seems to be the case with humans in general. Do you keep all "less serious" bits you made when working on something serious?

I'm probably wrong in some of this, but I guess people have always had the idea of fun...