High-tech pyramid probe finds tunnel

Press, 4 February 1987, Page 10

High-tech pyramid probe finds tunnel

NZPA-Reuter Giza Japanese experts using advanced technology said yesterday that they had found a tunnel under the great pyramid of Giza and a cavity which might be a secret chamber. The team from Tokyo’s Waseda University used a method that depends on the reflection of electromagnetic waves to comb the 4600-year-old Pyramid of Cheops and the Sphinx in search of secret tunnels and 'chambers that could explain Pharaonic mysteries. The outcome of the Japanese experiment will be available by mid-April after the data is run through a super computer in Tokyo. Egypt’s antiquities chief, Ahmed Kadry, has already hailed the Japanese research and a separ-

ate French probe last year as having put the world “on the threshold of a new archeological revolution.” The head of the Japanese team, Sakuji Yoshimura, said a cavity 1.5 m high and at least four metres long was detected behind the north-western wall of the so-called Queen’s Chamber inside the pyramid. A French team detected hidden cavities last year, but when they drilled small holes through the surface to investigate they found sand. The Japanese found also a tunnel 42m away from the pyramid and extending underneath it. Its length is not known yet. Mr Yoshimura said it too was full of sand. The French team, led

by two architects, Gilles Dormion and Jean-Patrice Goidin, is in Cairo to continue its own work inside the 138 m high pyramid next week. Mr Kadry told a news conference that the methods used by the Japanese and the French complemented each other and that they would both continue their experiments. The two Frenchmen believe the cavities could lead them to the missing mummy of Cheops and that the sand-filled chamber they drilled into could contain clues as to where Cheops is buried. The Japanese team said that, as well as the cavities detected by the French, there were geometrical cavities around the Sphinx.