BELOW PYRAMIDS

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 95, 23 April 1935, Page 11

BELOW PYRAMIDS

SUBWAY FOUND

A subway connecting Khephren'f Pyramid City to Cheops's Pyramid City has been discovered in the course of recent excavations. This had been cut through the living rock.

More remarkable still, a shaft, eleven yards long, was found to lead from the subway to the heart of the rock. When examined, it was found to end in a chamber: some six yards by eleven yards. , ' 'f,'■'-'■'• From one side of it there was a sec* ond shalt leading sixteen yards further down into the rock and ending in a hall somewhat larger than the upper chamber, with seven smaller chambers leading from it. In two pi these, basalt sarcophagi were < found." • From one of these side-chambers k third shaft runs down another fourteen yards into the rock,, ending in a colonnaded hall, in which three more basalt sarcophagi were found. So far, the bottom-most chamber, which is some 65 yards* below the surface of the causeway,, has not been investigated, as jt ,is partly under water. \ :

The chambers are, according to Professor Selim. Hassan, the Egyptian excavator, of the Saitic period (about 600 8.C.), states the "Daily Telegraph." It is known that between the Saitic and Ptolemaic periods (600 8.C.-200 8.C.) the pyramid area was used as a burial-ground, and that materials from Fourth Dynasty tombs, dating ,some 2800 years earlier, were used for these later burials. ~' : , Indeed, Professor Hassan has been' able to reconstruct some of thesa Fourth Dynasty tombs with original material collected from several point) half a mile or so from the tomb itself. But these later burials have almost «J* ways been above the earlier ones. '

This quest of a burial-place so faff below an older burial-ground is moat unusual, and recalls the now historic) tomb of Hetepheres, mother of Cheops. which Dr. Reisner so dramatically, found hidden in the living rock soma 32 yards below the causeway leading from Cheops's Pyramid to the Pyramid Temple.

Professor Hassan also found that both the paths on either side of the causeway leading, from Khephren's " Pyramid to its temple has' been paved. The latter undoubtedly permitted tha undisturbed passage of the King'i "Ka" (spirit) from and to the burial* place. ■■ ' .'■■" ' ■