A few years later the same Erasmus Wilson was responsible for the creation of the Egyptian Exploration Society (the EES) and served as its first president.[241] Then in 1883, Wilson and the Victorian author Amelia Edwards co-founded the important Chair in Egyptology at University College London—and it was through Wilson’s personal recommendation that the young Flinders Petrie became the first scholar to occupy it.[242]
Perhaps all such connections are nothing more than quaint coincidences. If so, then it is probably also a coincidence that in the seventeenth century the founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, one of the most prestigious of today’s Egyptological research centres (which holds the coveted ‘Petrie Chair’), was none other than Elias Ashmole—the first man ever, according to Masonic historians, to be openly initiated on British soil into the hitherto secret society of Freemasonry.[243]
We have no evidence that the Brotherhood is still a significant influence in Egyptology today. Our researches into the pedigree of this insular discipline, however, did, in a rather oblique way, lead to the rediscovery of two of the three missing ‘Dixon’ relics.
The British Museum and the missing cigar box
These three items are the only relics ever to have been found inside the Great Pyramid. Moreover the place in which they were found, i.e. the star-shafts of the Queen’s Chamber, links them directly to one of the key aspects of our own research. In the summer of 1993, therefore, 121 years after they had been discovered, we resolved to try to find out what had happened to them.
Going back through press reports, and the private diaries of the figures involved, we found out that John and Waynman Dixon had brought the relics to England in a cigar box. We also learned, as noted earlier, that the Dixons had been involved in bringing to England Cleopatra’s Needle. The obelisk was erected on the Thames Embankment, where it stands to this day. John Dixon was at the inauguration ceremony and was on record as having buried ‘a large cigar box, contents unknown’ beneath the pedestal of the monument.[244]
The logic looked persuasive. John Dixon brought the relics to England in a cigar box. John Dixon brought Cleopatra’s Needle to England. And John Dixon buried a cigar box beneath Cleopatra’s Needle. Around that time the relics disappeared. The strong Masonic link in this affair called to mind a well-known practice in operative and speculative Freemasonry which involves certain rituals when placing the corner-stones of Masonic monuments and edifices. This practice suggested the possibility that the relics from the Great Pyramid could have been hidden under Cleopatra’s Needle along with the other Masonic paraphernalia and memorabilia known to have been installed there.[245]
At any rate, the relics did genuinely seem to have disappeared and the experts whom we consulted at the British Museum said they had no idea where they could have gone to. We also consulted Professor I. E. S. Edwards, the Museum’s former Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities (1954-74) and a former vice-president of the EES. Edwards is Britain’s foremost authority on Giza and the author of a definitive text, The Pyramids of Egypt, first published in 1946 and reprinted virtually every year since then. In all editions of this book we found that he had mentioned Waynman Dixon and reported how the shafts in the Queen’s Chamber were discovered, but had made absolutely no reference to the relics. This, he told us, was because he had no recollection of them and therefore, of course, no idea concerning what their ultimate fate might have been.
Like ourselves, however, Professor Edwards knew of the link between Flinders Petrie, Piazzi Smyth and the Dixons, and knew that Petrie’s exploration of the Great Pyramid had immediately followed that of the Dixons.
Oddly enough, Petrie, too, makes no mention of the relics in his own famous book Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh—though he does speak of the Dixons and the shafts. But could he have referred to them elsewhere in his voluminous publications? Edwards suggested that we ask Petrie’s biographer, the Egyptologist Mrs. Margaret Hackford-Jones, to research the matter in Petrie’s diaries and private papers. If he had made any mention of the Dixon relics then she would definitely be able to find it. But a thorough search by Mrs. Hackford-Jones brought no results.[246]
In the absence of viable alternatives, therefore, we wondered whether it might not be worth looking to see whether the three curious objects might not still be in Dixon’s cigar box underneath Cleopatra’s Needle.
The story was picked up by the Independent, a British national newspaper, on 6 December 1993. Interviewed in the report, Professor Edwards stated categorically that neither he nor anyone else he knew had heard of these relics before.[247] We were therefore taken by surprise on 13 December 1993—only a week after the article containing Edwards’s quote was published—when Dr. Vivian Davies, the Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, casually announced in a letter to the Independent that the relics, still in the cigar box, were in his Department’s keep.[248]
So why had his Department not admitted to having them before?
‘I think there has been a lot of misunderstanding about this whole business,’ soothed a Museum PR spokesman a few days later. ‘We didn’t say we did not have them, we said we were not aware of having them.’[249]
After doing some more digging we discovered what had happened. The relics (or rather two of them because the only carbon-datable item, the piece of wood, was missing) had not been placed under Cleopatra’s Needle as we had at first conjectured. Instead they had remained in the hands of the Dixon family for exactly a hundred years. Then, in 1972, Dixon’s great-granddaughter had taken them along to the British Museum and had generously donated them to the Egyptian Antiquities Department. Their receipt was recorded in the meticulous hand of the Keeper himself—Dr. I. E. S. Edwards.[250] Thereafter the relics seemed simply to have been forgotten and only resurfaced in December 1993 because an Egyptologist named Dr. Peter Shore happened to read the Independent’s story about our search for them. Now retired in Liverpool, Shore had been Edwards’s assistant in 1972. He remembered the arrival of the relics at the British Museum and now promptly notified the relevant authorities that they had a potentially embarrassing incident on their hands.
We naturally wondered how it was possible that mysterious relics recovered from unexplored shafts inside the Great Pyramid of Egypt could have been treated with such indifference by professional Egyptologists. To be completely honest we found it very difficult to accept that they really could just have been forgotten for twenty-one years by the British Museum’s Egyptian Antiquities Department. What we could not understand at all, however, was how they could have stayed forgotten during most of 1993 after a robot had explored the very same shafts and found a much publicized closed ‘door’ deep within one of them. Indeed more than two weeks before the article in the Independent came out, Rudolf Gantenbrink, the discoverer of the ‘door’, had visited London and given a full lecture at the British Museum to a large group of Egyptologists—including Professor Edwards, Dr. Vivian Davies and many others who knew of our search for the ‘Dixon’ relics. During the lecture, Gantenbrink showed and explained detailed video footage, taken by his robot, of the interior of the Queen’s Chamber shafts—i.e. the shafts in which the relics had been found. As well as the ‘door’ at the end of the southern shaft, the footage also clearly showed, still lying on the floor of the northern shaft, but at higher levels than the Dixons had been able to reach, at least two distinct objects—a metallic hook, and an apparent baton of wood.[251]
In the next chapter we shall take a look at Gantenbrink’s exploration, and at the events that led up to and followed it.
Chapter 7
The Case of the Robot,
the Germans and the Door
‘Upuaut, a wolf deity ... He was chiefly revered for his role as Opener of the Ways to the Underworld, showing the dead souls the path through that dark realm ...’
Veronica Ions, Egyptian Mythology, 1982
The introduction of a robot-camera into the narrow mouth of the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber in Marc
h 1993, and the subsequent spectacular discovery of a closed portcullis ‘door’ 200 feet along that shaft, are not events that occurred in a vacuum. On the contrary, although mainstream Egyptologists profess little interest in the Queen’s Chamber (which they generally regard as an ‘unfinished’, ‘abandoned’ and unimportant feature of the Great Pyramid), quite a lot of activity had taken place around it during the previous decade.
In 1986, for example, two French architects, Gilles Dormion and Jean-Patrice Goidin, somehow managed to obtain a scientific licence to conduct a spectacular exploration inside the Great Pyramid. Dormion and Goidin had persuaded certain senior officials at the Egyptian Antiquities Organization that a ‘hidden chamber’ could lie behind the west wall of the horizontal corridor leading to the Queen’s Chamber. In a rare move, the EAO gave permission for the drilling of a series of small holes to test the theory. Apparently some evidence was found of a large ‘cavity’ which was filled with unusually fine sand—nothing more—but this was enough to send the world media into a frenzy and to turn Dormion and Goidin into hot media properties for a while. Egyptologists fumed on the quiet. The project was eventually stopped and Dormion and Goidin were never to resume their work in the Great Pyramid.[252]
The same thing happened again in 1988 when a Japanese scientific team from Waseda University took up the challenge. They were led by Professor Sakuji Yoshimura. This time the Japanese used ‘non-destructive techniques’ based on a high-tech system of electromagnetic waves and radar equipment. They, too, detected the existence of a ‘cavity’ off the Queen’s Chamber passageway, some three metres under the floor and, as it turned out, very close to where the French had drilled. They also detected a large cavity behind the north-west wall of the Queen’s Chamber itself, and a ‘tunnel’ outside and to the south of the Pyramid which appeared to run underneath the monument. Before any further exploration or drilling could be done, the Egyptian authorities intervened and halted the project. Yoshimura and his team were never to return to complete their work in the Queen’s Chamber.[253]
It seems odd, despite all the buzz concerning hidden chambers in the vicinity of the Queen’s Chamber, that nobody should have taken a closer look into the Queen’s Chamber’s mysterious and hitherto unexplored shafts. Disappearing as they do, one northwards and the other southwards, into the bowels of the monument, one would have thought that somebody would have had the gumption to investigate them (using video-camera reconnaissance instead of all these unsatisfactory and inconclusive drillings and radar scanning probes). Indeed, as we have argued elsewhere, there is much about their construction and design that could almost have been deliberately contrived to stimulate and invite such investigations.[254] Throughout the 1980s, however, the consensus of senior Egyptologists was that the shafts, like the Queen’s Chamber itself, were ‘abandoned’ features of the Great Pyramid. No doubt it was the power of this consensus, and the built-in reluctance to challenge it, that discouraged individual Egyptologists from interesting themselves in the shafts. After all, what would be the point of exploring obscure parts of the Pyramid that everyone knew had been ‘abandoned’ during construction.
As a non-Egyptologist, the German robotics engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink did not suffer from such inhibitions. Early in 1991 he submitted a proposal for the videoscopic examination of the shafts to the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo.
Planning an adventure
Gantenbrink’s story, as he reported it to us in many hours of documented conversations, goes back to August 1990 when the Egyptian Antiquities Organization commissioned the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo to install a ventilation system inside the Great Pyramid. This project would mainly involve the ‘cleaning’ of the two shafts of the King’s Chamber which (unlike those in the Queen’s Chamber) emerge on the outside faces of the pyramid and thus could be of some conceivable use for ventilation. After cleaning, powerful electric fans would be installed in their mouths to boost the natural air-flow through them.
A few months after accepting the EAO’s commission for the ventilation project Rainer Stadelmann, the Director of the German Archaeological Institute, received Rudolf Gantenbrink’s proposal for the exploration of the Queen’s Chamber shafts using a high-tech miniature robot. This proposal, a copy of which Gantenbrink has kindly supplied to us, is entitled Videoscopische Untersuchung der sog. Luftkanale der Cheopspyramide (Videoscopic Investigation of the so-called Air Shafts in the Pyramid of Cheops).[255]
The proposal outlines Gantenbrink’s plans to build a special robot equipped with two powerful lamps and a ‘CCD Farbvideokamera’ with a special fixed-focus lens giving a full go-degrees angle of vision. The specifications of the robot would include a powerful electric motor in order for it to be able to tackle the steep slopes of the shafts. The video camera and the motor would be controlled from a console and monitor unit stationed inside the chamber and linked to the robot by electric cables. Caterpillar tracks would be fixed above and below the robot’s chassis and adjusted with two sets of powerful hydrolic-suspension units in order to ensure a good grip on the ceiling and floor of the shafts.
There is nothing in the Videoscopische study about ventilation. What it describes is unambiguously an exploration into the uncharted regions of the Great Pyramid, an adventure in the Queen’s Chamber shafts—a ‘robot’s journey into the past’.[256] Nevertheless the next move was logical enough: Stadelmann passed over the EAO’s ‘ventilation’ scheme to Rudolf Gantenbrink.
Nor did Gantenbrink object. He had intended, in any case, to examine the King’s Chamber shafts at some point during his project and saw no difficulty in fitting these shafts with the electric fans called for by the ventilation scheme. Indeed the idea of getting involved in ventilating the Pyramid as well as exploring it rather appealed to him since it added a ‘conservation and restoration’ element to his work.
Diversion and delay
As planned, however, Gantenbrink began with the exploration of the Queen’s Chamber shafts. Assigned by the German Archaeological Institute to assist Gantenbrink, and to serve as the Institute’s official representative on site, was Uli Kapp (who, coincidentally, had also assisted Mark Lehner on the ARCE Sphinx Project in 1979-80).[257] The start date was February 1992 and the decision was made to tackle the southern shaft first[258]—the very shaft in which, in March 1993, the ‘door’ would be discovered.
The initial exploration of the shaft was not as simple as Gantenbrink had supposed. He had to adapt to the rather oppressive conditions within the Queen’s Chamber and found that manoeuvring the sturdy little robot inside the confined space of the narrow and steeply sloping shaft was difficult and extremely slow work. By mid-May 1992, however, he had made considerable progress, penetrating to a depth of 70 feet. Furthermore, as he peered curiously into his monitor screen, he could see the shaft disappearing into the deep, dark distance beyond. Where did it lead to? Was it really ‘abandoned’ as the majority of Egyptologists maintained,[259] or did it serve some yet unknown and greater function? Hitherto Egyptologists had theorized that this shaft would not be more than 30 feet long but now Gantenbrink had proved them wrong. What could possibly lie ahead?
The desire to continue was irresistible. But at this nail-biting stage he was called to attend to the secondary ingredient of his project—the ‘ventilation’ of the Great Pyramid using the shafts of the King’s Chamber.
Since these extend from the Chamber’s northern and southern walls right through to the outside of the Pyramid, Gantenbrink was able to investigate them with a much simpler device than that required for the Queen’s Chamber shafts. This device he named Upuaut I. Resembling a crude, miniature sledge, and mounted with a video camera, it could be hauled up and down the shafts by means of cables with pulleys at both ends.
Upuaut I could only look at the King’s Chamber shafts—where it found little of interest. The cleaning job was done in a quainter manner. Gantenbrink made use of an old axle from the wreck of an abandoned truck in the nearb
y village of Nazlet-el-Sammam, which he attached to a cable and yanked up and down the shafts to push out the debris and sand that had piled up inside them. This done he arranged for sponsors to supply and install electric fans and then informed the German Archaeological Institute that he would now prepare for the continuation of his exploration of the much more promising and mysterious ‘blind-ended’ shafts of the Queen’s Chamber.
Upuant II
Gantenbrink enthusiastically proposed to Stadelmann that he would develop an even more powerful robot, to be named Upuaut II, in order to launch the final assault on the cramped and inaccessible shafts. This new machine would be specially designed to overcome the difficulties encountered by its predecessor (the prototype robot, used in early 1992, now discarded and jocularly named ‘the father of Upuaut’) in the first attempt to explore these shafts. Upuaut II, Gantenbrink had decided, would be smaller, smarter, and much stronger. He opted to design it from scratch and to this end brought together a team of engineering and electronic experts, mostly volunteers, in a special laboratory in Munich. What they were to come up with during the course of the next year was a marvel of the space age. The body of the robot was made of a particularly light but robust aluminum used in aircraft components. A sophisticated laser was included which could probe any small and inaccessible regions within the shaft. Hundreds of electronic components were used to form the electronic ‘brain’ and guidance system of the robot. Specially designed motors and gears were fitted to the front and rear of the main body, and steel struts were added for extra stability. Even hydraulic high-pressure pistons were included, capable of generating a thrust of 200 kilograms to ensure that the robot could brace itself tightly within the shaft. A new camera unit was also designed that could swivel not only horizontally but also vertically to catch every conceivable angle of view. Two powerful high-intensity bulbs, fitted on each side of the camera, would illuminate the way ahead. Finally a special eight-wheel drive system—four gripping the floor and four gripping the roof of the shaft—would ensure that the robot could reach its final destination.