I thought this was interesting:

"It has long been a puzzle why the subterranean chamber of the pyramid of Khufu should have a finished ceiling and walls, but an entirely rough floor with a deep hole in it. The meaning is seen when we recognise the regular method of rock cutting. The roof is finished, the walls are started. A pit was sunk as low as the intended floor of the chamber. Had it been finished, then the sloping entrance passage, would have run on down to the chamber floor, and the chamber would have been a lofty one, twenty feet high." (Petrie, Egyptian Architecture, 1938, p.28-29).

If he's right the familiar view of the inside passages and chambers would be rather different if it was completed as he suggests.

Here's the chamber as it is now:



And here's a reconstruction that I think follows Petrie's suggestion:



(The colour change is at the pavement level as I've not yet been able to plot the internal mound to my satisfaction but in reality the Grotto is in bedrock.)

As I commented at the time that I posted some of my photographs of the short horizontal section of the descending passage is so narrow that anything they had planned to put in the chamber would have had to be very small.

IES Edwards has gone as far as to suggest that it was the need to introduce a sarcophagus along with a change in funerary practice that led to the abandonement of the Subterraean Chamber (Do the Pyramid Texts suggest an explanation for the abandonment of the Subterranean Chamber of the Great Pyramid? "Hommages à Jean Leclant, Volume 1 1994).

Even with the completion suggested by Petrie you wouldn't have been able to introduce a sarcophagus like the one in the King's Chamber. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be the person on the downside of any items they planned to put in the chamber. The danger of it sliding uncontrolled down the slope must have been great and the risk of getting trapped on the far side deep below ground would have been ever present.

Petrie doesn't suggest that the very narrow shaft that continues from the Southern Wall might also have been a "marker" for the Southern wall. That would have made a truly massive chamber.





I said in my previous post about the Subterranean Chamber that it's a very strange place and my admiration for those who cut it even in it's unfinished form is unbounded.

Jon

www.egyptarchive.co.uk