Hello Rick,

Despite having spent nearly thirty years working off-and-on on a theory about the planning of Khufu’s pyramid I do, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, generally agree with your viewpoint here – though you put it a touch more strongly than I think it warrants.
Khufu’s pyramid does receive an inordinate amount of Media publicity.
In recent years even more so because of these enigmatic shafts.

In his book Secrets of the Great Pyramid 1971, Peter Tompkins gives an interesting overview of how this particular pyramid came to be so popular – a lot of the ‘blame’ lies with the 17th Century mathematician and astronomer John Greaves, followed by Sir Isaac Newton, then the so-called Pyramidologists such as Charles Piazzi Smyth.
Then, skipping a few researchers and theorists, we come to the 22nd March, 1993, when Gantenbrink’s robot trundled up the south QC shaft and ‘discovered’ the block with its copper ‘handles’.

I think we can blame the Media circus that followed (and continues to do so) this discovery on the popularity of the Indiana Jones movies and the oft-repeated but highly questionable description of the block as ‘a door’.
If it’s a door, then there has to be a room behind it, and if there is a room behind it, then there must be either written records of The Wisdom of the Ancients (complete with plans for a Doomsday Weapon, of course), or treasure that makes King Tut’s look like the left-overs from a jumble sale. *


You write, ‘… if by some amazing there is another room with more artifacts, I hope we have the presence of mind to leave them alone.’

Hmmm, I agree with the sentiment but I can’t see any Egyptologist resisting the urge to tunnel into such a room from the outside of the Pyramid – though hopefully with more care and respect than Al Mamun’s motley crew managed to muster (come to think of it, Howard Vyse wasn’t much better…).


You write, ‘Djoser's pyramid site is far more interesting and far less documented than Khufu's.’

Broadly, it is because Khufu's is the most well documented pyramid that it attracts the most attention, certainly as far as the Media and public are concerned.
And it is only because it is the most well documented pyramid that it generates the most theories, which in turn generate more interest, and so it goes on.
Perhaps an exhaustive examination a la Petrie of the other major pyramids would break this circle - it would certainly help increase our knowledge and understanding of them.

MJ

*personally, I’d hope for the original plans of the Pyramid – and being able to say to people (in a gloriously smug fashion): there you are, proof they designed it exactly as I theorised