Speaker 1: Imagine for just a moment that you are standing right
at the absolute center of the Giza Plateau. The midday
sun is just beating down, turning all that sand into
this blinding mirror.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the heat there is, it's intense.
Speaker 1: Right, and the air is just thick with dust. You've
got the chaotic sounds of Cairo humming in the background,
and you tilt your head all the way back looking
up at two point three million blocks of solid stone
stretching nearly five hundred feet into the sky.
Speaker 2: It's staggering. I mean, it really puts human scale into perspective.
Speaker 1: It really does. And for centuries humanity has looked at
the Great Pyramid and just thought of it as a
solved puzzle, a marvel obviously, but a known quantity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we figured, well, we measured the outside with lasers,
we mapped the interior chambers, put it in the textbooks,
and basically just check the box exactly.
Speaker 1: We thought we had the blueprint of antiquity all figured out.
But what if the very stones you're looking at are
hiding massive secrets right.
Speaker 2: Now, like literally right now?
Speaker 1: Yes, what if behind the walls of these monuments we
thought we knew inside and out there are colossal voids,
secret doors with tiny copper handles, and deliberately erased identities
that we are only just now discovering.
Speaker 2: And we're finding them using technology that borders on science fiction.
Speaker 1: Honestly, welcome to Thrilling Threads. I'm so glad you're joining us.
We are taking all those centuries of assumptions, throwing them
completely out the window, and doing a deep dive into
the source material.
Speaker 2: We're looking at the ancient world through the lens of
modern particle physics, forensic biology, and cutting edge archaeology.
Speaker 1: You're probably here because you, like us, absolutely love that
aha moment when a piece of history just flips completely
upside down. Today's thread is pulling together a wild mix
of historical accounts and modern science to.
Speaker 2: Explore really the most tantalizing ancient Egyptian mysteries that are
still completely unsolved today.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because we aren't just talking about
a few missing artifacts or misplaced pottery shards here.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. The stakes are incredibly high when
we look at these sources. We aren't just looking at
old rocks, right, We are looking at a civilization that
possessed astonishing engineering capabilities, incredibly complex spiritual mythologies, and really
tense political traumas.
Speaker 1: And so much of that reality has either been lost
to time or deliberately erased by their own people.
Speaker 2: Exactly when we study ancient Egypt, we are essentially acting
as detectives at a crime scene where the evidence is
four and a half millennia.
Speaker 1: Old and all the witnesses have been dead for thousands
of years. It really feels like having what you think
is a fully completed jigsaw puzzle sitting on your dining
room table.
Speaker 2: Oh I like that analogy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're admiring it. You think you see the whole picture.
But then you accidentally bump the table, a few pieces
slide away, and you realize that half the pieces actually
belong to an entirely different puzzle hidden underneath.
Speaker 2: And suddenly you have no idea what the real picture
is supposed to look like. So let's start with the macro.
Speaker 1: The biggest puzzle piece on the board, the Great Pyramid
of Gize itself.
Speaker 2: Right, completed roughly around twenty five sixty BCE during the
reign of the Faro Cufu, and for nearly four thousand
years it was the tallest artificial structure on the planet.
Speaker 1: Which is just wild to think about.
Speaker 2: It is, but its sheer size, you know, the millions
of tons of stone, That isn't actually the most perplexing
mystery to structural engineers. The real mystery is its alignment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Great Pyramid is aligned to true north, southeast,
and west with an accuracy that is frankly terrifying. We're
talking about a monugendive error of less than three sixtieths
of a single degree.
Speaker 2: It's almost impossible to comprehend.
Speaker 1: If you ask me to park my car perfectly straight
in my own driveway, I'm going to have a wider
margin of error than they did building a four hundred
and eighty foot tall artificial mountain forty five hundred years ago.
Speaker 2: Right without a modern compass or laser leveling or satellite GPS.
Speaker 1: How is that even possible?
Speaker 2: Well, it's a testament to an observational brilliance that we
often fail to credit to ancient peoples. There are several theories,
mostly revolving around the observation of the stars that circle
the North Pole, but the sources highlight a particularly compelling
theory proposed back in the year two thousand by a
British egyptologist named Kate Spence. She looked at the problem
not as an architectural one, but as an astronomical one.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, so looking up instead of.
Speaker 2: Down exactly, she suggested that the ancient builders didn't just
look for a single north star because the sky didn't
look the same then as it does now. Instead, they
use two specific stars that aligned vertically in the night
sky around the year twenty five hundred BCE.
Speaker 1: Right, those stars are Kochab and Mizar.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So if you are standing in the Agician desert
in twenty five hundred BCE and you trace an imaginary
clumb line, like a straight vertical line between Koshab and
Mizar down to the horizon, that line would point almost
exactly to true north.
Speaker 1: Wow. So the pharaohs architects could eventually just plant a
sighting stick in the sand, wait for that exact cosmic
alignment to happen in the night sky, and draw a
perfectly straight line on the desert floor.
Speaker 2: Exactly to establish the foundational grid for the entire pyramid.
It's elegant in its simplicity.
Speaker 1: I absolutely love that idea, but it requires you to
understand something fundamental about how the Earth moves like it's
tied to a very specific moment in time.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It is because if you go out to the Giza
plateau tonight and look up at Kochab and bizarre, they
aren't going to help you build a perfectly aligned pyramid.
The cosmic clock has shifted.
Speaker 2: That brings us to the mechanics of axial procession. To
understand why Spence this theory is so powerful, we really
have to understand how our planet moves.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Imagine a spinning top. When a top is spinning rapidly,
it stands perfectly straight, but as it begins to lose momentum,
the top of the stem starts to trace a slow,
wide circle in the air. It wobbles, It wabbles, and
the Earth does the exact same thing. As it spins
on its axis. The gravitational pull of the Sun and
the Moon causes it to wobble very very slowly.
Speaker 1: And it takes what about twenty six thousand years to
complete one wobble roughly, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Which means the direction our north pole points into space
is constantly slowly sweeping across the stars in a giant circle.
Speaker 1: So, because of this axial procession, the stars appeared to
drift very slowly across the sky over millennia. The north
star we use today Polaris, wasn't the north star when
Kufu was building his pyramid.
Speaker 2: No, back then, the closest pole star was Thuben. So
the alignment of Koshab and Mizar doesn't point to true
north anymore. But here is where Kate Spence's theory becomes brilliant. Okay,
it not only explains the mechanism of how they might
have aligned the pyramid, but it accounts for the error.
The slight fractional error in the pyramid's alignment actually correlates
perfectly with the very slight drift of those two stars
around the exact decade Kufu.
Speaker 1: Was building it. That is just mind blowing. The tiny
aerds is a chronological fingerprint.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: They literally built a monument perfectly sank to a sky
that doesn't even exist anymore. They anchored this massive physical
weight to a fleeting moment in the cosmos.
Speaker 2: It's poetry in stone, it is.
Speaker 1: But I have to lay Devil's advocate here. It's brilliant
to use the stars as a compass. It solves the
geometry and the surveying, but knowing the precise angle to
lay a fifteen ton block of solid granite doesn't explain
how you actually get it there. You can have the
most perfect blueprints in the world, drawn by the greatest astronomers.
Speaker 2: But if you don't have cranes.
Speaker 1: Right, if you don't have hydraulics or combustion engines or
even the wheel, how are you moving two point three
million of these blocks?
Speaker 2: That logistics puzzle has been the eternal question how do
you move mountains of stone without industrial machinery? But the
sources bring up an incredible discovery from twenty thirteen that
shed immense light on the logistics, if not the actual
lifting mechanism itself.
Speaker 1: Oh the Diary of Marror.
Speaker 2: Yes, near the coast of the Red Sea, at a
site called Waddy al Jarf, archaeologists uncovered a cache of
ancient papyrus documents buried in these artificial caves.
Speaker 1: This is honestly one of my favorite historical discoveries of
the entire century. We always hope to find like a
Golden mask or a magical text, but finding the Diary
of Mirror is like digging in the sand. And finding
a forty five hundred year old corporate spreadsheet. It sounds mundane,
but it is utterly revolutionary.
Speaker 2: It really is. Mirror was an official, essentially a middle
manager or a maritime foreman, who was heavily involved in
the supply chain for the construction of Kufu's Pyramid.
Speaker 1: And his logbook just meticulously details his daily activities. He
doesn't write about the gods or the cosmic alignment.
Speaker 2: No, he writes about moving rocks. He details how his
crew of workers transported the gleaming white Tura limestone, which
was used for the pyramids smooth outer casing, from quarries
across the Nile.
Speaker 1: If you read the translations, it reads exactly like a
modern shipping manifest. Inspector Mirror spent the day with his
file loading stones sailed up the river, unloaded at Giza.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He tracks his shipments, notes how many days the
voyage took, and even records the rations given to his men.
It describes a highly sophisticated state sponsored supply chain.
Speaker 1: It's unbelievable.
Speaker 2: They loaded these massive stones onto specially designed wooden boats.
They navigated them down the Nile and through a complex
series of artificial purpose built canals that acted as an
aquatic highway, bringing the.
Speaker 1: Stone right up to the base of the Giza plateau exactly.
Speaker 2: They even use the annual flooding of the nile to
their advantage, floating the stones closer to the site than
would be possible during the dry season.
Speaker 1: It just humanizes the whole endeavor so much. It wasn't magic,
and it certainly wasn't Aliens. It was an incredibly sophisticated
bureaucracy with thousands of workers, supply lines and maritime engineering.
Speaker 2: Just massive coordination.
Speaker 1: But I keep coming back to the physical reality of
the stone. I mean, Marra writes about getting the stones
to Giza by boat. He tracks the maritime shipping right,
but he conveniently leaves out the par art where they
take a stone the weight of three modern elephants out
of the boat and list it hundreds of feet into
the air.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the diary stops where the greatest mechanical mystery begins.
We know they possess copper chisels, hemp rope, wooden sleds,
and water to slick the sand to reduce friction.
Speaker 1: Just really basic tools, very basic.
Speaker 2: The prevailing archaeological consensus leans heavily toward the use of
massive ramps made of mud, brick, limestone, ships, and rubble.
But even the ramp theory has massive structural and logical issues.
Speaker 1: Huge issues. I mean, if you try to build a
straight ramp reaching the top of a four hundred and
eighty foot pyramid with a gentle enough inclined actually drag
a fifteen ton block up.
Speaker 2: It, that ramp would have to be over a mile
long exactly.
Speaker 1: The ramp itself would require almost as much material and
labor as the pyramid who was built to service. It
doesn't make sense, which is.
Speaker 2: Why architectural historians have proposed dozens of alternatives. Some suggest
a spiral ramp that wrapped around the exterior of the
pyramid as it grew. I've heard that one, and others
like the French architect Jean Pierre Hudin, have proposed a
fascinating theory of an internal ramp system, like a spiraling
tunnel hidden just inside the outer edge of the stone,
allowing workers to drag the blocks up from the inside.
Speaker 1: I want you to just take a second and really
imagine the logistical nightmare of this picture yourself trying to
organize a workforce of thousands.
Speaker 2: Of people without a single computer.
Speaker 1: Right, you have to feed them, house them, coordinate them
to stack two point three million multi ton blocks perfectly.
No mechanized pulleys, no iron tools, just human muscle, sweat
and organization.
Speaker 2: And doing it all before the invention of the wheel.
The ultimate lifting method remains an absolute, frustrating, glorious mystery.
It forces us to recognize what human beings can accomplish
with unified focus.
Speaker 1: And generational medication. The sheer volume of stone used for
Kufo's pyramid is staggering. It dominates the entire landscape in
our modern imagination of ancient Egypt.
Speaker 2: What if there was a structure that made the Great
Pyramid look small.
Speaker 1: A structure so vastly complex that it made Giza look
like a simple geometric exercise, And what if we just
lost it?
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, this brings
us to the phenomena of missing megastructures, specifically, the legend.
Speaker 1: Of the Labyrinth. Oh, this story is wild.
Speaker 2: To understand this, we have to look at the accounts
of early historians. Around four hundred and fifty BCE, the
Greek historian Herodotus traveled to Egypt. Now, context is everything here, right.
Speaker 1: Because by the time Herodutus visited Egypt, the Great Pyramid
of Giza was already two thousand years old. He was
a tourist looking at ancient history himself exactly.
Speaker 2: But while he was deeply impressed by the pyramids, he
described another structure near the pyramid of the pharaoh aminem
Hat the Iid in the Fayum Oasis that left him
completely awestruck.
Speaker 1: He called it a labyrinth, and Herodidus was a chronicler
known for occasionally exaggerating, but his description of this labyrinth
is so specific and so wild that it demands attention.
Speaker 2: It does. He claimed it had three thousand rooms.
Speaker 1: Three thousand, yeah.
Speaker 2: He wrote that half of them, fifteen hundred rooms were
above ground, and the other fifteen hundred were entirely subterranean.
Speaker 1: He described massive courtyards built of white marble, ceilings made
of enormous single slabs of stone, and a layout so
massive and complex that it was impossible to navigate without
a local guide.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just Herodotus spinning a tall tail either.
The Greek geographer Strabo also visited the site centuries later
and confirmed it.
Speaker 1: Existed, describing massive intersecting halls that dizzyingly confuse anyone who
walked through them. So we have multiple independent eyewitness accounts
from classical antiquity describing a megastructure that rivaled the pyramids.
Speaker 2: It was considered one of the great wonders of the
world by those who saw it. But today, if you
go to the site at Hawara where it's supposedly stood,
you see a ruined mud brick pyramid and a massive
flat expanse of sand and scattered rubble.
Speaker 1: The obvious question is, how does a civilization lose a
building with three thousand rooms? Did it just vanish into
the desert? Did a massive earthquake swallow it hole?
Speaker 2: The answer is likely much more pragmatic, and it has
to do with the ancient Egyptian practice of stone recycling.
We look at these monuments as sacred heritage, but to
the people living there thousands of years later, building materials
were incredibly.
Speaker 1: Precious right and labor intensive.
Speaker 2: To quarry exactly. Subsequent generations of rulers, then the Romans,
and eventually the builders of medieval Cairo looked at these ancient,
abandoned monuments not as history to be preserved, but as
incredibly convenient pre cut stone quarries.
Speaker 1: So over millennia people simply dismantle the labyrinth block by block.
Speaker 2: Yes, they carted the stone away to build new temples,
Roman outposts, homes, and city walls. When archaeologists finally excavated
the area in the late eighteen hundreds, like Flinders Petrie,
they found the massive foundational.
Speaker 1: Bed of sand and scattered stone chips, confirming something colossal
stood there, but the superstructure was entirely gone. Is heartbreaking
to think about. It is imagine taking a grand, majestic
medieval cathedral like Notre Dame, carefully pulling down every single
stone and using them to build a dozen completely mundane modern.
Speaker 2: Houses or paving stones for a road. The grandeur is
just dispersed into the mundane. You might be walking past
a retaining while in Cairo today that was once part
of the greatest labyrinth in the ancient world.
Speaker 1: It is the ultimate architectural ghost. Yeah, but there's a
tantalizing caveat to this story that keeps archaeologists awake at night.
Speaker 2: Yes, there is. Remember, Heroddus specifically noted that half of
the labyrinth fifteen hundred rooms were underground.
Speaker 1: He claimed they contained the tombs of the kings who
built the labyrinth, and the labyrinthine tombs of the sacred crocodiles.
Speaker 2: Representing the god Sobeck, who was worshiped in that region. Now,
while the above ground structure was easily visible and therefore
easily quarried away, excavating a subterranean complex of that immense
size just to steal the stone would have been.
Speaker 1: Incredibly difficult, dangerous, and time consuming. So if the quarrying
stopped at.
Speaker 2: The ground level, then the colossal underground portion of the
Labyrinth could theoretically still be impact Wow, it would be
deeply buried beneath the sands and the very high corrosive
water table of the Fayoum region. Some researchers fiercely speculate
that this hidden world is just waiting to be unearthed.
Speaker 1: We may still have the greatest, most complex Egyptian monument
sitting entirely unseen beneath our feet, protected by the groundwater
and the sand. That gives me absolute chills.
Speaker 2: It's an amazing thought.
Speaker 1: We are looking for lost rooms beneath the sand, hoping
to find a buried city. But what is so incredible
about modern archaeology is that perhaps the most shocking loss
rooms aren't under the sand at all.
Speaker 2: No, they're hiding right above our.
Speaker 1: Heads, suspended in the stone, inside the very monuments we
thought we knew inside and out, which brings us out
of the macro mysteries of missing buildings and right into
the micro mysteries of particle physics.
Speaker 2: We are returning to the great Pyramid of Gear. For centuries, explorers,
grave robbers, and eventually legitimate archaeologists have mapped the interior.
Speaker 1: We know about the King's Chamber with its anti sarcophagus,
the Queen's chamber below it, the chaotic subterranean chamber.
Speaker 2: And the magnificent sloping, corbal vaulted hallway known as the
Grand Gallery. By the twentieth century, the academic consensus was
that we had found all the major spaces. The pyramid
was considered structurally mapped and complete.
Speaker 1: But then the year twenty seventeen happens enter the Scan
Pyramids project, and they didn't bring pickaxes or ground penetrating
radar or dynamite like the early explorers who literally blasted
their way in.
Speaker 2: They brought cutting edge particle physics. They utilized a revolutionary
technique called muontomography, And to truly understand how profound this is,
we have to look at the science of what a
muon actually is.
Speaker 1: Okay, lay it on us.
Speaker 2: Muons are elemental particles similar to electrons, but much heavier.
They are created naturally and constantly when high energy cosmic
rays from deep space, often from supernovas or distant galaxies,
crash into the Earth's upper atmosphere. They collide with atoms
of gas, and.
Speaker 1: This collision creates a shower of secondary particles right.
Speaker 2: Exactly, including muons, which rain down on the surface of
the Earth constantly at near the speed of light. They
pass through our bodies, through buildings, through almost everything every
single second of every.
Speaker 1: Day, but they interact differently with solid matter versus empty space.
I always think of it like standing in a greenhouse
with a glass roof during a massive hailstorm.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good way to picture it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, If the hail is just falling on the glass,
you see even spread of impacts. But if there's a
thick tree branch spind it above the glass roof, the
hail hits the branch and you see a blank spot
on the glass below. Where no hail hits.
Speaker 2: That is a brilliant analogy. Meuon tomography works on a
similar principle, but in reverse. It works basically like a
cosmic X ray. Muons can penetrate solid rock, but as
they travel through incredibly dense material like limestone, they gradually
lose energy and get absorbed.
Speaker 1: Or however, if they passed through empty space like a
hidden room, they don't lose that energy, then they continue
straight through.
Speaker 2: Right. So the Scan Pyramids team placed highly sensitive muon detectors,
which look a bit like specialized photographic plates, inside the
known chambers of the Great Pyramid, and then they waited.
Speaker 1: They simply tracked the particles raining down from the sky
over several months, and as the data accumulated, a picture
began to emerge from the cosmic noise.
Speaker 2: Where there was solid rock above the detectors, fewer muons
hit the plates, but in one specific localized area there's
a massive spike in muon strikes.
Speaker 1: And that spike meant the cosmic rays were flying unimpeded
through an empty void, a void that nobody in modern
history knew existed.
Speaker 2: The data revealed a massive empty space sitting directly above
the Grand Gallery. And we aren't talking about a little
crack in the rock or a collapsed stone.
Speaker 1: No, the mathematical modeling shows this void is at least
thirty meters long that's roughly one hundred feet.
Speaker 2: It is almost the exact same size and shape as
the magnificent Grand Gallery below it. It is the first
major hidden structure found inside the Great Pyramid since the
eighteen hundreds, and.
Speaker 1: They found it without moving a single grain of sand.
It is a stunning triumph of non invasive archaeology. We
use the debris of dying stars to look inside a
forty five hundred year old monument.
Speaker 2: But it also presents a massive, agonizing scientific frustration because
we know exactly where this void is, we know its
rough dimensions, but we have absolutely no idea what is
inside it.
Speaker 1: It doesn't appear to connect to any known hallway or passageway.
The data shows it is completely sealed off by massive
blocks of stone on all sides exactly.
Speaker 2: And nobody wants to be the person who takes a
giant industrial drill to the last remaining wonder of the
ancient world just to peek inside.
Speaker 1: Definitely not.
Speaker 2: So we are in this agonizing waiting period. What is it?
Is it a hidden, untouched burial chamber containing the true
horde of Cufu. Is it a storage room for sacred artifacts, or.
Speaker 1: As structural engineers argue, is it simply a large structural
gap left intentionally by the builders to reduce the immense
weight of the stone on the grand gallery below it.
Speaker 2: We can see the ghost of the room through the
mathematics of particle physics, but we cannot open the door.
But as if that wasn't enough to digest, the same
scientific team dropped another absolute bombshell in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting. They have plaied a
similar highly localized Muon detection technique near the main original
entrance of the Great Pyramid.
Speaker 2: On the north face above the descending passage, there are
these massive chevron shaped limestone blocks stacked in an inverted.
Speaker 1: V and for a long time architects assumed they were
just there for structural support to divert the immense weight
of the pyramid away from the entrance below like an archway.
Speaker 2: But the Muon detectors found another anomaly hiding right behind
those chevrons. The detectors indicated a smaller void just behind
those massive blocks.
Speaker 1: And this time, because it was so close to the exterior,
they were able to interact with it. They pushed tiny,
flexible endoscopic cameras through the millimeter thin gaps between those
chevron blocks.
Speaker 2: And they didn't just find a rough cavity in the rubble.
They found a beautifully finished, vaulted corridor.
Speaker 1: It's about nine meters long, roughly thirty feet with a
perfectly angled ceiling, just sitting there in the absolute dark.
It hasn't seen the light of day since the Bronze Age.
Speaker 2: And again, nobody is entirely sure why it was built. Sure,
it could be a pressure relief chamber for the entrance,
but an equally tantalizing idea is that this hidden corridor
might be a blocked off path.
Speaker 1: It could be a false lead, or it could be
a tunnel leading deeper into the pyramid to places we
haven't even conceived of yet.
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is the complete paradigm shift it forces
upon us. We have moved from a historical mindset of well,
we have mapped the layout of the Great Pyramid to
the thrilling realization that the Great Pyramid is actively hiding
things from us.
Speaker 1: The architecture is deliberately opaque, and this is the first
time the internal architecture the Great Pyramid is deliberately stonewall.
Speaker 2: No, it's not.
Speaker 1: If we are talking about the pyramid actively stone walling us.
We absolutely have to talk about the robots, right, because
the saga of the ventilation shafts is like something out
of a science fiction movie.
Speaker 2: In the so called Queen's Chamber, which sits below the
King's Chamber, there are two narrow shafts carved directly into
the walls, angling upward into the solid body of the pyramid.
Speaker 1: They are incredibly small, only about eight inches square, way
too small for any human being to ever crawl.
Speaker 2: Into right, And for decades the assumption in the archaeological
community was purely pragmatic. They were just air vents for
the workers who were carving the chamber to provide oxygen.
Speaker 1: But then in the early nineteen nineties, specifically nineteen ninety three,
an engineer named Rudolph Gauntenbrink decided to see exactly where
these shafts went. He sent a tiny, custom built German
robot equipped with tank treads and a camera named Upiat two,
crawling up the southern shaft.
Speaker 2: I remember the world watching the grainy footage as this
little treaded robot slowly climb the steep eight inch tunnel.
Speaker 1: Grinding its way up a forty degree incline through thousands
of years of dust. Yeah, and after traveling about two
hundred feet up into the dark heart of the pyramid,
it didn't find the outside air. It suddenly stopped.
Speaker 2: It didn't reach the exterior of the pyramid, as a
functional ventilation shaft naturally should. Instead, the shaft was abruptly
and deliberately blocked by a smooth limestone slab.
Speaker 1: And here's the detail that absolutely sticks in my mind,
the thing that I think about constantly when we talk
about ancient engineering. On the front of this tiny stone block,
sitting two hundred feet up a tunnel no human could
ever possibly fit in, there were two little copper pins or.
Speaker 2: Handles, Yes, the infamous door.
Speaker 1: Why why would anyone put two copper handles on a
tiny door that no human being could ever reach. If
you are a builder and it's just a structural block
meant to cap a shaft, you just use a block
of scone exactly. Adding copper handles implies it was meant
to be interacted with, or at the very least, it
symbolically represents a door meant to be It is.
Speaker 2: One of the most baffling poetic details in the entire
structure of the pyramid, and it drove the archaeological world crazy.
It prompted further highly anticipated exploration.
Speaker 1: Because everyone wanted to know what was behind it.
Speaker 2: Right years later, in two thousand and two, another robotic
mission was organized broadcast live on television. They equipped a
new robot with a tiny specialized drill. The robot crawled
back up the shaft, meticulously drilled a small hole right
through that limestone door, and pushed a fiber optic camera
right through the hole to see what treasure or scroll
or chamber lay beyond and what did they find.
Speaker 1: The camera looked through the hole, the light illuminated the darkness,
and right behind the first door with the copper handles
was just another roughly hewn stone block sealing the way.
Speaker 2: It's like a cosmic Russian nesting doll made of limestone.
Speaker 1: And later another robot named Jedi went up the opposite shaft,
the northern shaft, and found essentially the same thing, another
door with copper pins you don't double seal and ate
it shaft and meticulously installed copper handles on it just
for weight distribution or ventilation.
Speaker 2: No, this isn't structural engineering. This is deeply psychological, or
rather spiritual architecture. That is the crux of the entire mystery.
We often fall into the trap of projecting modern pragmatic
engineering sensibilities onto ancient builders. We look for a physical
function for every stone, But in the ancient Egyptian worldview,
the spiritual and the physical were entirely intertwined.
Speaker 1: They were inseparable.
Speaker 2: Consider the shafts in the king's chamber above. Astronomical alignments
suggest they point directly to the circumpolar stars and the
constellation of Orion, which was associated with Osiris, the god
of the afterlife.
Speaker 1: So these weren't air vents at all.
Speaker 2: Many Egyptologists believe these eight inch tunnels weren't air vents
for the living. They were literal, physical pathways for the
soul of the pharaoh. They were designed to guide the
king's spirit out of the tomb and toward his eternal
destiny among the imperishable stars.
Speaker 1: So the door with the handles spiritual door. It's an
obstacle or a gateway meant to be opened by the
ethereal soul, not by a physical.
Speaker 2: Hand precisely, and the fact that we, thousands of years
later are sending little mechanized robots up there to drill
holes in it represents a fascinating clash of civilization.
Speaker 1: It really does. It's our modern scientific desire to physically
conquer and categorize every space colliding with an ancient architecture
that was built entirely for the incorporeal.
Speaker 2: These shafts and doors weren't meant for the living to explore.
They were vessels for the afterlife, which actually provides a
perfect thematic transition to the immense physical vessels they built
for the exact same purpose.
Speaker 1: If we are talking about vessels for the afterlife, we
have to talk about the journey of raw and Cufus
solar boat, because while the pyramid itself is a mountain
of stone, what they buried right next to it is
a masterpiece of a completely different material.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty four, an Egyptian archaeologist named Kamal el
Malock was directed to the clearing of sand and debris
near the southern base of the Great pyramid. They were
essentially just cleaning up the site.
Speaker 1: But underneath massive enclosure wall he discovered a sealed pit
carved directly into the bedrock.
Speaker 2: The pit was covered by forty one enormous limestone blocks,
each weighing around eighteen tons, sealed so perfectly with gypsum
plaster that it was entirely air tight.
Speaker 1: And when they finally managed to lift one of the
massive blocks and shine a light inside, the air that
rushed out still smell of ancient cedar. They didn't find
a tomb or a mummy.
Speaker 2: They found wood, but not just random planks of wood.
They found an entire ship. But here's the incredible catch.
It was completely disassembled.
Speaker 1: The builders had carefully and deliberately dismantled this massive vessel
into one two hundred and twenty four individual pieces of
beautiful imported lebonese cedar, and they had stacked them in
this pit in thirteen neat layers with absolute precision.
Speaker 2: It had been sitting in the dark in pieces for
forty five hundred years. The preservation was astonished due entirely
to that airtight limestone seal. Even the ancient ropes made
of half a grass were still.
Speaker 1: Intact, but discovering the boat was only the beginning of
a massive logistical challenge. An Egyptian restorer and conservator named
Ahmed Yusuf was tasked with putting it back.
Speaker 2: Together, which is an incredible story in itself.
Speaker 1: I always compare this to the ultimate nightmare scenario of
building the world's oldest, most complex piece of Ikea furniture,
except you have two and twenty four wooden pieces, absolutely
no instruction manual, no picture on the box, and if
you accidentally snap a wooden peg or apply the wrong pressure,
you just ruined a priceless Bronze age artifact.
Speaker 2: It was an agonizingly slow, deeply respectful process. Amid Yusuf
spent years just studying modern Egyptian boat builders along the Nile,
looking for traditional techniques that might have miraculously survived the millennia,
just to understand how the ancient joints and lashings might
have worked.
Speaker 1: He had the map every single piece of wood. He
spent over fourteen years painstakingly rebuilding it without using a
single modern metal nail, and when it.
Speaker 2: Was finally complete, the scale of this thing was breathtaking.
The reassembled ship measured forty three meters.
Speaker 1: Long that is over one hundred and forty feet. It
has a high, sweeping prow and stern shaped like papyrus stalks.
It is a masterpiece of aerodynamic and hydrodynamic design.
Speaker 2: What's incredible is the engineering of the wood itself. The
ancient shipwrights used a system of mortise in tenin joints
held together by wooden pegs, and then lashed the entire
hull together with rope.
Speaker 1: And the genius of this design is that when the
ship is put in the water, the dry cedar wood
absorbs the moisture and swells. The ropes shrink when wet.
Speaker 2: Together, the swelling wood and shrinking rope pull the ship
incredibly tight, creating a naturally watertight seal without pitch or nails.
Speaker 1: It's brilliant engineering, but once again we run into the
mystery of its actual purpose. Why go to the immense
trouble and expense of building a one hundred and forty
foot luxury yacht out of rare imported wood using master
cracks only to immediately take it completely apart and bury
it in a hole next to a pyramid?
Speaker 2: Was it ever even used? That is the subject of
intense ongoing debate among Egyptologists. One camp believes it was
a highly functional funeral barge. The theory is that after
Pharaohkufu died, his embalmed body was placed on a canopy
on this very ship, and it was sailed down the
Nile in a grand solemn procession to the Giza Plateau, and.
Speaker 1: After the funerary ceremony was complete, the boat, having touched
the divine body of the pharaoh, was considered too sacred
for common use, so it was ritually dismantled and buried
near his tomb as a sacred relic.
Speaker 2: But the other camp says it's purely symbolic, tied deeply
to the mythology of the Sun god. Yes the solar
barge theory. In ancient Egyptian religion, the sun god Raw
traveled across the sky during the day in a magnificent boat,
ringing light to the world, and then traveled through the perilous,
demon filled underworld at night in a different boat, and.
Speaker 1: The Pharaoh, who was considered the living embodiment of Horace
on Earth, was expected upon death to join Raw on
this eternal cosmic journey.
Speaker 2: Some researchers fiercely argue that Kufu's boat was never meant
to touch earthly water. It was a magical object, a
physical spell, buried in the bedrock so that the pharaoh's
soul could use it in the afterlife to navigate the heavens.
Speaker 1: So it's essentially a space ship made of cedar.
Speaker 2: Essentially yes, and the physical evidence is completely contradictory. Some
experts point to subtle water marks and shrinkage on the wood,
suggesting it did indeed sail the Nile at least once.
Speaker 1: Others point out that there is no evidence of rigging
for sales, and the oars seem more decorative than functional
for a ship of that massive size, making it a
purely symbolic construct.
Speaker 2: But regardless of whether it touched the Nile or was
built for the stars, it perfectly reflects a society where
the symbolic held exactly as much weight and demanded exactly
as much engineering perfection as the physical.
Speaker 1: Cufu's boat was carefully preserved in an airtight vault for
his eternal glory. The Egyptians went to unimaginable lengths to
ensure his name, his journey, and his soul lasted forever.
But that reverence wasn't guaranteed for everyone.
Speaker 2: No, it certainly wasn't.
Speaker 1: What happens when a royal's legacy isn't preserved in the
seal pit, but is actively violently and systematically destroyed.
Speaker 2: This raises an important question about the nature of memory
and immortality in ancient Egypt, and to explore it, we
have to move forward in time, roughly twelve hundred years
after Cufu leaving the massive pyramids of Giza for the
hidden subterranean tombs of the New Kingdom in the Valley
of the Kings.
Speaker 1: Specifically, we have to look at a tomb discovered in
nineteen oh seven by Edward Ayrton, known simply by its
archaeological designation cavfafty five right.
Speaker 2: Cave fifty five, is the ultimate true crime story of Egyptology.
When archaeologists open this tomb, they immediately realized they were
walking into an ancient crime scene.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just the tomb had been robbed for gold,
which is unfortunately common for almost every tomb in Egypt.
It was that the tomb had been completely desecrated with
specific targeted intent.
Speaker 2: The beautiful wooden coffin inlaid with gold and glass, had
been viciously smashed.
Speaker 1: The spectacular gold face mask, which usually depicts the idealized,
serene face of the dead to guide the soul back
to the body, had been deliberately torn off and destroyed.
Speaker 2: And most chillingly, of all the identifying inscriptions, the royal
cartouches containing the name of the deceased had been violently
scratched out, chiseled away, and erased from every single surface
in the tomb.
Speaker 1: If you're a standard grave robber, you grab the gold,
you grab the jewels, and you run before the guards
catch you. You don't sit there in the dark meticulously
chipping away a name from a wooden box.
Speaker 2: Right, there's no profit in that.
Speaker 1: Why it's been so much physical energy just to erase
someone's name.
Speaker 2: Because to understand this crime, you have to understand ancient
Egyptian theology. To the ancient Egyptians, a human being was
made of several parts. Okay, there was the physical body,
the ka or life force, the ba or personality, and
crucially the wren the name. They believe that to survive
in the afterlife, your name had to be oken and
remembered by the living. It anchored your existence.
Speaker 1: So if your name was destroyed. If it was chiseled
off your statues and erased from your tomb, your soul
was completely disconnected from the universe.
Speaker 2: It was effectively annihilated. It was the ultimate punishment, eternal oblivion.
So the destruction in kV fifty five wasn't a robbery.
It was an act of profound theological hatred. Someone wanted
this specific person wiped from existence entirely.
Speaker 1: Which immediately makes you ask who was in the coffin
and what on earth did they do to make their
own people so deeply violently angry.
Speaker 2: Inside that wrecked nameless coffin was a badly deteriorated mummy.
At first, the bones had suffered such massive water damage
and decay over the centuries that researchers couldn't even agree
if it was a man or a woman.
Speaker 1: Eventually, the consensus settled on a male royal from the
late eighteenth dynasty, but pinning down the exact identity set
up a fiery debate that is raged in academic circles
for over a.
Speaker 2: Century, and the leading candidate for this wrath, the man
whose actions would justify such an extreme erasure, is a
pharaoh who fundamentally broke every rule of Egyptian society.
Speaker 1: Acanatan Akanatan is such a fascinating, almost alien figure in history.
He comes into power and he completely upends the table.
For centuries, Egypt had a massive, wealthy pantheon of gods
a moon raw Osiris, Isis and Nubis.
Speaker 2: And the priest of a moon based in Thebes was
incredibly powerful, practically rivaling the pharaoh in wealth and political influence.
Speaker 1: Acanatin takes the throne and effectively says, no, we are
scrapping all of that. He institutes what many historians argue
is the first recorded instance of monotheism in human history.
Speaker 2: He commands the worship of a single, abstract, formless sun
deity called the Atan. It was a religious, political, and
cultural revolution of unprecedented scale.
Speaker 1: He didn't just change the god, he moved the entire
capital city away from the powerful priests in Thebes out
into the barren desert, building a new city called Akatatan,
known today as Amarna.
Speaker 2: He even completely changed the style of Egyptian art, moving
away from the rigid, idealized muscular forms of previous pharaohs
to a strange, almost grotesque realism.
Speaker 1: Statues of aconatins show him with a long face, a
protruding belly, wide hips, and elongated limbs.
Speaker 2: But when Acconatin died, the massive system he overturned fucely
snapped back the old establishment. The priests of a Moon
returned to power with a vengeance.
Speaker 1: They abandoned his new desert city to the sand, restored
the old gods, and began a systematic state sponsored campaign
to wipe his heresy from history.
Speaker 2: They smashed his statues, chiseled his name off every temple wall,
and attempted to erase him from the official king lists.
Speaker 1: So finding a desecrated tune like kV fifty five, with
a smashed face and meticulously erased names perfectly fits the
profile of Aconotin. The traditionalists found his body or press,
intercepted it during a reburial, and tried to damn his
soul for eternity.
Speaker 2: It makes perfect narrative sense. It's the closing act of
a religious war, and in twenty ten, modern science seemed
to finally back the story up right.
Speaker 1: The famed twenty ten DNA testing of the Royal mummies,
researchers took tiny precious samples from the badly deteriorated bones
of the cave fifty five mummy, and they ran the
genetics against the other known royal mummies.
Speaker 2: The genetic markers suggested two crucial things. First that this
mummy was the direct son of the great pharaoh Amenhotep
the third, and second that this mummy was the biological
father of the famous boy king to tun Kamun.
Speaker 1: Which points a massive glowing neon arrow directly at Ocanatin.
We know from historical records that Acanaton was the son
of Amenotep the Third, and while it was debated, many
historians believed he was two Dunleman's father.
Speaker 2: So the DNA seemed to definitively solve the century old
mystery Cave fifty five is Akanon case closed.
Speaker 1: But history is never that simple because the physical evidence,
the actual bones themselves, threw a massive wrench into the
DNA results.
Speaker 2: When forensic anthropologists examined the actual skeleton of the Cave
fifty five mummy, they looked at the epiphysile fusion, the
way the ends of the bones fused to the shafts
as a person ages, particularly the collarbone in the pelvis.
Speaker 1: They also looked at the wear on the teeth. They
concluded quite firmly that this person died in their early twenties,
maybe twenty five at the latest.
Speaker 2: And herein lies the immense contradiction. Historical records indicate that
Akanatan ruled Egypt for seventeen years. He enacted a massive
religious revolution, built a city, and had multiple daughters with
his primary wife, Nephertiti, and likely other children with secondary wives.
Speaker 1: He couldn't possibly have achieved all of that and died
in his early twenties. To fit the timeline of his reign,
he had to be at least in his thirties or
more likely his forties when he died.
Speaker 2: So the forensic bone age says one thing, the historical
timeline says another, and the DNA, well, the DNA is
profoundly complicated.
Speaker 1: Why is the DNA complicated If it says he's the
father of Tut, isn't that proof?
Speaker 2: We have to acknowledge the severe limits of forensic science
when dealing with three thousand year old degraded DNA, especially
within the context of royal Egyptian.
Speaker 1: Dynasties, because of the inbreeding right exactly.
Speaker 2: The Egyptian royal family viewed themselves as divine and gods
only marry other gods therefore they engaged in generations of
close kin marriage, brother marrying sister, father marrying.
Speaker 1: Daughter over generations. This intense inbreeding creates a massive genetic bottleneck.
The DNA profiles of brothers or even cousins begin to
look so remarkably similar that distinguishing them after three thousand
years of environmental degradation, water damage, and contamination is incredibly fraud.
Speaker 2: So the KVE fifty five mummy could theoretically be Oconotin
if the anthropologists are drastically wrong about bone aging, or
it could be a lesser known younger brother of Acanatin,
a shadowy figure named Smith Carr, who may have ruled
briefly and whose genetics would look nearly identical to Acanon's.
Speaker 1: The science meant to solve the mystery only deepened it
more than one hundred years after that tomb was opened,
and after millions of dollars in modern genetic testing. The
body in Cave fifty five remains a literal cold case.
Speaker 2: But speaking of the power vacuum left after Acinatin's chaotic reign,
we absolutely cannot talk about the Amarna period without talking
about the woman who stood right beside him.
Speaker 1: Her resting place isn't just a mystery finding. It would
be the holy grail of modern Egyptology.
Speaker 2: You are, of course, referring to Nefertiti.
Speaker 1: Nephertiti is a true ghost of history. She lived in
the fourteenth century BCE. She is undeniably one of the
most recognizable figures from the ancient world, largely because of
that stunning, perfectly preserved painted limestone bust discovered in a
sculptor's workshop in Amarna in nineteen twelve.
Speaker 2: The elegance, the cheek bones, the vibrant colors, it's iconic.
But she wasn't just a beautiful face. She wielded immense power.
Speaker 1: She was right there alongside aconat and during his radical
religious revolution. Some surviving stone reliefs even show her striking
down the enemies of Egypt with a mace of violent
dominant pose normally reserved strictly for the pharaoh himself. She
was a co architect of the new religion.
Speaker 2: And yet after Accinotton's death, her historic footprint becomes incredibly murky.
The record's fragment. Did she die shortly after her.
Speaker 1: Husband, or, as some historians strongly suspect, did she actually
assume the throne herself and rule Egypt as a pharaoh
in her own right, adopting a new royal name spank
Today or Nefernifot.
Speaker 2: She may even desperately trying to guide the country through
the chaotic, violent aftermath of her husband's religious experiment, trying
to placate the angry priests of Amun while holding onto power.
Speaker 1: We don't know the end of her story because we
have never found her tomb. Most of the major players
from that era have been found, but Nefertiti.
Speaker 2: Is missing, which leads to one of the most controversial
edge of your seat theories of the last decade. In
two twenty fifteen, a British Egyptologist named Nicholas Reeves proposed
an idea that set the archaeological world on fire.
Speaker 1: He suggested that Nefertini's tomb wasn't lost out in the
desert sands, He was hiding in plain sight behind the
walls and the most famous tomb ever discovered.
Speaker 2: He was looking at the burial chamber of her stepson,
King Tudunkamun. Reeves was examining ultra high resolution three D
laser scans of the painted walls inside Tutakomon's burial chamber.
Speaker 1: Beneath the vibrant paint, he noticed strange, perfectly straight lines
and fissures in the plaster. He suggested these were the
faint structural outlines of plastered over sealed doorways.
Speaker 2: His theory was radical, but logical. Two Tunkamun's tomb is
famously small and cramped for a pharaoh. Reeves theorized that
the tomb was originally built for Nefertidi.
Speaker 1: But when young King Tut died unexpectedly at nineteen, his
own tomb wasn't ready, so the priest quickly walled off
Nefertiti's deeper burial chamber, plactered over the doors, painted over them,
and hastily buried the boy king in the front antechamber.
Speaker 2: It was an incredible theory. It meant the greatest treasure
in history was sitting just inches behind the walls of
a tomb we had been walking through since nineteen twenty two,
and initially the science seemed to support it.
Speaker 1: In twenty fifteen, a team of Japanese radar experts brought
ground penetrating radar to the valley of the Kings GPR
works by sending high frequency radio pulses into the wall
and measuring how those ways bounce back.
Speaker 2: If they hit solid bedrock, they bounced back quickly. If
they hit an empty void, the signal changes. They scanned
the north and west walls of Tut's tomb and announced
that they saw distinct anomalies, evidence of open spaces, and
even signatures that suggested metallic and organic materials sitting right
behind the plaster.
Speaker 1: The global media lost its collective mind. We were days
away from finding nevertidy.
Speaker 2: But this is where the rigorous, often frustrating process of
the scientific method comes in. Science requires replication. The stakes
were too high to drill a hole through priceless, three
thousand year old wall paintings based on one radar scan.
Speaker 1: So subsequent, more comprehensive radar scans were conducted by different teams,
including a team from Nashville Geographic, using different frequencies and
more advanced equipment, and.
Speaker 2: Those results yielded mixed and ultimately negative conclusions. The radarways
and the valley of the kings are notoriously tricky. The
natural fissures in the limestone bedrock can scatter the signals
and create false ghost voids in the data. It was a.
Speaker 1: Crushing blow to everyone who wanted that mystery solved. The
current official consensus of the Egyptian Antiquities Ministry is that
there are no hidden rooms behind Tutunkomun's walls.
Speaker 2: The anomalies in the initial scans were likely just natural
cracks in the rock. Nefertidi remains a ghost waiting out
there in the desert, but all of.
Speaker 1: This ties directly back to the boy in the tomb himself.
Tutokomen is the most famous pharaoh in the world, discovered
untouched in nineteen twenty two by Howard Carter, a king
who took the throne at nine years old and was
dead by nineteen.
Speaker 2: And his physical body has been the subject of the
most intense evolving cold case in medical history. Two Tunkban's
remains perfectly illustrate how are historical narrative shifts depending entirely
on the lens of the technology we have available to
analyze the evidence.
Speaker 1: The story of his death has changed drastically over the
last century. Let's track the evolution of this cold case
because it shows how our biases shape history.
Speaker 2: For decades after the tomb was opened, everyone assumed there
was foul play. Look at the context. He was young,
his father Achnaton's reign had been a chaotic heresy. The
country was unstable and powerful generals and priests were vying
for control.
Speaker 1: A nineteen year old king dying suddenly as prime real
estate for an assassination.
Speaker 2: Theory, and in nineteen sixty eight, new technologies seemed to
objectively confirm that narrative. A team from the University of
Liverpool took the very first portable X ray machine into
the Valley of the Kings and X rayed the mummy
in its tomb.
Speaker 1: The two dimensional images revealed a dark shadow, a loose
fragment of bones sitting inside the cranial cavity in a
thickened area at the base of the skull boom.
Speaker 2: Murder theory born. The narrative immediately shifted. Documentaries were made,
books were written.
Speaker 1: The story became that Tutonkaman was struck on the back
of the head with a blunt instrument while he was sleeping,
or maybe during a chariot ride, assassinated by his ambitious
advisor I or his general Horemheb, who wanted to seize power.
Speaker 2: It was Shakespearean, it was sexy history. It made perfect sense.
But science advances and our ability to see the truth
become sharper.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and five, researchers brought a much more
sophisticated diagnostic tool to the mummy, a CT scanner instead
of a flat X ray. This allowed them to capture
thousands of cross sectional slices and create an incredibly detailed
three D model of the skeleton.
Speaker 2: And the CT scan completely dismantled the nineteen sixty eight
murder theory the bone fragment floating in the skull. The
three D imaging showed it perfectly matched a piece missing
from the cervical vertebrae.
Speaker 1: It was likely dislodged during the ancient embalming process, or,
more embarrassingly, it was roughly knocked loose by Howard Carter's
own archaeological team when they were using hot knives to
melt the hardened resin to pry the solid gold mask
off the mummy in the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2: There was no evidence of a healing blow to the
back of the head, but while the CT scan closed
one door, it opened another. The three D imaging found
something the X ray missed.
Speaker 1: It showed a severe compound fracture and Tuck's left leg
specifically just above the knee, and unlike the skull fragment,
this fracture showed a thin layer of embalming resin inside
the break.
Speaker 2: Which means the bone broke while he was still alive
or immediately upon death and hadn't started to heal. So
the narrative shifted again.
Speaker 1: He wasn't murdered. The new theory was that he fell
off a chariot while hunting, shattered his leg, and in
a world three millennia before antibiotics, the massive wound got
infected with gangreen and killed him.
Speaker 2: A very plausible, very mundane, very human tragedy, but the
store doesn't end there. In twenty ten, the paradigm shifted
a third time. We moved from structural imaging of the
bones to molecular biology.
Speaker 1: The DNA testing we mentioned earlier regarding kV fifty five
didn't just map his Missy family tree. It looked for
the genetic signatures of ancient pathogens.
Speaker 2: And they found something massive. They found the DNA of
the Plasmodium false apparent parasite in his bone tissue. King
Tut had malaria, and not just.
Speaker 1: A mild case, but evidence of multiple infections of the
most severe, deadly form of the disease.
Speaker 2: Furthermore, the DNA confirmed the tragic reality of his lineage.
His parents, the mummy in kV fifty five and the
mummy known as the Younger Lady, were full brother and sister.
Speaker 1: This extreme genetic bottlenecking resulted in severe congenital health issues.
The combined data from the CT scans and the DNA
showed that Teutonkhamons suffered from a cleft palate, a mild
curvature of the spine, and most significantly, a severe club foot.
Speaker 2: The imaging also showed he had Cohler disease, a painful
degenerative condition where the bones in the foot slowly die
and crumble from a lack of blood supply.
Speaker 1: This changes the entire picture of who this person was.
He wasn't the robust, golden boy king we see in
the Hollywood movies riding into battle on a chariot with
a bone arrow who was assassinated by his enemies.
Speaker 2: Exactly if we synthesize all this data from the last
fifty years, Tutankhamon was a frail, severely immunocompromised teenager living
in constant physical pain.
Speaker 1: He couldn't stand do andated. He likely needed a cane
to walk, which perfectly explains why over one hundred and
thirty walking sticks, many showing signs of heavy use, were
found perfectly preserved in his tomb.
Speaker 2: He was suffering the profound, debilitating genetic consequences of royal
dynasty building. He didn't die of a dramatic blow to
the head in a political coup. He likely succumbed to
a cascade of failing health where a sudden broken leg,
combined with severe bonocrosis and a massive bout of malaria
finally overwhelmed his severely weakened immune system.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for us, the people
trying to look back in the past. It means that officially,
the exact pinpoint cause of his death remains officially unresolved
on the coroner's report, we can't say definitively which ailment
stopped his heart.
Speaker 2: But more importantly, it shows how our understanding of history
is never truly settled. It is a living, breathing thing
that changes entirely based on the lens we used to
look at it.
Speaker 1: The nineteen sixty eight X ray gave us a thrilling
murder mystery. The two five ct scan gave us a tragic,
mundane accident, and the twenty ten DNA gave us a sobering,
painful medical reality of a frail teenager.
Speaker 2: It forces us to approach ancient history with a profound
sense of humility. The more advanced our tools become, the
more we realize how much we do not.
Speaker 1: Know, and what an incredible journey that has been. Today
we started with the massive macro mysteries, the impossible precision
of the Great Pyramid aligning with dead stars using a
celestial plumbline.
Speaker 2: We explored the logistical nightmare of moving two million stones
tracked on a papyrus spreadsheet by a foreman named Mirror.
Speaker 1: We talked about the ghost of a three thousand room
labyrinth that was dismantled and recycled into the mundane streets
of Cairo. And then we zoomed all the way into
the micro.
Speaker 2: Mysteries, subatomic cosmic rays revealing one hundred foot voids hidden
above the Grand Gallery, tiny robots drilling through spiritually sealed
doors with copper handles.
Speaker 1: And the degraded DNA of a tragic teenage king rewriting
a century of dramatic murder. Theories. History is not static,
It is not locked in a textbook. It is actively
being rewritten.
Speaker 2: Today, which leaves us with a truly provocative thought tom
all over, one that expands far beyond the borders of Egypt.
If muon scanning, which allowed us to see massive hidden
voids through solid stone from the outside and ground penetrating
radar are just in their absolute infancy right.
Speaker 1: Now, imagine what archaeological technologies fifty or one hundred years
from now will be able to reveal.
Speaker 2: What if every major ancient monument on Earth, not just
in Egypt, but the massive temples in Mesoamerica, the forgotten
stupas in Asia, the megaliths in Europe has an invisible
twin structure.
Speaker 1: What if there is a hidden labyrinth of rooms, forgotten corridors,
and intact tombs just waiting for the right scientific lens
to finally be seen. We might be living on a
planet filled with undiscovered history right in front of our eyes,
hovering just beyond our current spectrum of sight. That is
exactly the kind of thought that keeps me entirely glued
to this subject. The puzzle is never finished. We just
keep finding tools to see the pieces that were buried
under the table, and we keep dick and now we
want to bring you into the conversation. Think about everything
we've unpacked today, from the cosmic to the genetic. If
you had the power to safely magically look behind one
of those sealed double doors and the Queen shaft to
see where the soul was meant to go, or if
you could dig beneath the water logged sands of Hauara
to find the true underground scale of the lost labyrinth?
Which mystery would you choose to uncover? And why? Drop
a comment and let us know where you stand. Thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive
into the unknown, unthrilling threads, where the past is always
full of surprises. Until next time, keep questioning everything.