The Great Pyramid of Giza may house two secret rooms at its heart, claims a French architect known for his theories on how the 4,500-year-old structure was built.
Jean-Pierre Houdin, who has been asking for a probe into how the great structure was built, said 3-D simulation and data from American egyptologist Bob Brier pointed to two secret chambers in the heart of the structure.
The rooms would have held furniture meant to be taken into the afterlife by the Pharaoh Khufu, also known as Cheops in Greek, he said.
"I am convinced there are antechambers in this pyramid. What I want is to find them," Houdin was quoted as saying by LiveScience.
The French architect has been arguing for decades that the Great Pyramid was not built using ramps around the outside, but from the inside out.
The prevailing theory is that Egyptians might have built the foundation of the pyramid using an outside ramp to pull blocks up from the ground.
Then, about a third of the way up, they would have dismantled the ramp and used an inner corkscrew ramp to finish the structure. The original outside ramp would have been dismantled and the stones used to top off the pyramid.
In 2008, Houdin told National Geographic that L-shaped rooms in the pyramid support his theory. The rooms would have provided space for workers to manoeuvre large blocks, he said.
Houdin said the theory remains unproven, though a Canadian research team plans to seek permission from Egypt's antiquities department to investigate further with thermal imaging of the pyramid, according to an article published in Physorg.com.
The construction debate isn't limited to how the Egyptians moved the blocks: Some researchers question where the blocks came from. Some tests suggest that at least few blocks were made of poured concrete instead of quarried a controversial theory.
Houdin's secret room proposal is based upon similar rooms found in the pyramid of Khufu's father Snefru, a king known for numerous pyramid-building projects.
Based on blocks found in the king's chamber of the Great Pyramid, Houdin suspects Egyptologists have overlooked a passageway leading to the secret rooms.
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