Probing The Chambers of Cheops

By David S. Jackson/Cairo

At exactly 2:40 a.m. last Tuesday, under the orange glow of a crescent moon, a small group of scientists gathered expectantly at an archaeological site south of the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, just outside Cairo. They did not carry hand picks or shovels. Instead, they watched a TV monitor as a miniature camera was lowered into a narrow hole in the ground. When the video image flickered to life, the group gasped. There before them, inside a chamber that had been sealed 4,600 years ago, lay the dismantled timbers of a wooden ship. The archaeologists immediately recognized it as the long-sought companion to the famous royal ship of Cheops that now resides in a Giza museum.

The dramatic find was a triumph of space-age technology and archaeological investigation. The existence of the sister ship had been suspected since 1954, when the first vessel was discovered near the tomb of the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Cheops, or Khufu. Work at the new site began two weeks ago. The trick was to probe the chamber without disturbing the interior -- including the 4,600-year-old air that might reveal secrets of the ancient atmosphere.

Bob Moores, a Black & Decker engineer who helped design a lunar-surface drill for the Apollo program, mated one of his company's drills with an ingenious air-lock seal. An industrial vacuum cleaner at the site sucked the dust from around the hole once the drilling got under way. To see inside the vault, technicians modified a miniature remote-controlled video camera so it could be inserted into the 3 1/2-in.-wide entrance hole. The camera, originally designed to probe the interior of nuclear reactors, provided fiber- optic light without introducing any heat into the chamber. Over the site was a makeshift scaffold and the flags of Egypt and the National Geographic Society, the principal sponsor of the $250,000 project.

For three days the scientists drilled, an inch at a time. Last Monday morning, 62 in. into the porous limestone, the carbide-tipped drill broke through. Pieter Tans, a research scientist from the University of Colorado in Boulder, filled six canisters with 159 quarts of air drawn from the chamber. He also took a sniff. Said Tans: "I did not smell history. I didn't smell anything, except maybe staleness."

The inside of the chamber remained a mystery until early the next morning, when the video camera was finally lowered into place. What the scientists saw & on the monitor looked like a pile of lumber under reed matting. Even so, recalled Tans, "as soon as we saw it, we knew it was a boat." Tohamy Mahmoud Ali, an Egyptian worker who had helped excavate the first vessel, broke into excited Arabic as he recognized the disassembled ship lying in its narrow pit. At one end were several upright pieces, perhaps parts of the prow.

Since there are no immediate plans to excavate the ship, the scientists resealed the entrance hole after meticulously filming every inch of the chamber for later study and mapping. Using a special zoom lens, they filmed everything from the markings on the walls to the lengths of the boat's cedar planks. From the film, archaeologists hope to determine the size of the ship -- and perhaps even discover clues to its purpose. Some scholars believe the vessels were intended to carry the spirits of the dead on their eternal journey around the earth with the sun-god Ra. They disagree, though, about whether they are so-called solar boats built for the day-time sojourn across the sky or ships intended for the nighttime voyage through the underworld. Still others speculate that they were simply funerary boats used to ferry Cheops' body down the Nile for burial. Whatever the purpose, Egyptian officials must now decide how to display their new, but still untouched, vessel.