The granite King’s Chamber inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. Photo: Andrew Currie / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
18 Jun 2026 · Great Pyramid, Giza, Egypt
Ultrasound scans look inside the King’s Chamber walls
A ScanPyramids team from TU Munich and Cairo University published ultrasonic shear-wave scans, made in 2022, of the 45 accessible granite blocks in the two lower rows of the King’s Chamber walls. They built a 3D model of block thicknesses and joints and found internal reflectors up to about 3 m deep, including an anomaly about 2 m behind block NW9 on the north wall.
Why it matters: It is the first systematic look inside the granite lining of the chamber. The authors call the NW9 reflector a plausible but not uniquely constrained sign of an internal boundary or cavity, and propose further multi-method scans.
Mainstream view: The study is framed as structural and conservation data. The authors do not claim a hidden room and say the anomalies are not yet interpreted.
Nature reported new geophysical survey results, published by Eldamaty, Abbas, Ballard and Reeves in the Amarna Royal Tombs Project’s occasional papers, that they say point to hidden chambers beyond the walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb, possibly the burial of Nefertiti.
Remote Sensing retracted Filippo Biondi and Corrado Malanga’s 2022 paper, which claimed SAR Doppler tomography revealed undiscovered internal structures in the Great Pyramid. The journal says an investigation after a reader’s concerns confirmed serious methodological flaws and statistical errors that undermine the conclusions.
Xavier Landreau, Guillaume Piton and Sayed Hemeda used satellite imagery, 19th-century maps and watershed mapping. They argue that two 600–700 m structures across Wadi Dahshur, west of the Red Pyramid, long read as stone-transport ramps, are dams, one with a duckbill-shaped spillway, linked to a roughly 1 km diversion channel passing close to the pyramid.
An ambient-noise survey at 37 points inside and around Khufu’s pyramid found uniform resonance frequencies and design features that reduce seismic amplification.
