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According to a new announcement from Cairo, Egypt will open in 2026 a Khufu’s Pyramid secret chamber, approximately 30 meters long, sealed for over 4,500 years, and Egyptologist Zahi Hawass says that what lies behind the door will “rewrite the history of the pyramids.”
According to the official account, the announcement was made by Hawass at the 44th Sharjah International Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates, in November 2025.
According to the Jerusalem Post, he declared to the public: “using advanced instruments, we found a 30-meter chamber inside the Pyramid of Khufu, with a door at the end.
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Next year, we will reveal to the world what is behind that door.”
Technically, the chamber was mapped by a combination of muography (cosmic-ray radiography), ground-penetrating radar, ultrasound, and electrical tomography.
The original discovery of the “Big Void,” as researchers call the structure, was published in the journal Nature on November 2, 2017 by the international ScanPyramids team.
The numbers of the mystery, according to scientific publications and Hawass’s announcement, tell the story in five points:
- 30 meters long chamber, with a sealed door at the end
- 4,500 years unopened, since the reign of Khufu (Cheops), around 2600 BC
- Above the Grand Gallery, within the main body of the pyramid
- 3 independent muography techniques confirmed the existence of the void
- 2026 as the year of the public opening announced by the team
The announcement about Khufu’s Pyramid secret chamber in Sharjah
Hawass, former Minister of Antiquities of Egypt, is today the most recognized voice in Egyptian archaeology. In Sharjah, he built anticipation regarding the chamber’s contents but confessed his two personal hypotheses.
According to records, “My hope is to discover the tomb of Imhotep, the architect of the first pyramid, and the tomb of Queen Nefertiti,” Hawass said, as quoted by the Jerusalem Post.
According to historical records, Imhotep designed the Saqqara step pyramid for Pharaoh Djoser, about 100 years before the Great Pyramid.
The whereabouts of his tomb have never been confirmed in over a century of excavation.
Nefertiti, wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten and stepmother of Tutankhamun, lived more than a thousand years after Khufu.
Her tomb also remains missing, and the hypothesis that it is in a hidden chamber within another monument was defended in 2015 by Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, without confirmation to this day.
Furthermore, Hawass stated that his international team will only release findings “after exhaustive analysis,” with a scientific report preceding the public unveiling.
In other words, no live show inside the pyramid: the opening will undergo academic review before becoming a headline.
How cosmic particles mapped the void in 2017
Methodologically, to see inside a pyramid without excavating, the ScanPyramids team used a technique born from particle physics: muography.
Physically, muons are subatomic particles formed when cosmic rays collide with Earth’s atmosphere. They pass through stone easily but lose intensity when passing through solid mass.
Therefore, detectors installed inside the Queen’s Chamber measure how many muons arrive from each direction. Where there is a void, more muons pass through.
Where there is solid rock, fewer pass. The difference forms a three-dimensional image of the internal structure.
According to the publication in Nature, the team used three different detectors operated by three independent groups: nuclear emulsion films from Nagoya University (Japan), scintillator hodoscopes from KEK (also Japan), and gas telescopes from CEA (France).
All three saw the same void, in the same place.
According to an independent assessment, “Scientists saw the void with three different detectors in three independent experiments, which makes the finding very robust,” evaluated Lee Thompson, a physicist at the University of Sheffield, commenting on the publication.
In terms of authorship, the Nature article was signed by a team coordinated by Mehdi Tayoubi, from the HIP Institute in Paris, and Kunihiro Morishima, from Nagoya University, in partnership with Professor Hany Helal, from Cairo University.
The 9-meter corridor that confirmed the method in 2023
On March 2, 2023, the same ScanPyramids team published a second finding, this time in Nature Communications: the SP-NFC (North Face Corridor), approximately 9 meters long by 2 meters wide.
In terms of location, this corridor is located just behind the pyramid’s north face, hidden behind the chevron-shaped blocks above the original entrance.
The team identified a gap between the blocks via radar and ultrasound.
Subsequently, researchers inserted a 5-millimeter diameter endoscope from Waseda University in Japan. For the first time in nearly five thousand years, a camera entered inside.
What appeared was a corridor with a gabled vaulted ceiling, hypothetically designed to relieve the weight of the stone above.
“The fact that the chamber is large enough to accommodate several people makes the discovery particularly remarkable,” said Christian Große, from the Technical University of Munich.
Therefore, the success of the SP-NFC validated the method. If muography plus radar plus endoscope worked for a small corridor, the same combination has a real chance of reaching the large chamber above.
What might be behind the door of Khufu’s Pyramid secret chamber
According to the Nature publication, the 30-meter Big Void is located above the Grand Gallery, the most imposing corridor in the pyramid.
The Grand Gallery is already 48 meters long, 9 meters high, and has a corbelled ceiling, one of the most sophisticated stoneworks of Antiquity.
Above this gallery, there is a void of equivalent size, with a similar cross-section. The function of this space remains open.
In scientific terms, hypotheses include a real burial chamber intentionally hidden, a weight-relieving chamber to protect the Grand Gallery from the crushing tons above, an incomplete room abandoned during construction, or even something architecturally unprecedented.
Historically, when the Pyramid was explored by Arab caliphs in 832 AD, the King’s Chamber was already empty.
The granite sarcophagus is there, but without a mummy. The whereabouts of Khufu’s own body have never been confirmed.
In Sharjah, Hawass refused to speculate on the chamber’s contents. “Data guides the work inside the pyramid,” he said, emphasizing that the investigation is guided by non-invasive sensors, not by speculation.
The Great Pyramid in numbers: why accept that we didn’t know everything
In numbers, it has a 230.37-meter base and an original height of 146.6 meters (today 138.75 m).
Additionally, the pyramid’s body consists of approximately 2.3 million stone blocks, totaling 6 million tons.
There were 5.5 million tons of limestone (much of it from the Tura quarries, on the other side of the Nile), 8 thousand tons of granite from Aswan, and 500 thousand tons of mortar.
According to the history of exploration, despite more than two centuries of scientific exploration, we only knew five large internal spaces before ScanPyramids: the King’s Chamber, the Queen’s Chamber, the Grand Gallery, the Subterranean Chamber, and the Ascending and Descending corridors.
In terms of discovery, the Big Void and the North Face Corridor, announced in 2017 and 2023, are the first major internal structures identified in the pyramid since the 19th century.
In other words: we have discovered more about the interior of Khufu’s Pyramid in the last eight years than in the entire 20th century.
This effort dialogues with other technologies that are revisiting the past, such as SAR scanning used to map sites around the world and which CPG covered in its coverage of new Chinese exploration drones.
SAR and the controversy of the “underground city” beneath Giza
In parallel with the results confirmed by ScanPyramids, a much more ambitious, and much more contested, announcement emerged in March 2025.
Researchers Corrado Malanga (University of Pisa), Filippo Biondi (University of Strathclyde), and Armando Mei claimed to have detected, via synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with Doppler tomography, an “underground city” extending approximately 2 kilometers beneath the Giza plateau.
Therefore, the archaeological community rejected the announcement. Without peer review and with questioned methodology, the work does not carry the same weight as ScanPyramids’ muography, published in Nature.
In parallel, Hawass also positioned himself against it. For him, this type of claim hinders the public reception of real scientific discoveries.
The 30-meter corridor, however, is validated by three independent techniques and will be the credibility test for the project in 2026.
What’s coming in 2026 and what Egypt wants to show the world
According to the announced schedule, the project foresees a reviewed scientific report before the public revelation. There is no official date yet for the physical opening of the chamber.
According to Hawass, Hawass autonomous robots have already been used to reach and clear openings that were beyond human reach.
These pieces of equipment descend from the Djedi project, which in 2011 sent a robotic camera through one of the so-called “shafts” of the Queen’s Chamber.
In terms of context, the scenario is favorable: the Grand Egyptian Museum, inaugurated in Giza with over 5,000 objects from Tutankhamun’s treasure, opened in 2025, creating a window of global attention for Egyptian archaeology.
Egypt wants to transform this attention into tourism, revenue, and a renewal of the hypothesis that the pyramid still holds surprises.
If the chamber reveals an intact tomb, it will be the greatest archaeological discovery since Tutankhamun in 1922.
If it turns out to be a weight-relieving chamber, muography still validates the method and paves the way for investigating Khafre and Menkaure with the same arsenal.
Update: The scientific report announced by Hawass for 2026 has not yet been published. The exact date of the public
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