In 1765 the British consul to Algiers, Nathaniel Davison, discovered a hidden chamber directly above the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The 'Edwin Smith' papyrus: a fine example of ancient Egyptian hieratic script and one of the world's oldest surviving surgical documents (c. 1600 BC).

He gained entry via a precarious climb using a rickety ladder at the south end of the pyramid’s Grand Gallery. It seems that the passage leading to this chamber had been accessible since the pyramid’s construction. The chamber’s dimensions were similar to those of the King’s Chamber directly below, although unlike the King’s Chamber, the compartment Davison discovered was very cramped, being only around three feet in height. As Davison explored, he found nothing but a floor several feet deep in bat dung—no hidden sarcophagus, no treasure and, as in the rest of the pyramid, not a single inscription. Little did Davison know that directly above the chamber which now bears his name, a further four chambers awaited discovery.

Seventy-two years after Davison’s discovery, British adventurer Colonel Richard William Howard Vyse, following the intuition of his colleague, Giovanni Caviglia, blasted his way into the four hidden compartments above Davison’s Chamber (Figure 1) using gunpowder. These four chambers, known today as the ‘Chambers of Construction’, were approximately the same size as Davison’s. However, in one very important way they were different; for upon the wall and roof blocks of these ‘Vyse Chambers’ were many painted inscriptions and, significantly, the name of the pyramid’s supposed builder, Khufu.

Figure 1: The ‘Chambers of Construction’ above the King’s Chamber.

The importance of these painted marks to Egyptology cannot be overstated. They are Egyptology’s ‘Holy Grail’, because they offer the only empirical evidence that directly connects Khufu to the Great Pyramid. As Egyptologist Dr Mark Lehner writes:

“Since nobody had entered from the time Khufu’s workmen sealed it until Vyse blasted his way in, the gang names clinch the attribution of this pyramid to the 4th-dynasty pharaoh, Khufu.”1

However, from the moment Colonel Vyse first presented these painted ‘quarry marks’ to the world, questions have surrounded them and suspicions have grown—particularly surrounding the king’s various names and whether they were fraudulently placed into the four chambers by Vyse and two of his closest assistants, Raven and Hill, or not.

Indeed, the more we analyse the painted inscriptions from the ‘Vyse Chambers’, the more errors and anomalies we find in them. Taken together, the evidence points towards the perpetration of an audacious hoax in the Great Pyramid by these men in 1837.

Let us now consider two pieces of this considerable body of evidence.

Odd Numbers

Early hieratic letters and numerals essentially consisted of cursively written or painted equivalents of the sculpted hieroglyphic signs.2 As such, their early orthography was not so far removed from their counterpart sculpted signs. However, as the millennia passed, the two forms diverged greatly from one another.3

One of the key differences between early hieratic script and their sculpted hieroglyphic equivalents is that hieratic script (like that allegedly discovered in the ‘Vyse Chambers’) was always and only written (and read) from right-to-left, whereas hieroglyphics are bi-directional.4 Both forms are also read from top-to-bottom.5

In 1837, hieratic script was barely understood by the Western world, and as the evidence reproduced in this article suggests, Vyse did not understand it either. Indeed, it seems that Vyse regarded the script in these chambers as painted hieroglyphic rather than hieratic quarry-marks, and that this misunderstanding caused Vyse to make a grave error in the placing of these hieratic numbers onto the roof blocks in Campbell’s Chamber.

The painted marks in these chambers appear in a variety of orientations from their natural upright positioning. The conventional explanation for this apparent haphazard arrangement is that, originally, the marks would have been painted onto each block at the quarry in the natural upright manner.6 The builders of the chambers, unconcerned about the orientation of the painted marks on the blocks, would have then rotated each block (with it signs) to find the most efficient means of placing it within the various chamber walls.7 (Figure 2a-b).

Figure 2a. “Hieratic” number sign (21) as it appears on the roof blocks of Campbell’s Chamber, in its actual (upside-down) yet incorrect orientation. (Image: John Perring 1837).

Figure 2b. “Hieratic” number sign (12) as it appears on the roof blocks of Campbell’s Chamber, in its actual (upside-down) yet incorrect orientation (Image based on Alan Rowe 1931).

The way that these signs appear on the roof blocks of Campbell’s Chamber is inconsistent with the grammatical rules of hieratic script. In hieratic script, a vertical stroke ‘|’ symbolizes 1 unit while a ‘∩’ sign symbolizes the value 10, thus ‘| | ∩’ = 12 and ‘| | | ∩ ∩’ = 23 and so on.8 Note also that in hieratic script the highest numerical value is always placed to the right of the lower values.9 This ensures that the higher value is always read first, i.e. from right-to-left. It is here that Vyse seems to have made a mistake.

If we rotate the painted numbers on these blocks to their natural upright position—so that they are presented as they would have “appeared at the quarry” (vis-à-vis the conventional explanation for their orientation)—then the lower unit strokes ‘| |’ end up on the right and the higher ∩ value on the left. This means that the signs cannot have been drawn on at the quarry and then rotated, unless drawn on incorrectly:

Figure 3. Rotating the signs so that they appear as they would have “at the quarry” (vis-à-vis the conventional explanation) suggests that this value on the roof block of Campbell’s Chamber has been incorrectly written with the higher value on the left instead of to the right.

Clearly, something here isn’t right. To offer an explanation consistent with the rules of Hieratic script, critics have proposed that these numbers were perhaps written sideways onto these blocks at the quarry (Figure 4), from top to bottom.10 Oriented in this way, the 90º rotated number signs will then have the higher unit values (∩) correctly placed above the lower unit values (| |) and are thus read first, top-down.

Figure 4: The hieratic sign for ‘12’ rotated 90º (sideways) so that the highest numerical value is read first (from top-to-bottom).

However, while the ancient Egyptians did indeed write certain hieratic numbers sideways in a style similar to that presented in Figure 4, this was only ever done when writing the calendar days of the month as observed in Figures 5a, 5b and 5c.

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