The Giza Sphinx: Real Tunnels, Denied Chambers and the Battle for Access

In 1922, Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s tomb and made the world believe that Egypt still held rooms no one had seen. On the Giza Plateau, however, the Sphinx had stood beside the pyramids for thousands of years, and the ground around it contains passages, stone shafts, natural cavities and tunnels cut by modern explorers. The question is not whether empty spaces exist at Giza. The question is which spaces belong to ancient construction, which were made by later excavators, and who decides what may be opened to the public.

Since the nineteenth century, explorers have drilled into the Sphinx, dug around its paws and descended into shafts between the statue and the causeway of Khafre’s pyramid. A study by Zahi Hawass and Janet Richards describes the Osiris Shaft, an underground complex entered from a shallow passage under the causeway, with several levels and chambers. Geophysical work has also found that the bedrock beneath the Sphinx enclosure is not uniform. These facts do not automatically prove a “Hall of Records” or a lost civilisation’s archive. They do make the claim that “there is nothing under the Sphinx” incompatible with the archaeological record itself.