![]() ![]() They would appear to have chanced upon the tomb marking the entrance to the caves during their routine explorations of the plateau in 1837. The only people known to have gone anywhere near this vast cave system after Salt and Caviglia were the British explorer Colonel Howard Vyse (1784-1853) and his colleague, the engineer John Shae Perring (1813-1869). Yet having found no gold or treasure, Salt and Caviglia had given up their search and returned to the surface, giving no hint that they ever returned to this lost underworld of the pharaohs. After exploring them for a distance of “several hundred yards”, they came across three large chambers of equal size, each interconnected, and with further tunnels leading away into the darkness. These recorded how Salt, in the company of his employee, the redoubtable Italian explorer and former sea-captain Giovanni Battista Caviglia (1770-1845), had entered a vast network of Catacombs beneath the plateau. ![]() ![]() My colleague, the British Egyptological researcher Nigel Skinner Simpson, had uncovered something unique in the recently rediscovered memoirs of Henry Salt (1780-1827), the British Consul General in Egypt, an avid explorer and collector of Egyptian antiquities. I had come to this neglected area, west of the Great Pyramid, following new information that was set to challenge everything we know about the evolution of Giza’s famous monuments. On March 3rd, 2008 I entered a previously overlooked large tomb on the Giza plateau. Underworld of the Pharaohs By Andrew Collins ![]()
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