Mysterious red hieroglyphs painted in a shaft in the Great Pyramid of Giza are likely to be engineering measurements for the building of a secret chamber, according to the Hong Kong founder of an international team exploring the shaft.
Ng Tze-chuen, 58, said the suspected measurements - not seen for thousands of years - would have been used to guide workers to build the shaft to precise measurements and pointed to the existence of something important in a secret chamber behind a door at the end of the shaft his 10-strong team aimed to probe.
'The workers needed the signs because they didn't want to just stop the shaft at a random length. They measured the length precisely so that something could be put behind the second door. Must be something intriguing,' the Causeway Bay dentist said.
Ng's view came after a researcher explained the markings.
The secret chamber has been described by Zahi Hawass, Egypt's minister of state for antiquities affairs, as the last great mystery of the pyramid. Independent researcher Luca Miatello, an expert on ancient Egyptian mathematics, said the markings were numerical signs meaning 1, 20 and 100 from left to right that add up to 121 cubits, or 63.4 metres, the length of the shaft to the first door. The royal cubit, the ancient Egyptian unit of measurement used to build the pyramid, was 52.4cm long, equal to seven human palms of four digits.
Miatello based his interpretations on rare images from a snake camera sent into the shaft by Ng's team - named Djedi after an ancient magician who, legend says, was asked to play a part in designing the pyramid.