The Queen's Chamber

While we were discussing the Grand Gallery, you may remember that at its lowest point, there is a horizontal passage leading to the Queens Chamber. This passage is 127 feet (39m) long, and starts with the same height as the ascending passage, but as it gets closer to the Queens Chamber, there is an inexplicable drop in the floor level of 2 feet, so one can almost stand up comfortably. I have yet to hear a plausible explanation for this feature, but I'm sure it was no mistake. Some photos of the passageway are shown below.

As was the case with the Kings Chamber, we found the lighting in here prevented us from taking really good shots of the chamber as a whole, so we concentrated our photography on closer views of all of the features in the Queens Chamber. The Queens Chamber was found as empty and bare as the Kings  Chamber - in fact there isn't even a "sarcophagus" in the room. But there are some very important differences -

- The floor in the Queens Chamber is rough and unfinished - Egyptologists have taken this as evidence that this was the originally intended burial place for the Pharaoh, but then there was a change of plan and they decided to build the Kings Chamber for the King's incarceration. But this doesn't square with the fact that the so-called "air-shafts" or "ventillation shafts" from the Queens Chamber had to be constructed as the pyramid rose, because they are set within the core blocks at their angle of ascent. So the question is - if the Queens Chamber was abandoned as the burial place for the Pharaoh, why were the shafts continued to their full extent? We shall look closer at one of the shafts later in this section.

- The reason for the naming of the Queens Chamber (and also the Kings Chamber) is very evident in this room - It is not because of any reason related to Egyptology, it was the Arabs who named both of these rooms because, according to Arabic tradition, the King was buried in a room with a flat ceiling, and the Queen in one with a gabled ceiling. The Queens Chamber has a gabled ceiling -  its roofing beams on opposite sides angle up to a single line, like the roofs of houses. Also, above the Kings Chamber we find a series of "Releiving Chambers" blocks of granite with lintels and slabs which go upwards for five more levels until they meet in a triangluar fashion, like the Queens Chamber's ceiling.

- There is a large corbelled niche in the southern wall, reaching a height of over 25 feet. Egyptologists speculate that it once contained a statue, but there is no evidence to support this, and no such statue was ever found. One of the more interesting things about this feature is that it is located slightly off-centre in the southern wall - there seems to be no logical reason for this.