By Zahi Hawass The following is a quote taken from the beginning of the petition by the Friends of the Giza Geomatrix Team:"I am a Friend of the Giza Geomatrix Team. I recognise and fully support the following Petition. Respectfully I call for you to give it your positive consideration, and thereby, the involvement of The Geomatrix Team to assist you in this matter." I have mentioned this in my last two articles for Al-Ahram Weekly and, as I explained before, the area around the Sphinx is solid rock and none of the claims of this team is true because we have already drilled here and proved that there is nothing underneath it. These people are also dishonest, because they claim to have used ground-penetrating radar on the Giza plateau without having sought the permission of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). The nearby village of Nazlet Al-Samman has also already been excavated and we discovered the causeway and valley temple of Khufu, as well as the possible remains of a palace and evidence of a settlement. The Friends of the Geomatrix Team claim that there are no excavations in the area around the Sphinx and the SCA will not allow any to be conducted. However, if anyone were to come and visit the Giza plateau today he or she would see that a major excavation there is in fact underway. The type of work being conducted there has never been done before. We have found that in front of the valley temple of Khephren, the son of Khufu and the owner of the second pyramid on the site, there is a paved limestone ramp about 12m long. The ramp slopes down at the end, but about half way along it we have found tunnels. Evidence has also been discovered that shows that the harbour that used to serve Khephren's pyramid was at the end of this ramp. Each entrance to the valley temple was protected by a goddess; the lioness-headed Bastet for the north entrance, and the cow-headed goddess, Hathor for the south entrance. We also found evidence of where the embalming tent might have been that was used to purify and wash the king's body when he died. Nearby, a mud-brick stand was found that could have been a platform from which the widowed queen and her children, including the crown prince, watched these purification rituals taking place. As well as this ongoing excavation work at Giza, a site management plan for the plateau is being developed. The area south of the pyramids is being prepared for horse and camel stables, a new visitor centre and a car park. Another area will be used to park the electric trams that will take tourists up to the site, like those at the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. These trams will be the only mode of transport permitted to enter the site. The area of the Sphinx will be fully developed in a unique way, which is why we are carrying out all this large-scale excavation work. We are using a front-end loader to take all the loose sand away and to move large stone blocks. To our surprise, during the course of this work we found a huge mud- brick wall standing to a height of one metre above the ground surface. It is very similar to the wall built in the reign of Tuthmosis IV to the north of the Sphinx, which was built to protect it from wind-blown sand. Until that discovery no one knew that the wall had been extended to the east, but the new wall contained pottery that also dated to the New Kingdom, the period of Egyptian history during which Tuhmosis IV ruled, so they may be contemporary. It could also indicate that originally the wall also turned south, in front of the Sphinx temple and valley temple. I believe it might then have turned again to the west and run along the south of the valley temple as well. Other, separate mud-brick walls that have been found and examined are believed to have been part of a settlement in front of the valley temple, maybe the city of the priests and others who maintained the funerary cult of Khephren. Now, would those people who persist in sending me these ill- informed petitions please read this and come to Egypt to witness for themselves all that I have said in these articles over recent weeks? In the future, I am not going to read any more petitions from the Friends of the Geomatrix Team. I will close the subject and not answer any more of these hallucinations.
