5 Unsolved Mysteries of Egypt

Egypt has always been the focus of archaeologists, owing to the huge amount of mysteries and history in the area. Even after numerous discoveries, this ancient piece of land has still a lot to offer. We delved into the sands of this aging place to find the unanswered mysteries of Egypt and following is a list of some of the really best ones.

Hidden Chamber in the Great Pyramid

The biggest pyramid was built for Pharaoh Khufu, about 4500 years ago. The goliath structure stands a whopping 150 meters and initial observations revealed that the monument has only three chambers inside it. In order to be certain about the findings, a team scanned the pyramid in November 2017 to see if there was anything they missed. Sure enough, above the Great Gallery of the pyramid, they found signs that there might be a large hidden chamber as large as the biggest room in the whole pyramid. We are yet to see what’s inside the hidden chamber but whatever it is, Pharaoh Khufu certainly wanted to keep that secret from the world because the chamber is completely inaccessible by any corridors.

Mummy Wrapped in Book Pages

In 1848, a man bought an ancient Egyptian mummy off a shopkeeper in Alexandria. For years, he put it on display as a decoration, not realizing how strange of an artifact he’d found. After peeling off her bandages (a few decades later), scientists found something very unusual about this mummy.

The mummy had been wrapped in the linen pages of a book and they were not written in Egyptian. Further analysis (over the course of a few years) showed the language to be Etruscan, the language of a civilization that lived where modern-day Italy is situated. We still don’t know what the text says as we can only understand a few words. Most of them are either dates or the names of gods. Therefore, we can only speculate as to what it means or why anyone would wrap it around a dead body.

The Destroyed Pyramid of Djedefre

The Pyramid of Djedefre should have to be the highest point of any pyramid in Egypt. The proud Djedefre did materialize that despite the fact that he didn’t have the resources to build the biggest pyramid. He used a little workaround to make sure the tip of his tomb was just a little bit taller than everybody else’s.

He built it on a hill while all other pyramids were at a lower altitude. Among all these pyramids that have been around for thousands of years, it is Djedefre’s pyramid that is the most prominent one. Some think that Djedefre simply died before they were able to get much of the work done and his pyramid was left in ruins. Others think that Romans quarried it for the stones 2,000 years ago, tearing down a massive historical monument. And still, others think that the people of Egypt hated Djedefre to an extent that they decided to destroy an entire pyramid.

The Lost Land of Punt

A lot of ancient Egyptian writings have been found in numerous places, and interestingly enough, a large number has references to a place called Punt. It is said to be an ancient African kingdom full of gold, ivory, and exotic animals that excited the Egyptians’ imaginations. It was a place that commanded the respect of the Egyptians, a land they had dubbed “God’s Land”. There are no doubts that Punt exists as the place is mentioned countless times and there’s even a picture of the queen of Punt in an ancient Egyptian temple. Although there are some hints which suggest that Punt could be somewhere around Eastern Ethiopia, no one has succeeded in finding this significant place.

The Sphinx

In 2013, archaeologists found something amazing laying around in Egypt: paws of a 4000-year-old sphinx. The remains of the one-meter tall statue were found in Tel Hazor, Israel. Nobody knows what an Egyptian statue was doing in Israel but the only clue left behind is an inscription on the base that bears the name “King Mycerinus”, a pharaoh who ruled over Egypt around 2500 BC. It is highly unlikely that Tel Hazor was conquered by Egyptians as it was a big and prosperous trading hub in Canaan. The best theory seems to be that the statue was a gift. But it is still unknown why it was sent and why was it shattered. All we know is, somebody built a sphinx 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) away from the Great Sphinx of Giza.

Check more about Egypt on Wikipedia