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A lost artifact from the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of only three objects recovered from within the last remaining wonder of the ancient world, has been found in a chance discovery at the University of Aberdeen.
Curatorial assistant Abeer Eladany, originally from Egypt, was browsing items from the university’s Asia collection when she came across a cigar box marked with her country’s ancient flag.
Inside he found several wood chips that he later identified as a piece of wood from the Great Pyramid that had been missing for over a century.
“The university collections are huge, with hundreds of thousands of items, so searching for them has been like finding a needle in a haystack. I couldn’t believe it when I realized what was inside this harmless-looking cigar can, ”he said.
The wood fragment is one of three items discovered by engineer Waynman Dixon within the Queen’s Chamber of the pyramid in 1872.
Known as the ‘Dixon relics’, two of them, a ball and a hook, are housed in the British Museum, while some have speculated that the missing piece of cedar was part of a measuring ruler that could reveal clues about the construction of the pyramid.
The fragment is believed to have been bequeathed to the university by Dixon’s friend James Grant, but it was never classified and, despite an extensive search, could not be located.
The discovery of the relic has also raised new questions, as carbon dating has shown that the wood can be dated to the period 3341-3094 BC, some 500 years earlier than historical records dating the Great Pyramid of Pharaoh’s reign. Cheops in 2580 -2560BC.
Neil Curtis, director of museums and special collections at the university, said: “Finding the missing Dixon relic was a surprise, but the carbon dating has also been a revelation.
“It is even older than we had imagined. This may be because the date is related to the age of the wood, perhaps from the center of a long-lived tree. Alternatively, it could be due to the rarity of trees in ancient Egypt, which meant that wood was in short supply, treasured, and recycled or cared for for many years.
“Now scholars will debate its use and whether it was deliberately deposited, as happened later during the New Kingdom, when the pharaohs tried to emphasize continuity with the past by burying antiquities with them.”
The cedar fragment originally belonged to a much larger piece of wood, which was most recently seen in a 1993 scan of the interior of the pyramid by a robotic camera in hidden and now unreachable voids.
Eladany said: “I am an archaeologist and have worked in excavations in Egypt, but I never imagined that it would be here in the North East of Scotland where I would find something so important to the heritage of my own country.
“It may be just a small piece of wood, which is now in several pieces, but it is enormously significant given that it is one of only three items that have been recovered from the interior of the Great Pyramid.”
