Field Notes from Dahshur
By Dr. Sarah Chen
*The Questor - September 8, 2023*
The morning sun casts long shadows across Dahshur's desert landscape as I make my third trek this month to what I've come to think of as Egypt's forgotten pyramids. While tourists crowd the plateau at Giza, here at Dahshur, the remarkable Red and Bent pyramids stand in relative solitude, harboring secrets that have kept me awake for weeks.
Most visitors to Egypt never venture this far south of Cairo. Their loss is my gain. For the past eighteen months, I've been part of a small team conducting what I can only describe as revolutionary research at these sites. The details of our findings remain under strict embargo – the kind that makes my palms sweat every time I open my laptop to write. But I can share glimpses of our journey, if not our destination.
The Red Pyramid has become my second home. Named for the rusty hue of its limestone blocks, it's the third largest pyramid in Egypt, yet on most days, I can count the number of visitors on one hand. Its perfect 43-degree angles hide engineering mysteries that make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Our ground-penetrating radar surveys have revealed... well, I've already been warned twice about saying too much.
But it's the Bent Pyramid that keeps drawing me back. Its distinctive silhouette – rising at a steep 54-degree angle before abruptly shifting to a gentler 43 degrees – has long been explained as a simple construction error. Our recent findings suggest otherwise. The change in angle appears deliberate, perhaps even crucial to... [redacted by request of the Supreme Council of Antiquities].
The secrets we've uncovered in the lesser-known chambers of these pyramids challenge everything we thought we knew about Ancient Egyptian construction techniques. The precision of certain architectural elements we've documented defies conventional explanations. Last week, our team discovered a series of markings that... I'm sorry, I'll have to leave that sentence unfinished for now.
What I can say is this: these "secondary" pyramids are about to take center stage in Egyptology. The evidence we're preparing to present next spring will rewrite portions of history books. The mathematical implications alone have our team's engineers questioning fundamental assumptions about ancient technological capabilities.
For now, I continue my daily walks around these magnificent structures, watching how the changing light plays across their ancient surfaces. Sometimes, in the quiet of early morning, I place my hand against the warm limestone and think about the hands that shaped these blocks over four thousand years ago. They knew things we're only beginning to understand.
The next few months will be crucial for our research. While I can't reveal the nature of our ongoing investigations, I can say that three separate universities have already requested access to our preliminary data. The implications stretch far beyond Egyptology into the realms of engineering, mathematics, and... well, that's another sentence I'll have to leave unfinished.
Until we can share our full findings, I invite you to look beyond the famous plateaus of Giza. The real mysteries of ancient Egypt might lie here in Dahshur, hiding in plain sight under the desert sun.