Lost Giza found in Egypt

Brit writer claims he has found lost cave network

A British writer claims he’s found a lost underworld of the pharaohs which has been rumoured to exist since the construction of the Great Pyramid nearly 5,000 years ago. Armed with the memoirs of a nineteenth century British explorer called Henry Salt, Collins and Egyptological researcher Nigel Skinner Simpson say they have tracked down the entrance to this forgotten cave system.

The story begins in 1817 when Salt, a former British Consul General to Egypt, and Italian explorer Giovanni Caviglia entered a series of what they described as “Catacombs” beneath Giza’s famous pyramid field and travelled for a distance of “several hundred yards”, before coming upon four large chambers from which went further cave passageways. ??Salt’s memoirs were never published, and no one seems to have recorded the cave's existence since that time.?

“The importance of the memoirs had been overlooked,’ Collins says. “They’d been catalogued but never studied in depth.”

A release from Collin’s publishers states that the team used Salt’s writings to find a cavern entrance which opened into a tomb. “Here they came upon an opening that led into a vast cave chamber filled with fallen rock debris, animal bones, colonies of bats and venomous spiders,” it reads. “Following in the footsteps of Salt, Collins and his team explored the caves for some distance, finding incised walls and mummy fragments, before the air became too thin to carry on.”

Dr Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities has been quick to dismiss the discovery: “There are no new discoveries to be made at Giza”, he stated. “We know everything about the plateau - amateurs cannot find anything new.”