photography

[Image: A pyramid at Giza, the earth archaeo-surgically opened at its base; courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum has an amazing collection of old lantern slides from Egypt, documenting that country’s archaeological history and monumental remains.

The shots above and immediately below, in which we see the pyramids at Giza, exude a stage-set quality: the diffuse and hand-colored light, the foreshortened perspective, and the cut-away glimpse into a world of subterranean vaults lending an air of surreality to the whole collection.

[Image: Giza, courtesy of the [Images: Brutalism at Giza, circa 2,500 B.C.; courtesy of the [Image: Ruins in light, courtesy of the Luis Alvarez. In the September/October 2008 issue of Archaeology magazine, author Samir Patel explained how Alvarez used a device called a muon detector “to scan the inside of an ancient structure,” which, in this case, was Khafre’s pyramid at Giza.

“Working with Egyptian scientists in the late 1960s,” Patel explains, Alvarez “gained access to the Belzoni chamber, a humid vault deep under the pyramid.” There, “Alvarez’s team set up a muon detector called a spark chamber, which included 30 tons of iron sheeting, in the underground room.” This image—of foreign physicists building iron rooms beneath the pyramids in a search for secret chambers based on cosmic particles raining down from above—is one of the coolest things I have ever read in my life.

[Image: An illustrated depiction of the physicists' sub-pyramidal adventures; view Read more on Brutalism at Giza and the Iron Room Beneath the Pyramids…