In the Field: More about subterranean Giza

Collins first found clues to the cave’s exstence in the memoirs of Harry Salt, a 19th century British diplomat and adventurer, who describes an exploration beneath the Giza plateau in 1817, alongside Italian explorer Giovanni Caviglia. According to the memoir, Salt and Caviglia walked “several hundred yards into the cave,” before turning around, leaving the rest of the cave unexplored.

Recently, Collins and British Egyptologist Nigel Skinner-Simpson, retraced Salt’s steps from 200 years before. Sure enough, in the back of an apparently unrecorded tomb west of the Great Pyramid, they stepped through a fissure in the rock and found themselves in the mouth of an "spacious" cave. They explored as deep as they could, then turned around, citing “unseen pits and hollows, colonies of bats and venomous spiders.”

The caves beneath the pyramids, Collins believes, are the inspiration for the Ancient Egyptian belief in the underworld. Collins told Discovery News: "Ancient funerary texts clearly allude to the existence of a subterranean world in the vicinity of the Giza Pyramids.”

Ancient Egyptian religion was based on the existence of Duat, the subterranean afterlife ruled by the god Osiris. After a person was given a ritual burial, a form of his spirit would descend underground where his heart would be weighed – judged – by Osiris.

Upon hearing of Collins’s report, Hawass dismissed the find with a huff: "There are no new discoveries to be made at Giza. We know everything about the plateau.”