In 1926, French engineer Émile Baraize finally forced open the mysterious hatch on Egypt’s Great Sphinx, a sealed passage that had baffled explorers for decades. What he found inside defied all archaeological expectation, a hidden chamber that rewrote what experts believed about the monument’s true purpose.
A rectangular shaft about five feet wide and six feet deep is cut into the top of the Great Sphinx’s head, directly into the skull of a statue long assumed to be solid rock. Discovered by the team of French engineer Émile Baraize during excavation work in the 1920s, the opening was later sealed with cement and an iron cover. It is not the only one. Additional openings exist at the back, beneath th…