Science: Probing The Chambers of Cheops

At exactly 2:40 a.m. last Tuesday, under the orange glow of a crescent moon, a small group of scientists gathered expectantly at an archaeological site south of the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, just outside Cairo. They did not carry hand picks or shovels. Instead, they watched a TV monitor as a miniature camera was lowered into a narrow hole in the ground. When the video image flickered to life, the group gasped. There before them, inside a chamber that had been sealed 4,600 years ago, lay the dismantled timbers of a wooden ship. The archaeologists immediately recognized it as...