AS I was saying last week, Bob Cribbs was an unusual American friend who loved Egypt and Egypt loved him too.
As I also mentioned, Bob and Thad a common interest in using new technologies in the service of cultural heritage.
Bob was a specialist in applying radar and ultrasonic systems to medicine. When I was visiting the States, he and I explored together the structure of the Great Pyramid.
This was given greater significance, because Ain Shams University and Stanford University were working together to use cosmic rays to, find out whether there were any hidden chambers in the Second Pyramid – Khafre.
A few years later, I arranged a meeting with the Supreme Council of Antiquities, which was headed by the late Dr Ahmed Kadri at the time. Bob and I told Dr Kadri that we could construct an electronic system similar to that used to investigate the human body in order to investigate, for the first time, archaeological sites.
The objective was to find any spaces or cavities that had gone unnoticed in a building or underground. This was to be achieved by creating a synthetic, digital image using this equipment, without having to dig into the building or the ground.
This is normally known as the ‘non-destructive method’. Dr Kadri asked us to put our ideas in writing in the form of a scientific report, which he would refer to a technical committee for evaluation. The evaluation was positive and we had a second meeting with him to decide where to apply this technology.
In 1954, Kamal el-Mallakh had discovered a pit beside the Great Pyramid, filled with pieces of wood, that, when reassembled, formed a huge boat about 40m long, known at that time as the Cheops Solar Boat.
It took about 20 years for a famous Egyptian restorer, Ahmed Youssef, and his team to reassemble the boat which is now exhibited in a special museum beside the Great Pyramid.
Because of the lack of experience of excavation techniques at the time, the boat suffered a lot from the change in environmental conditions, before and after it was discovered. .
The archaeologists then spotted a second pit next to the first one beside the Great Pyramid and they were hoping to find a second boat in it. So Dr Kadri asked us to examine the pieces, before taking any steps to safeguard the boat.
As planned, the team constructed the necessary equipment and we worked together in the pit area making electronic measurements for about a week. The synthetic image we obtained of the pit showing that it was filled with pieces of wood about three-quarters of the way to the top.
We drew up a technical report detailing what we had discovered. It also proved the effectiveness of our radar imaging system, used for the first time in the service of archaeology.
